Nobody is going to tell you those things, you have to figure them out yourself: What could we have done wrong here?  Sometimes you run a study without making any obvious mistakes, but fail to get any results at all.  You run an electrophetic gel, for example, and after all that work there are no protein bands at all on the gel when you’re done, not even for the standards.  What might have gone wrong?

As featured in this month’s SuperSpark, problem solving skills come in handy outside the laboratory, too.  In fact, they come in handy in real life, pretty much every day!  And science instruction should be providing plenty of opportunities to learn and develop those skills.

The longer I teach, the more I realize that teaching students how to think logically and clearly, and to get that thinking on paper so that it’s logical, clear, concise, and convincing to readers is one of the most important skills we can pass along, or at least encourage, in our students.  It’s hard to imagine a career in which such skills aren’t very, very helpful, not only in keeping a job and advancing, but in getting the position in the first place.  And of course, in science, we have a hard time getting our papers published, or our grants funded, unless we can make a convincing case for our work.

The problem in teaching these skills is that in most science classes we have so much factual material to cover, there just isn’t all that much time available to guide students’ writing.  In fact, guiding student writing, without actually doing the writing (and the thinking, and the rewriting!) for the student is worth a separate blog at a later date; figuring out how to do in a way that truly benefits the student took me more years than I’d like to admit!

One useful way to teach good science writing techniques is to give students good models to look at. Let them examine good published graphs, for example, relating to a topic of general interest or a topic currently under study, with well-labeled axes and instructive figure captions.  Or have students read a well-executed Introduction to a published research paper, again on a topic that is relevant to what students are learning.  Those first paragraphs are especially important in any piece of writing, because if well done, they establish a clear direction for the rest of the piece, and give readers a good reason to continue reading.

But how do we get students to take a really close look at how the writing is done, and at what makes that writing particularly effective?  This month’s MiniSpark has students looking at scrambled sentences from an interesting paragraph about carnivorous plants, and looking for clues about how to put the sentences back into their original order.  Do this sort of thing enough times, week after week, and pretty soon students will have a pretty good idea about what it takes to develop a clear and logical argument in writing!

©SciSpark, 2012

And then I asked her why plants need light.  She had no idea!

And there’s the problem with our science education in a nutshell.  Students are required to memorize lots and lots of details, but they typically miss the big picture.  It’s as though we’re saying to the students: “Look, if you want to start working in a biochemistry lab or a molecular biology lab tomorrow, here are all the facts and the words you’ll need to know.”

But these kids aren’t going to start working in a biochemistry lab tomorrow, or in a physiology lab, or an animal behavior lab, or a molecular biology lab.  Not tomorrow, not next year!    They’re in 9^th grade!  And most of them will never work in a research lab anyway!

Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in Chief of the research journal “Science” recently put it this way*: “When we teach children about aspects of science that the vast majority of them cannot yet grasp, then we have wasted valuable educational resources and produced nothing of lasting value.  Perhaps less obvious, but to me at least as important, is the fact that we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so.  For far too many, science seems a game of recalling boring, incomprehensible facts.”

My fear is that not only is our educational system not showing students what doing science is really all about—the thinking, the trial and error, the designing of experiments, the problem-solving, the interpretation of data, the attempts to figure out and explain clearly what those data mean and where those data lead—but it’s also discouraging an awful lot of creative kids from going into scientific fields.  And it’s not helping students be productive members of society, where problem-solving skills sure do come in handy from time to time.

*Alberts, B. 2012. Trivializing science education.  Science 335: 263.

The homework issue revolves around who actually ends up doing the homework — the student or a parent — and whether homework is at all useful if the student hasn’t first learned the necessary tools or concepts in class.  I’ve already talked about the problem of designing meaningful homework assignments (Blog: Making Homework Work, Sept 30, 2011).  The present discussion assumes the assignment to be worthwhile.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee that it will do the job that it’s intended to do: help students to build on prior knowledge, and integrate what they have been learning over several days or weeks.  Parents often do too much of the child’s homework for them, out of affection and also just from the desire to see their kids succeed.

But it’s really important that kids learn to figure things out for themselves, and not give up too quickly in doing so.  Thinking is hard work, and that work needs to be encouraged: learning how to do this in middle and high school pays off very nicely later in life.

