WHY DO SCIENTISTS WANT TEACHERS AND STUDENTS TO DO REAL RESEARCH?

Carl Pennypacker

A growing number of studies, the newly released NRC Science Standards, and much anecdotal evidence is convincing many of us that "doing science" is the best way to achieve science literacy.

A central theme of the NRC Science Standards is that science education should endeavor to be "inquiry based." It is our supposition that "inquiry" is best served in research. The SSPs here are characterized by continual questioning, searching, and embarking on the enterprise in which nobody knows the answer beforehand. We endeavor to make the inquiry experience as open and extensible as possible, at every juncture, at every level of work.

Anybody who has been in this business more than a few weeks will eagerly testify that many, many kids and teachers are eager to undertake this type of learning and research. Everyone, including those doing formal evaluations using good statistical practices, finds that SSPs engage them. To the extent that the classroom should model or affect the real world, SSPs do this. And finally, there is an ironic twist to the whole enterprise: after two and a half decades of declining science budgets and lack of a supportive Congress or White House since Lyndon Johnson, basic research is really under tremendous pressure. Science funding is so tight that scientists cannot afford to be very speculative or adventurous. The kids and teachers in SSPs can afford to explore more than scientists these days!

Potential Hazards

SSPs are not a panacea for all that ails science and math education reform. Student and science partnerships must be in concert with many other systemic changes in U.S. education to be effective; we have to continually upgrade teachers' skills and tools. Teachers need to learn new pedagogies, tools, and curriculum. They need to be continually supported and enhanced and made part of professional, continually-learning, and intellectually-growing communities. In addition, we have to let exploration-based (non-SSP) modules flourish throughout the classroom environment. There are many neat kits and activities that build inquiry—inquiry that can translate and carry over into the SSP work. We want our children to be curious about nature and be able to ask why things are the way they are. These types of kits do emulate the spirit of inquiry present in many of our laboratories and universities.

As an example, I want to describe the program I lead—the Hands On Universe (HOU) project. In HOU we have seen amazing levels of student and teacher engagement. We aspire to get broad-scale involvement in the spirit of inquiry that is pervasive to all of research and basic science. My vision and that of my colleagues for the Hands On Universe project is that every child's mind and spirit is precious and a valuable resource for society. Given this view, we try to make every key stroke, every word, every action our teachers and scientists take respect the student's worth. Key to this respect is seeing in the children the potential to realize that which we most value in ourselves—our desire and passion to inquire about the nature of the universe. The penultimate of this is that every child has the potential to become a potential collaborator at some level. Not that every child can grasp the most sophisticated concepts, but valuable efforts that students take can easily become part of our research. And perhaps more importantly, the spirit of inquiry manifests itself in the program—we emulate research in our curriculum, our software, our pedagogy, our web use.

In addition, HOU research is fortunate to be accessible enough to allow genuine collaboration with students and teachers. This enables us to speak to children on their terms and on our terms. We want to empower them and ourselves to move strongly, proudly, with hope, well-equipped with the math, the science, and the data and technology skills of the future. This mandate, this dream, this hope that we reach each child in their own language and with the spirit and action of a truly scientific adventure is perhaps one of the central challenges and goals of HOU. We want to make science real in their world.

Goals of HOU

How do we achieve the vision described above? Our goals are listed as follows;

Hands On Universe will

• Create opportunities for each person to discover the scientist within
  • joy of exploration of the universe
  • reach diverse populations
  • meaningful participation in the astronomical community
• Build and support a collaborative community of students, educators, and astronomers that engages in astronomical inquiry and research
• Provide access to professional quality telescopes
  • fulfill observing requests
  • participants pursue their own investigations
  • establish and maintain a worldwide network of automated telescopes
• Provide technological tools for implementation of HOU
  • astronomical image analysis software
  • image request and acquisition
• Provide curricula to support learning science, mathematics, and technology within the context of astronomical explorations
  • emphasize student-centered inquiry
  • reflect NRC and NCTM standards
• Provide curricular, pedagogical, scientific, and technical support for educators
  • workshops led by HOU teacher resource agents
  • continuing support throughout the year

But the implicit tension in this vision of partnerships is that we are expecting ninth graders to have some of the same insights and cognition as "22nd" graders. Simultaneously we demand that the ninth graders' output is real in the scientific world! We expect scientists to be sensitive to these issues and to push themselves to make something unusual and new work. We expect teachers and students to be sensitive to the plight of the scientist. This sounds impossible and perhaps the mismatch of the century. But we have evidence that these partnerships can work in many cases.

HOU-Inspired Goals for Open-Ended Collaborations

The following criteria are what HOU aspires to as we attempt to build meaningful partnerships. Most other SSPs embody many of these characteristics.

