Science Teaching Matters

An article in today's New York Times compares the sense of science education crisis in the post-Sputnik era and now.

It's a good general-interest update piece that pulls together a lot of the key current issues:

• We need more and better science teachers in high-school classrooms (coincidentally, that's a current MnSCU initiative: More and Better STEM Teachers).
• Teaching methods in science need broadscale improvement: too many memorization-based approaches, not enough conceptual and hands-on work.
• The sequence of science education: it presents the arguments of the "physics first" scientists, who say that what made sense in the 19th century (biology, chemistry, then physics) is upside down, and based on the idea that biology is a "descriptive" science. (The American Association of Physics Teachers articulates this approach at http://www.aapt.org/Policy/physicsfirst.cfm).
  
• A lot of disagreement about what the problems are.

The piece got me sifting through the dregs of my own files on STEM. Almost a decade ago, in 1999, Gibbs and Fox wrote an article in Scientific American, "The False Crisis in Science Education," that summed up the then-current sense of angst, and argued that there were really two problems underlying the "crisis:"
1. General science education in elementary and postsecondary schools isn't focused on science that is useful to most people in their adult lives, and
2. There are plenty of college students prepared and willing to take on advanced science education, but they get weeded out in gatekeeper introductory courses. The shortage is thus "controlled by universities, not by secondary schools."

As the NYT article notes, the "current" crisis has been roiling since at least 1983 and "A Nation at Risk." It will probably continue on bubbling until we can agree on what the problems really are.