The tutoring issue raised similar concerns.  Is the tutor simply doing the student’s homework, and doing all the thinking?   That might well improve a student’s grade during the term, but it would be setting the student up for future failure, when the student needs to think something through on his or her own, or explain something important to someone else.

The tutoring issue provoked a lot of responses from professional tutors, and the postings were very gratifying to read.  Most of the tutors said that their main job was to get students to explain their thinking aloud.  In this way, the tutor discovers exactly what the student does and does not understand, but perhaps even more importantly, the student will also find out what he or she does and does not understand.  Sometimes a student will be in the middle of a sentence and realize that something they said just doesn’t make sense (I’ve certainly had that happen to me!).  And that leads to some good questions, and then to real learning.  And the act of simply putting ideas and information together into a convincing explanation helps transform the facts that a student has memorized, and the lab experiments that they have performed, and the diagrams that they have labeled, into something real and meaningful, something that will stick with them.  They will actually have learned something useful, and made it part of themselves.  As one respondent noted, “…when the words come out of the student’s mouth, the message tends to stick.”

I’ve been saying for years that the best way to learn anything is to try teaching it to someone else. It forces us to think more carefully about what we think we know.

Teachers and tutors and parents can ask their students to do just that, simply by asking them to explain their thinking aloud or in writing.  It can sometimes be hard for parents to pull this off because of all the emotional issues that are often involved.  That’s why SciSpark encourages all students to post their responses to the Student Response Board — this gives students a chance to explain their thinking to each other.  The exercise is partly intended to help students realize what they do or do not understand.  But it’s also very useful for students to see how other students are explaining the same issues.  Sometimes you realize that there are other perfectly good ways of looking at the same issues, or working through the same problems. Sometimes learn a lot by listening to someone else’s thinking.

Fortunately, this does not describe all parents. There are a large number who talk with their children about schoolwork — while the children are working on it and after the work is completed — and often give them supplemental activities to do that are fun as well as educational.  These parents are acting as real teachers for their children, and as partners in their education.

There is a clear connection between how much a parent participates in a child’s education and the future academic success of that child.  You can read about the results of some of this research yourself.  For example, take a look at Science Daily and www.amle.org as they are just two of many websites discussing the results of studies on this topic.

It can be a lot of fun when parents (or teachers) and children work together solving problems, asking and attempting to answer new questions about the lessons, and embarking on a journey of discovery together.

We’re not talking here about parents doing their kids’ work for them.  We’re talking about parents encouraging their kids to think, and sharing the joy inherent in that process.

When it comes to helping children develop critical thinking skills, the parent’s role cannot be overstated.  Students often need to be actively encouraged to think on a deeper level than the one they’re accustomed to working on–in reading, in studying for tests, and in doing homework.  They should be encouraged to ask questions about what they observe and learn, and encouraged to figure out ways of answering those questions.  They should also be encouraged to explain their thinking to others, and to summarize what they’ve learned.  Explaining things to someone else promotes learning.  So when you engage in conversation with your child about what they’ve been learning and have them explain their thinking to you, you’re helping them learn in a very useful, meaningful way.  This is how critical thinking skills and creativity are developed. They can’t be developed by sitting a child down alone to answer questions out of a book or from a website

Take a look at the “About SciSpark” page, which was written for parents who believe in being active participants in their children’s education, and let us know what you think.  We try to give kids lots of interesting things to talk to their parents about!

Before we got the study started I took some questions from the children.  All of the questions were good, but some of them were great, and some were really surprising.

One child asked, “How do they pee?” 

“Pretty much just like us,” I said. “Except that since they’re surrounded by water, they don’t need toilets: they just pee whenever they need to, and the water around them carries it away.”

The hermit crab Pagurus longicarpus in an artificial shell

“Into the ocean? They pee into the ocean?  Ewwwww” was the general response.

Well, it’s not just hermit crabs that are doing that.  Fish, snails, lobsters, oysters, sea turtles, whales…they all pee in the ocean.

“Ewwwwww, disgusting”

“I’m never swimming at the beach again!”

Well, it’s not really all that bad.  The chemicals in the pee get taken up pretty quickly by plants and algae.  In fact, without those nutrients going into the ocean, the plants and algae wouldn’t be able to grow very well, and there would be a lot less food available in the ocean for animals that eat algae, and for animals that eat the animals that eat the algae.  There would be fewer oysters, fewer clams, fewer fish, fewer sharks, fewer dolphins, fewer whales…fewer of everything.  It’s all part of a big cycle.

