Starting a Science Education

By William Banko, Michael E. Jabot, Patricia B. Molloy, Arnold Serotsky, & Bruce Tulloch

Is it possible that our country has been teaching science backwards? Scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, on which the United States ranked 25th in math and 21st in science out of 30 developed nations, certainly seem to indicate that our overall approach is not working. Now we have objective evidence of what does work in the learning and teaching process, which opens a new approach that can be applied to science instruction. Research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, education, and machine learning is demonstrating that young children have the capacity to learn more than anyone previously imagined.

This research into a “new science of learning,” examined in the July 17, 2009, issue of Science , has shown that acquisition of information by the human brain is most rapid and efficient from birth to the preteenage years. For example, a second language is learned effortlessly and without an accent between the ages of 3 and 7, according to the researchers. Yet our current approach to science education follows very much the opposite of this natural learning pattern. The majority of our formal science education is focused on the 9th through 11th grades. During this three-year period, students are afforded the benefits of specialized teachers and resources to learn physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. By this point, however, we have not only missed the optimal learning period for children, we are nearly...