Examples of approaches that have demonstrated their effectiveness can be found in recommended reading articles by Michelle Smith and by Louis Deslauriers et al. Developing such teaching expertise should be the focus of STEM teacher training. This view of STEM teaching as optimizing the development of expertise provides clearer and more detailed guidance than what is currently available from the classroom research on effective teaching. Most of the classroom research on effective teaching looks at K classrooms and attempts to link student progress on standardized tests with various teacher credentials, traits, or training.

Although there has been progress, it is limited because of the challenges of carrying out educational research of this type. There are a large number of uncontrolled variables in the K school environment that affect student learning, the standardized tests are often of questionable validity for measuring learning, teacher credentials and training are at best tenuous measures of their content mastery and pedagogical content mastery, and the general level of these masteries is low in the K teacher population.

The level of mastery is particularly low in elementary- and middle-school teachers. All of these factors conspire to make the signals small and easily masked by other variables. At the college level, the number of uncontrolled variables is much smaller, and as reviewed in the NRC report Discipline-Based Education Research , it is much clearer that those teachers who practice pedagogy that supports deliberate practice by the students show substantially greater learning gains than are achieved with traditional lectures.

At the K level, although there are notable exceptions, the typical teacher starts out with a very weak idea of what it means to think like a scientist or engineer. Very few K teachers, including many who were STEM majors, acquire sufficient domain expertise in their preparation. Hence, the typical teacher begins with very little capability to properly design the requisite learning tasks. Much of the time, students in class are listening passively or practicing procedures that neither have the desired cognitive elements nor require the level of strenuousness that are important for learning.

Teachers at both the K and undergraduate levels also have limited knowledge of the learning process and what is known about how the mind functions, resulting in common educational practices that are clearly counter to what research shows is optimum, both for processing and learning information in the classroom environment and for achieving long-term retention. This requires essentially the opposite cognitive process from STEM creativity, which is primarily recognizing the relevance of previously unappreciated relationships or information to solve a problem in a novel way. At the undergraduate level, STEM teachers generally have a high degree of subject expertise.


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Unfortunately, this is not reflected in the cognitive activities of the students in the classroom, which again consist largely of listening, with very little cognitive processing needed or possible. However, the assigned problems almost never explicitly require the sorts of cognitive tasks that are the critical components of expertise described above.

It is common to assume that motivation, and even curiosity about a subject, are entirely the responsibility of the student, even when the student does not yet know much about the subject. The perspective on learning that I have described also explains the failure of many STEM reform efforts.

What is learning STEM?

Belief in the importance of innate talent or other characteristics. Schools have long focused educational resources on learners that have been identified in some manner as exceptional. Although the research shows that all brains learn expertise in fundamentally the same way, that is not to say that all learners are the same. Many different aspects affect the learning of a particular student. Previous learning experiences and sociocultural background and values obviously play a role. Researchers have tried for decades to demonstrate that success is largely determined by some innate traits and that by measuring those traits with IQ tests or other means, one can preselect children who are destined for greatness and then focus educational resources on them.

This field of research has been plagued by difficulties with selection bias and the lack of adequate controls. Although there continues to be some debate, the bulk of the research is now showing that, excepting the lower tail of the distribution consisting of students with pathologies, the predictive value of any such early tests of intellectual capability is very limited. From an educational policy point of view, the most important research result is that any predictive value is small compared to the later effects of the amount and quality of deliberate practice undertaken by the learner.

Although early measurements of talent, or IQ, independent of other factors have at best small correlation with later accomplishment, simply labeling someone as talented or not has a much larger correlation. It should be noted that in many schools students who are classified as deficient by tests with very weak predictive value are put into classrooms that provide much less deliberate practice than the norm, whereas the opposite is true for students who are classified as gifted. The subsequent difference in learning outcomes for the two groups provides an apparent validation for what is merely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Given these findings, human capital is clearly maximized by assuming that, except for students with obvious pathologies, every student is capable of great achievement in STEM and should be provided with the educational experiences that will maximize their learning. The idea that for each individual there is a unique learning style is surprisingly widespread given the lack of supporting evidence for this claim, and in fact significant evidence showing the contrary, as reviewed by Hal Pashler of the University of California at San Diego and others.

‘Big five’ challenges in school education - Teacher

Most notably, parents can play a major role in both early cognitive development and STEM interest, which are major contributors to later success. However, optimizing the teaching as I described would allow success for a much larger fraction of the population, as well as allowing those students who are successful in the current system to do even better.


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Poor standards and accountability. Standards have had a major role in education reform efforts, but they are very much a double-edged sword. Although good definitions and assessments of the desired learning are essential, bad definitions are very harmful. There are tremendous pitfalls in developing good, widely used standards and assessments. So although good standards and good assessment must be at the core of any serious STEM education improvement effort, poor standards and poor assessments can have very negative consequences.

