One idea that prevailed during the curriculum reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that students were like little scientists: curious, imaginative, interested, and inventive. One idea that has emerged in recent years, however, is that students are quite different than scientists, and indeed come to science classes with naive theories and explanations for science concepts and phenomena. The assumption made by many science educators that scientists and students are very much alike is questionable, and perhaps has contributed to many instructional problems such as motivation, success on standardized tests, and overall performance in science.

Students in middle schools and high schools are not scientists, and we shouldn't be anxious to make them into scientists. They are adolescents, some of whom may choose to be scientists later in life, but the most will not. Let's look at some of the differences between scientists and adolescent students, and consider some of the implications of these differences.

Some Differences

For starters, most people will not become scientists or engineers. In a typical school with 1,000 students in the ninth grade, only 39 would earn baccalaureate degrees in science and engineering, five would earn master's degrees, and only two would complete the doctoral degree. A more important difference, however, appears when we examine scientist and student thinking.

Adolescents are limited in the extent to which they can reason in the abstract, whereas scientists deal with the abstractions as commonly as students deal with the concrete. As we will discuss in the next chapter, formal or abstract thinking alludes the majority of middle school and high school students. As some science education researchers point out, scientist work with concepts that have no directly observable circumstances (such as atoms, electric fields) and concepts that have no physical reality (potential energy). Students, on the other hand tend to consider only those concepts and ideas that result from everyday experience. As a result, many students will enter your classroom with misconceptions about scientific ideas, ideas that are firmly held, and very difficult to alter.

Another difference between students and scientists has to do with what we might call "explanations" of concepts and phenomena. According to Osborne and Freyberg, students are not too concerned if some of their "explanations" are self-contradictory, and do not seem to distinguish between scientific (testable, disprovable) and nonscientific explanations. Scientists, on the other hand, are "almost preoccupied with the business of coherence between theories." Osborne and Freyberg also point out that while scientists search for patterns in nature, for predictability, and the reduction of the unexpected, students are often interested in the opposite, thereby becoming interested in looking for the irregular, unpredictable and the surprise.

Students' interests, thinking processes and the way they construct meaning are also limited by their prior knowledge, experiences, cognitive level, use of language, their knowledge and appreciation of the experiences and ideas of others. Scientists' interests, Osborne and Freyberg argue, follow from their participation in the scientific community. Scientists also have available to them a wide range of technical supports enabling them to extend their knowledge base by means of computer networks and data bases, telescopes, electron microscopes, and a common language.

Students and scientists have very different attitudes about science. The more school science students are exposed to, the less is their interest in science. For example in one study, nearly two-thirds of 9 year olds, 40% of 13 year olds, and only 25% of 17 year olds reported science class to be fun. This pattern persists when students were asked whether science classes are fun, about science classes making them feel curious, successful and uncomfortable.

Bridging the Gap

How can science education be sensitive to the differences between students and scientists, and in such a way create science programs that nullify the negative trends in attitudes and achievement that have persisted for the past decade?

One place to begin is with pedagogy. Research study after research study has described a picture of the science classroom as a pedagogical monotone. In most classrooms a teach, text, test model prevails. For the majority of students, this model leads to disastrous results. What is needed is greater variety in pedagogy. There are many pedagogical models of teaching that place the student in an active role, as opposed to the widespread practice of students being passive receptors of information. Chapter 7 presents inquiry, conceptual change, direct/interactive, small group and individualized models of teaching, providing pedagogical varieties for the science teacher.

Science educators need to reconsider the goals of science teaching, and take a careful look at the objectives and concepts that secondary school students are expected to learn. Many science educators suggest that the humanistic and societal aspects of science should be emphasized in the science curriculum. Some suggest that science teaching---and the resulting curriculum---should help students generate ideas about the science-society interface. The interaction between science and society can lead to topics in science teaching that focus on the student interests, contemporary scientific, social and planetary issues, and help students use science concepts and methods in the investigation of these problems.

The emphasis in science teaching is on the teaching of facts and concepts. Very little emphasis is placed on the application of science knowledge to societal problems, the consequences of scientific discoveries, or the values undergirding science. Mary Budd Rowe's proposal for a shift in science education incorporates each of these components in a holistic paradigm of a science education program! The sad aspect of this is even with most of the attention given to this goal, American students have not done very well on standardized tests, especially when compared to their counterparts in other information-age societies.

As you examine this paradigm, keep in mind that Rowe suggests that for the most part, teachers and texts concentrate on the question "What do I know?" under the Ways of Knowing component. In fact, she points out that a typical high school science text averages between seven and ten new concepts, terms, or symbols per page. Making assumptions about the number of pages in the text, she estimates that students need to learn between 2,400 to 3,000 terms and symbols per science course. This translates to about twenty concepts per fifty-five minute period!

If these figures are even partially accurate, there is very little time for activities, for thinking about the applications, consequences or values implicit in science concepts and theories. The implication of this data is science lesson plans need to incorporate a spectrum of components.

Giving students a broader perspective of science will help bridge the gap separating them from the world of scientists. Most students will not become scientists, but they will become consumers of scientific discoveries and technological inventions, as well as decision-makers at the polling booths.