The kids were fascinated.  Then we got back on track and set up our hermit crab shell selection study, which went splendidly.

But along the way, the kids learned something about food webs and about nutrient recycyling, without even knowing it.  It wasn’t what I was there to talk about, but it sure got them interested.

That’s the great advantage of being a guest speaker in someone else’s class:  You’re not tied to the standard curriculum!

It was great to see the curiosity, creativity, and enthusiasm of 3^rd graders.  Why do we then go so far out of our way to destroy that, once the kids get to high school, or even earlier?

In a well-controlled experiment in which you are testing the effect of something on something else, you always include some individuals—your control individuals—that don’t get the treatment.  In this month’s SuperSpark, for example, we want to know if hermit crabs will preferentially choose or avoid shells that have holes in them.  But the hermit crabs in our study might just be unusually reluctant to move into any shell on that particular day, or might be unusually eager to move into any shell that day.  And so, to do such this study we need to include a treatment that includes shells without holes in them, so that we have a normal behavior to compare with how the hermit crabs respond to shells with holes.

But we can’t do this with our kids.  Should we take away their Facebook account for the month?  Should we let our child go to that party?  She we not let our child go to that party? Should we force them to practice their piano or violin for more hours every day?  Should we not make them practice today if they don’t want to?  Should we scold the child for doing badly on an exam, or should we just encourage the child to better the next time around?

It would be awfully nice to run a controlled experiment in advance of having to make the decision!  Let’s take the Facebook account away for a month and see what happens over the next few years.  At the same time, don’t take away the Facebook account and see what happens over the next few years.  Let the child go to the party and see how things go for the next few weeks or months.  Don’t let the child go to the party and see how things go for the next few weeks or months.  If we could run these experiments at the same time, then we would know which decision gives the best outcome!

Without controlled experiments, we just have to guess which is the right decision to make.  We make our decisions based on hunches, what we have heard from friends, what we know has happened to other people.  The problem is that there’s a lot of variation from person to person…in just about everything that matters, including physiology and behavior!  That certainly keeps life interesting, but it makes it difficult to know what the best decision is.  Every now and then you hear of some wonderful musicians that are now so thankful that their parents made them practice the violin for hours and hours every day.  Now they have this wonderful career.  But many other adults are still bitter at how much their parents made them practice!

You just can’t tell how any particular individual is going to respond to… anything!

But when we do experiments, we always run controls to account for just that sort of variation in response from individual to individual.  Is this drug effective in treating this particular ailment or not?  We get a large number of participants in the study and divide them into two groups at random.  We give the drug to some individuals; we don’t give the drug to other individuals.  In case any effects are psychological, just from thinking that you might be taking something helpful, we might give something that looks like the drug, but isn’t, or we might give the placebo to a 3^rd group of individuals without telling them whether they are getting the drug or not.  Then we figure out the average effect of the drug on the members of each group and determine whether overall the drug is worth developing or not.  But we still can’t predict the exact effect of the drug on any particular individual.  On average the drug might be pretty effective.  But even so, some individuals in the treated group might be helped only a little, and some might not be helped at all.

So should you let your child go to that party?  The best way to find out would be to clone the child and then send some of those clones to the party and keep some at home, and see how they all did over the next few weeks or months or years.  That wouldn’t be so easy to do, and even if you could do it, then you’d have to save up a lot of money to end ALL of those kids to college!  An alternative would be to get a large number of children together, pick some at random to go to the party, keep the others home and see what happens in later life.  But what will the effect of going to that party be on YOUR one child?

There’s just no way to tell in advance, because we can’t run a controlled study, and responses to any event vary—sometimes a lot—from person to person.  It’s tough being a teacher.  Or a parent.  Or both!

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In the last few years we’ve heard many suggestions that scientists have been fudging their data about climate change.

Rick Perry, for example, has apparently said that “A substantial number of scientists [have] manipulated data to keep the money rolling in.”    See this article: Rick Perry’s made-up ‘facts’ about climate change

Similarly, Ron Paul calls man-made climate change a great hoax, and Michelle Bachmann refers to the “man-made climate change myth” and the importance of distinguishing between “real science” and “manufactured” science.   See these articles:

Global Warming
Climate-change science makes for hot politics

So I thought I’d talk a little about how science gets done, and why fraud is a hard thing to get away with in science, especially for science that attracts a lot of attention.