The recent National Academy of Sciences—led effort on new science standards, starting with a carefully thought-out guiding framework, is an excellent start, but this must avoid all the pitfalls as it is carried through to large-scale assessments of student mastery. Finally, good standards and assessments will never by themselves result in substantial improvement in STEM education, because they are only one of several essential components to achieving learning. Competitions and other informal science programs: Attempting to separate the inspiration from the learning.

Motivation in its entirety, including the elements of inspiration, is such fundamental requirement for learning that any approach that separates it from any aspect the learning process is doomed to be ineffective. Unfortunately, a large number of government and private programs that support the many science and engineering competitions and out-of-school programs assume that they are separable.

The assumption of such programs is that by inspiring children through competitions or other enrichment experiences, they will then thrive in formal school experiences that provide little motivation or inspiration and still go on to achieve STEM success. Given the questionable assumptions about the learning process that underlie these programs, we should not be surprised that there is little evidence that such programs ultimately succeed, and some limited evidence to the contrary.

The past 20 years have seen an explosion in the number of participants in engineering-oriented competitions such as First Robotics and others, while the fraction of the population getting college degrees in engineering has remained constant. A study by Rena Subotnik and colleagues that tracked high-school Westinghouse now Intel talent search winners, an extraordinarily elite group already deeply immersed in science, found that a substantial fraction, including nearly half of the women, had switched out of science within a few years, largely because of their experiences in the formal education system.

It is not that such enrichment experiences are bad, just that they are inherently limited in their effectiveness. Programs that introduce these motivational elements as an integral part of every aspect of the STEM learning process, particularly in formal schooling, would probably be more effective. A number of prominent scientists, beginning as far back as the Sputnik era, have introduced new curricula based on their understanding of the subject. The implicit assumption of such efforts is that someone with a high level of subject expertise can simply explain to novices how an expert thinks about the subject, and the novices either students or K teachers will then embrace and use that way of thinking and be experts themselves.

This assumption is strongly contradicted by the research on expertise and learning, and so the failure of such efforts is no surprise. A number of elements such as school organization, teacher salaries, working conditions, and others have been put forth as the element that, if changed, will fix STEM education. Although some of these may well be a piece of a comprehensive reform, they are not particularly STEM-specific and by themselves will do little to address the basic shortcomings in STEM teaching and learning.

The conceptual flaws of STEM teacher in-service professional development. The federal government spends a few hundred million dollars each year on in-service teacher professional development in STEM, with states and private sources providing additional funding. From the perspective of learning expertise, it is clear why teacher professional development is fundamentally ineffective and expensive.

If these teachers failed to master the STEM content as full-time students in high school and college, it is unrealistic to think they will now achieve that mastery as employees through some intermittent, part-time, usually voluntary activity on top of their primary job. First, nearly everyone who has gone to school perceives himself or herself to be an expert on education, resulting in a tendency to seize on solutions that overlook the complexities of the education system and how the brain learns. Second, there are long-neglected structural elements and incentives within the higher education system that actively inhibit the adoption of better teaching methods and the better training of teachers.

These deserve special attention. Improving undergraduate STEM teaching to produce better-educated graduates and better-trained future K teachers is a necessary first step in any serious effort to improve STEM education, but there are several barriers to accomplishing this. First, the tens of billions of dollars of federal research funding going to academic institutions, combined with no accountability for educational outcomes at the levels of the department or the individual faculty member, have shaped the university incentive system to focus almost entirely on research.

In these high-performing countries, places in teacher education programs are limited and competition for entry is intense. Attracting the best and brightest school leavers to teaching is only a first step for top-performing nations. They also work to understand the nature of expert teaching and use this understanding to shape initial teacher education programs, coaching and mentoring arrangements and ongoing professional development. Features of these high-performing systems include rigorous teacher education courses and well-developed processes for defining and recognising advanced teaching expertise.

In contrast to top-performing countries, Australia draws its teachers largely from the middle third of school leavers.

Issues and Challenges in Science Education Research: Moving Forward

And there is little evidence that this is about to change. Following recent demand-driven reforms, some universities are admitting larger numbers of teacher education students with increasingly low Year 12 performances — a trend that may continue as the number of teachers required to staff our schools grows over the next decade. Meeting this first challenge requires an understanding of why teaching is currently not more attractive, what high-performing countries have done to raise the status of teaching, and what strategies are likely to make teaching a more highly regarded profession and sought-after career in Australia.

Germany, Mexico and Turkey are examples. Two conclusions from recent PISA studies are that increased national performance is associated with greater equity in the distribution of educational resources and that equity can be undermined when school choice segregates students into schools based on socioeconomic background. According to the OECD, at least as important as how much countries spend on schools is how these resources are distributed across schools.

Although Australia performs relatively well in PISA, both in terms of quality and equity, there are trends that should be of concern.

Bill Nye Explains The Biggest Issues In Science Education

These include a steady decline in the average performance of Australian year-olds since and no reduction in the relationship between student performance and socioeconomic background. Perhaps even more concerning has been an increase in between-school variance in PISA a measure of the extent to which Australian schools differ from each other.

