Inquiry-Based Science?? My query...,"Why aren't they teaching science?"

Inquiry-Based Science Education: The Death Knell of Science and Technology
by Mère Fâchée

Given the move in the 2009 session to approve the new inquiry-based science standards, this story is timely, especially since one of the chemistry teachers at this school was on the committee that developed the standards.

In the early 2000’s, I made the mistake of allowing one of my daughters to enroll in high school in a large district in south King County, after homeschooling her since 5th grade. One spring day, she came home from school upset and told me she just could not take her chemistry class anymore the way things were and asked me to go in and talk to the teacher about it. She had a litany of complaints:

· There was no assigned chemistry text. There was a stack of old texts in the classroom, but they were not used. This meant that there was no assignment to read pages such and such about topic X. Students were allowed to check the books out, but there was no incentive to do that. They would not have known how to find whatever concept they were having trouble with anyway.
· The teacher spent much of the class period working on his computer. If any questions were directed his way, he either ignored them or told the students to refer to their handouts. He rarely answered questions.
· There were some lectures explaining concepts, but this particular teacher was so bad that they were largely incomprehensible.
· “Learning” was to occur as the students performed experiments using (poor quality) copies of teacher-created handouts. The handouts were like recipes – no concepts, no theories, no formulas.
· My daughter was sick and tired of doing her teacher’s job. She felt she was the only student in the class who ever understood anything. The other students came to her with questions. If she didn’t get it, she would come home and ask me. The next day, she would go back and explain it to them. (Apparently, the other students did not have a chemical engineer as a resource at home like she did.)

I have a lot of experience dealing with education reform ideologues, and I did not hold out much hope that speaking with the teacher would be effective, but I made an appointment anyway. The appointment was for before school, so we only had 20 – 30 minutes to deal with the subject before students began showing up. It wasn’t enough.

I spent a while explaining to the teacher how disappointed I was in the curriculum and detailed several of my daughter’s complaints. (I didn’t mention her assessment of his teaching competence.) His best answer was that this was the curriculum that the school had chosen and he did not have the power to change that, as he was not the department head. I doubt he would have made the change if he had had the power anyway, but this was his way of deflecting my complaint.

Not one to be deterred by the parry technique, I asked who the department head was, so that I could take the issue to someone who had the power to actually do something about it. He indicated that the department head was in the very next room, and would I like to speak with him right now? Given the time constraints and that fact that I would then be outnumbered, I should have said I would schedule an appointment with the department head later, but I answered with a yes. They spent the next several minutes double-teaming me.

The idea behind the curriculum was that the students would “create knowledge” through the experiments, discovering the theories and concepts for themselves. What knowledge they “created” for themselves they would “own”. No longer would they memorize facts from a book to regurgitate for a test, only to immediately forget what they had learned. Less material could be covered this way, but it would be “deep knowledge”. They would truly understand it. The department head waxed eloquent on how wonderful this was. He even told me about students who came back from college and told him that this was how things were being done in college (which I strongly doubt) and how much they appreciated his methods.

I know what type of students come back to visit their teachers after they have been away to college. I was one of them. They are the ones who might actually learn with this method because there is no way to stop them from learning, no matter what method you use – the smart and motivated ones who have an affinity for the subject. I get awfully tired of the schools using my children as lab rats for some clueless Ph.D. candidate’s education thesis. Here’s another high-fallutin’ experiment foisted on children – just like the first attempt at New Math that introduced base arithmetic to 5th graders in the sixties!

Learning is only a 100% discovery process if you are a caveman. There is a process to learning about science that has been effective for centuries. First, the student is exposed to information discovered by others through reading and listening to lectures (class time and homework). Next, the concept is explored and knowledge deepened through practical experimentation (lab class). Next the student applies the concepts to real life examples (problem sets). Through all of this, the student is encouraged to ask questions that the teacher answers. Steps are repeated as needed until the student is able to show mastery of the material through testing.

The problem with inquiry-based learning is that it’s like throwing a non-swimmer into the ocean and expecting necessity to teach him how to swim. All but the most talented and resourceful students drown. Some of the drowning students try to grasp onto whatever they can to stay afloat, and in the process drag the swimmers down with them. The other drowning students just give up and go under. But (and here’s where the analogy breaks down), those who have given up can’t just leave the room; because they have to stay, they goof off and become a disruption. The result is a chaotic classroom with little to no learning going on.

Inquiry-based science education is particularly bad. It took intellects of the like of Newton, Pascal, Arrhenius, Charles, Boyle, Rutherford, Heizenberg, Gibbs, Le Chatelier, and more to develop some of the theories and concepts in chemistry alone. Each of these men was a giant, and each stood on the shoulders of other giants to develop his own theories. It took centuries for Man just to come up with the concept of zero. And we are expecting high school students to come up with these theories on their own, with a little directed experimentation?! How crazy is that?

I explained this to the two chemistry teachers to no avail. Mr. Department Head was extremely condescending. “Maybe your daughter is one of those students who needs to be spoon-fed everything.” My daughter, who turned out to be one of the few students from that school to graduate with a 4.0. My daughter, who spent her class time teaching the other students what only she understood. He could tell I was offended and wasn’t buying it. “What grade is your daughter getting? ‘A’? Is she going into a science-related field? No? Well, the best I can tell you is to tell her to get through the class, bag her ‘A’, and not worry about it.” That is a fine attitude about learning, isn’t it?

At this point, students were starting to show up and trying to get into the locked classroom. As I am a bottom-line kind of person, I tried to summarize what I had gotten out of our meeting, trying to make sure we understood one another. I said, “So, what you are telling me is that this is the curriculum you have chosen, and you don’t plan to change that. So we are just going to have to deal with it.” I suppose my angered state came through in my tone, but his response shocked me anyway. “Well, yes, if you want to be confrontational about it.”

I denied being confrontational and asked what my next step might be. He suggested that I schedule an appointment to speak with the principal about this, since she was both his boss, and the chair of the district level science committee that had chosen the curriculum. He thought that she might make me feel better about the decision. I had a mental image of me spending an hour listening to newspeak from Big Sister, while she tried to massage my ego and get me on their side. The thought of another hour wasted in frustration with a consummate educrat facilitator caused me to decline the invitation. I told them I would just teach my daughter what she needed to know at home.

I went home and told my daughter the result. I then told her that I would hold tutoring sessions after school for any of her friends that wanted to come. The next day, she brought home two boys who wanted to learn – boys she had thought of as goof-offs. I spent a half-hour teaching them about heat transfer and specific heat capacity. I explained concepts, showed them formulas, and went through calculations with them. When I was finished, one boy told me I had taught him more in half an hour than he had learned all year in class.

The next day, the “goof-offs” became model students – on task, understanding the experiment they were doing, and even helping other students. She said the change in them was remarkable. “They weren’t goof-offs,” she told me, “They were just lost and didn’t know what they were doing.” They even confronted the teacher and asked him why he hadn’t showed them the formula. His response was anger that I had showed them.

Inquiry-based science? It will be the death of our technological society.