The key is that scientists are inherently skeptical people.  When I submit a paper to a journal for publication, I certainly hope to hear nothing but praise!  “What a wonderful piece of research.  I wish I had done that!  And how beautifully and clearly written.  I recommend this for publication without revision.”  But that has never happened, not in my 36 years of publishing papers, more than 100 of them in fact.  Instead, I typically get something like this: “This is an interesting piece of research on XXX, showing that XXX.  However, …”  And then the reviewers go on and on about how I might have done the study differently, or about something in the methods that wasn’t clear, or they suggest different ways of analyzing the data, or they suggest better ways to present the data, or they disagree with some of my interpretations,  and so forth.  The final paper is much better because of those comments and suggestions, but it’s a slow and sometimes frustrating process.

That’s typical of how science works.  And if the research is truly innovative it usually runs into extra hurdles, because it goes against what people have been thinking for a long time. “That’s too weird; it can’t be right!”  And innovative studies with innovative findings are often threatening to colleagues, particularly to older colleagues who have spent years ignoring quirks in their data that might have led them to make the same innovative discoveries themselves years earlier.  So the established leaders in a field are especially critical of new ideas.  And who can blame them?  After working hard for decades, who would be eager to have their research shown to have been misguided?

Daniel Shechtman, who just won the Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering some very odd crystal structures in rapidly cooled metals, was initially accused of disgracing his research group with his surprising results.   Indeed, his group’s leader asked him to leave the research group, and he was later ridiculed by at least one other Nobel laureate!  (Nobel Prize in Chemistry for dogged work on ‘impossible’ quasicrystals)

So, let’s just say that the typical response of scientists to unusual ideas is skepticism.  They’re certainly not eager to embrace them.

When I was still a graduate student I ran into some trouble trying to publish a paper showing that some small animals in the ocean “leaked” a lot of what they ate into the surrounding seawater.  The paper was reviewed by a well-known researcher who had successfully championed for many years an easy way to calculate how much of what an animal ate actually got incorporated into the animal (that is, how much got assimilated), by basically measuring how much food went in, and how much came out as solid feces.  The difference was supposed to tell you how much stayed in the animal.  This works fine as long as all the unassimilated waste comes out as solids.  But if some of the assimilated material comes out in liquid form, as I had shown, then you are over-estimating the amount of food that stays in the animal, possibly by quite a lot.  The review of my paper was pretty fierce, and the reviewer recommended that I do more experiments, which I then spent several months doing. After I rewrote the paper with the new data, he then recommended that the paper not be published anyway.  I eventually got the paper published, but not without more work, and a good fighting spirit!  We call this “a learning experience!”

Even Nobel Prize winners have sometimes had their papers rejected by reviewers!

Coping with peer rejection
Rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries: accounts by Nobel Laureates

So the idea that hundreds of scientists around the world would cheerfully accept fraudulent research—on climate change or anything else–from fellow scientists is absurd.  In getting a manuscript for review, the first tendency is to think, “What flaws can I find here?  What might they have done wrong in this study? What might the researchers have missed in looking at their data?”  That’s the way scientists think.  And that’s not a bad thing: It keeps us all on our toes.  The research that comes out is all the better because of that.  But if you wanted to get away with something, you’d have a hard time doing it.

And by the way, the climate scientists under investigation last year were cleared of all wrong-doing, including fraud, in at least 4 separate, independent investigations.

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“The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality.  And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade…Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.” 

What does it mean, to make homework “smarter”?  To me, a good homework assignment is integrative.  It asks students to make connections between the things they’re learning about, and draws on the skills they’ve acquired previously.  A good homework assignment should allow students to put what they’ve learned to use, in an interesting way.  And if they can enjoy themselves while they’re doing that, well so much the better.

This doesn’t seem to be the way science is usually taught now, and it probably wasn’t when I was a student either.  My stepdaughter is currently learning all about ionic and covalent bonding in her 9^th grade biology class.  She memorizes the definitions and the diagrams, and does well on the tests, but she doesn’t actually then use this memorized information in any useful or interesting way.  The homework just reinforces the memorization.

Homeschoolers don’t really have “homework” in the sense that traditional schools use the term, since they’re always at home!  But they face the same issues:  workbook exercises–online or on paper–that mostly just ask students to write down what they’ve memorized.  What are two characteristics of all amino acids?  What do we call a molecule that contains two amino acids?  Fill in the blanks and you’re done.