In Finland, which has a comprehensive school system and little social stratification by location, between-school variance in reading increased from eight per cent to nine per cent between and In Australia, as John Ainley and Eveline Gebhardt observe in their report Measure for Measure , between-school variance increased from 18 per cent to 24 per cent, suggesting that our schools became more different from each other over this time. Significant between-school increases also were recorded in New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. Further, there was a significant increase in the gap between low and high socioeconomic schools in Australia over this period.

Australia was the only OECD country to observe such an increase, with several countries recording a significant decrease. And there is little reason for optimism that this trend is about to reverse. A third challenge is to re-design the school curriculum to better prepare students for life and work in the 21st century. And the pace of change is accelerating, with increasing globalisation; advances in technology, communications and social networking; greatly increased access to information; an explosion of knowledge; and an array of increasingly complex social and environmental issues.

The world of work also is undergoing rapid change with greater workforce mobility, growth in knowledge-based work, the emergence of multi-disciplinary work teams engaged in innovation and problem solving, and a much greater requirement for continual workplace learning.

The school curriculum must attempt to equip students for this significantly changed and changing world. However, many features of the school curriculum have been unchanged for decades. We continue to present disciplines largely in isolation from each other, place an emphasis on the mastery of large bodies of factual and procedural knowledge and treat learning as an individual rather than collective activity.

This is particularly true in the senior secondary school, which then influences curricula in the earlier years. There is little evidence that these general features of the school curriculum are about to change. At the same time we are seeing a decline in the popularity of subjects such as advanced mathematics and science and a decline in the performances of Australian students in comparison with students in some other countries.

Applying New Research to Improve Science Education

International studies indicate that the top 10 per cent of our Year 8 students now perform at about the same level in mathematics as the top 50 per cent of students in Singapore, Korea and Chinese Taipei. Again, it is not obvious that we have policies in place to reform mathematics and science curricula in ways that might reverse these trends in subject enrolments and performance.

Meeting this third challenge requires a significant rethink of the school curriculum. A fourth challenge is to provide more flexible learning arrangements in schools to better meet the needs of individual learners. The organisation of schools and schooling also has been largely unchanged for decades.

A new approach

Although composite classes are common, students tend to be grouped into year levels, by age, and to progress automatically with their age peers from one year of school to the next. A curriculum is developed for each year of school, students are placed in mixed-ability classes, teachers deliver the curriculum for the year level they are teaching, and students are assessed and graded on how well they perform on that curriculum.

This approach to organising teaching and learning might be appropriate if students of the same age commenced each school year at more or less the same point in their learning. But this is far from the case; the most advanced students commencing any year of school are typically five to six years ahead of the least advanced students. In practice this means that less advanced students often struggle with year-level expectations and are judged to be performing poorly — often year after year.

At the other extreme, some more advanced students are unchallenged by year-level expectations and receive high grades year after year with minimal effort. Underpinning this practice is a tacit belief that the same curriculum is appropriate for all, or almost all, students of the same age. Learning success and failure are then defined as success or failure in mastering this common curriculum. This age-based approach to organising teaching and learning is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation that requires teachers to judge and grade all students against year-level expectations.

In this way, excellent progress becomes an expectation of every student, including those who are already more advanced. Identifying and meeting the needs of children on trajectories of low achievement. A fifth challenge is to identify as early as possible children who are at risk of falling behind in their learning and to address their individual learning needs. Some children are already well behind year-level expectations, and many of these children remain behind throughout their schooling.

Trajectories of low achievement often begin well before school. Differences by Year 3 tend to be continuations of differences apparent on entry to school when children have widely varying levels of cognitive, language, physical, social and emotional development. Some children are at risk because of developmental delays or special learning needs; some begin school at a disadvantage because of their limited mastery of English or their socioeconomically impoverished living circumstances; and some, including some Indigenous children, experience multiple forms of disadvantage.

Many children in our schools not only remain on trajectories of low achievement, but also fall further behind with each year of school. They make up a long — and sometimes growing — tail of underperforming students, many of whom continually fail to meet minimum standards of achievement. Meeting this fifth challenge depends on better ways of: I totally agree with your comments on low achievers. The biggest problem we have in my school is the inability of infants teachers and the principal to realise that students who enter year 3 achieving in bands 1 and 2 are fighting an uphill battle to progress more than 2.

This is an important article and interesting to see how many of the challenges facing your schools are mirrored here in the UK. I wonder to what extent the same factors lie behind those challenges? With this challenge, as with the others that you have identified, there are issues deeply-rooted into society to consider and this makes comparison with other nations a tricky subject.

There have been several scholarly criticisms of the value and reliability of PISA data, as well as the way that it is used. At best it is a blunt tool. Moreover, many of the differences between education in different nations has to be viewed through the lens of cultural anthropology and I say this as an engineer by training to understand the influences of culture on learners.