• Students must be true partners on a footing equal to other collaborators.
• Student scientific output strives to model that of scientific publication quality. This implies group work, refereeing, and negotiating with referees.
• Students and teachers must have tools, preparation, continual communication, and support, so that they are fully part of the process.
• The research must work in the classroom—the SSP must create solutions not problems, create empowerment not awe at "scientists and science."

Through these successful partnerships we can reach not only the most eager students but also the rest of the class who will now feel they are part of this project. We want to help inquiry grow in every classroom endeavor. We give students the scientist's sense of wonder, the scientist's sense of hope, the scientist's sense of accomplishment, the scientist's sense of how we can explain our universe. Students are starting to undertake science as we do.

The engaged students give us their skills, their talents, their enthusiasm, their fresh approach to science and nature. They give us their collaboration and faith and much that is important and dear to them. We must respect and cherish this. We want them. Science needs them. We need them.

At HOU we endeavor to build learning communities, where everyone feels supported in their explorations not only by classmates, other teachers, and the community of researchers but also by a larger world community. In this community, all students can join their search if they desire, can share the journey and data on humankind's march to the understanding of our universe. The sense of inclusion, of being part of some grand scientific endeavor bigger than any one individual, is heroic and essential.

The process of striving for truly equal partnerships may be the most powerful component of the Hands On Universe. Having teachers and students become part of our team, become part of an important endeavor, means much to us all and gives us reason for learning more, for trying harder, for functioning as a community.

Why do HOU and Other SSPs Succeed

We believe HOU and other SSPs succeed for a number of reasons. Although the following are from HOU experiences, we believe that they are common to many SSPs.

Sense of Ownership

Students feel they own the data (as they do!). Empowering students with powerful and useful data is something we can do and something students and teachers respect. Being able to structure requests of images and then maintain some long-term sense of ownership is important. The student's name goes in the data header and stays with the image forever, even when other scientists and students use that data. Also enabling students to choose their own explorations—what they want to observe and with what filter, etc.—elevates them from the drudgery of normal school assignments and gives them a sense of control.

Student Contribution to Science

Students are making and will continue to make essential and important contributions to astronomy and other fields. And they experience a key part of the chain, the process, the excitement and wonder that makes scientists like science! They get to see the data first. They get to find things they don't understand and ask questions about them. They always have the chance for many levels of discovery.

Teacher Growth and Support

We take extensive measures to make sure that teachers are very comfortable with HOU before they bring it to their classrooms. As we mentioned earlier, HOU and many of these projects demand much of a teacher who may have had only introductory college science classes. We hold NSF-sponsored teacher enhancement workshops where they are able to upgrade many of their skills not just astronomy. They learn new pedagogy, new means of communications (some are starting regular video conferencing now!), new ways to handle and analyze data, new technologies, and they form professional communities of shared interest and support. They become friends with many of their fellow workshop teachers, and many communicate with each other through and beyond the school year.

Original Curriculum Activities

Having activities that work in the classroom and that build the cognitive skills and scaffolding for future exploratory work has been key to HOU's success. This makes life a lot easier for a teacher, for a school board, for the mentoring scientist, for the support network. And we attempt to build and emulate that spirit of research into all of our activities. We are posting the activities on the web, so we can add current events in astrophysics and make easy updates.

Formative and Summative Evaluation

We have to know fundamentally does HOU work? Do other SSPs work? By what metrics do we judge whether a project is changing students, changing teachers, and eventually changing society and our world in an efficient manner? I do not believe we have most of the evaluative tools in hand to understand completely how SSPs are succeeding. I do believe that we have ample evidence to move ahead, but we must not abandon our efforts to develop the evaluation and statistical measures that show long-term, deep changes in education.

How are some of the ways HOU is succeeding? We have had an external evaluator undertake statistical studies of our classrooms, and these are some of the ways he has shown HOU is making a difference.

Teachers

• Teachers used the interactive methods of teaching with HOU, as compared to being a "sage on the stage."
• Teachers shifted their view of the computer, saw it as a valuable research tool, and viewed themselves as co-investigators with HOU.
• Teachers changed their assessment techniques and moved to performance evaluation, portfolios, and journals to a higher degree than before HOU.
• Teachers were excited by the investigation and strived to learn more about astronomy and space sciences.
• Teachers carried their HOU methodologies over into their other classrooms.

Students

• Students found purpose and context for math and science learned in other classes by using HOU.
• Students viewed the computer as a valuable research tool and the teacher as a co-investigator when using HOU.
• Students, in particular girls and other groups traditionally underserved with science enrichment, were more likely to say that they would pursue science as a career interest after using HOU.
• Many students had positive attitudes toward their own relationships with science after using HOU. As one student put it: "With HOU, I don't just learn about science, I am a scientist!"

Conclusion

I think the future has never looked brighter for this kind of work. Though many challenges lay ahead, I am convinced that the odds are in our favor for making a large and sustainable positive impact on education and our planet.