Studies have shown that most students forget something like 80% of all the facts that they memorize in any given course within about a month (a lot less than that, for me!), so what is the point of all that memorization if it’s not related to something interesting or important?  “Sometime in the next 10-15 years, this information might come in handy!” Is that what we’re saying?

Homework should take what students have learned and reinforce it, and then give them the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned right away, to something interesting: a current problem in the news, for example, or some aspect of their own physiology, or something going on in nature.  And in the process of doing so, I think it should encourage students to use other skills they’re learning as well, such as writing and math.  As I have talked about earlier in this blog (“Scientists Write…and They Do Math, too!”), writing and math are important components of learning and doing science, and combining them together in giving assignments helps reinforce learning for all of those skills, in part by showing their relevance.

Many of the students that I have worked with in college have great trouble making connections between anything that they’ve covered in one course and anything that they’re learning in my course.  They know a lot of stuff, but it’s all in separate little compartments, because the teaching they have experienced is itself so compartmentalized.

So in my courses, and in SciSpark activities, I try to encourage students to make connections for themselves.  If we’ve been talking about the biomechanics of caterpillar locomotion, for example, I might ask them to write a poem about that for homework.  It seems like a crazy idea, but it works.  And it works, I think, because the activity encourages students to put the things they’ve learned together for themselves in an interesting way.  Maybe in a future posting I’ll show you some of the poems I’ve gotten over the years.  Few (probably none!) would win any prizes for poetry, but I’ll bet those students could talk with you about caterpillar locomotion years after the course is over!

As I’m very fond of saying, the only things we ever really learn are the things we teach ourselves.  And if done properly, asking students to write in an interesting way can put students in exactly that position.  And sometimes while you’re writing, you realize that you don’t understand quite as much as you thought you did.  So you end up with a question to explore further, and what you learn is something that you remember, because you’ve taught it to yourself.

That’s the difference between learning, and memorizing.

Good assignments can also help to develop the ability to summarize information.  As I say in my book, if you can’t summarize one piece of writing in your own words, you can’t possibly synthesize or compare several pieces of writing.  “The ability to summarize is an underappreciated, largely neglected, but essential skill for professional life.”*  I’ll blog more about those sorts of assignments another time.

*Pechenik, J.A. 2010. A Short Guide to Writing About Biology, 7^th ed. Pearson Longman, NY.

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Both Jan and Tony have long been concerned about the way that science is usually taught, with its almost exclusive emphasis on memorizing large numbers of facts and technical terms, and learning a variety of standard techniques.  That’s not what makes science fun, or interesting, to a scientist!  Asking questions that have never been asked before. Designing a clever experiment or study.  Pulling a convincing story from the data and telling that story clearly and convincingly to others. Discovering something new.  That’s what scientists enjoy doing!

You certainly don’t get that sense from Middle School or High School textbooks, where science comes through mostly as a series of facts and terms to be memorized, and standard calculations to be mastered.  Indeed, it can come as quite a surprise to find out how much we still don’t understand about how the world works!  As Jan says, “I didn’t find out what doing science was really all about until I started graduate school.  And then I got really excited!”   It would be nice if other students found out about the scientific adventure a lot sooner than that!

Jan A. Pechenik is a Professor of Biology at Tufts University, where he teaches marine biology and investigates the development and metamorphosis of marine animals, ranging from polychaete worms to colonial seasquirts.  In addition to the more than 125 papers he has published on these and related topics, he has also published several papers on science education and has developed a number of hands-on science activities and games that are currently being sold by several major science education companies.

Tony Lacertosa has degrees in animal science and environmental biology, and has spent more than 35 years teaching biology, geology, and earth science in grades 7-12 and at a community college; coaching a competition-focused science Olympiad team that won trophies at both the county and state levels; authoring and coauthoring a variety of laboratory manuals for student use; and training and mentoring many young science teachers.

SciSpark.com is the next episode in their quest to show students what scientific thinking, and the true nature of scientific research, are all about: asking new questions, designing studies to address those questions, working with data, thinking creatively—“out of the box”—and explaining things clearly, concisely, and convincingly to others.  We think that’s the right direction for science education to be taking.  We hope you’ll check out the website and let us know what you think.

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