Does a solution for America’s educational weaknesses lie in more student involvement in hands-on activities? Excerpt from the Chevron Innovating California Series program, “Education Beyond Talk: The Amazing Impact of Learning by Doing,” October 17, 2012.

CHARLES BEST, Founder, DonorsChoose.org

VINCE BERTRAM, Ph.D., President and CEO, Project Lead the Way

HELEN QUINN, Ph.D., Emerita Professor of Physics and Former Chair, Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Stanford University; Chair, National Board on Science Education

DENNIS BARTELS, Ph.D., Executive Director, Exploratorium; Member, Education Working Group for the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – Moderator

 

BARTELS: We [can look at] the statistics about how students are doing on standardized tests, and many of you have heard the crying need to reform our STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] education programs, but at the same time we exist in California – and in particular in a region, Silicon Valley – which is known for its innovation, for its creativity, for its entrepreneurship. How do you resolve that seeming contradiction?

QUINN: We need to be careful when we look at test data. Tests measure something, but they don’t measure everything. And, in fact, when you look at the countries that score well on international comparisons in science scores and ask about student interest in science, you find a decreasing student interest with increasing scoring on these particular measures. So something is going on, but [that thing] isn’t always getting engaged in science; that takes doing science.  You can learn a lot of facts and remember them and score well on the test and become very good at that and have no ability at all to do science, to think like a scientist, to begin to answer questions for yourself or to apply your knowledge in new contexts.

But all of those things are what we need both entrepreneurs and, indeed, employees in many, many jobs today to be able to do. And those things don’t come from learning a list of facts, so being careful about what’s being measured and paying attention to more than just the scores [should be part of the equation.]

The scores are important, and the kids do need to learn some facts, but they will learn them better and retain them longer if they learn them in the context of doing science and not just being told, “This is what scientists have discovered.” And that’s what our framework [does], and what I think the next-generation science standards will be pushing.

We say science has three dimensions; one of these dimensions is indeed the core knowledge that students need about important ideas across the disciplines of science. The other two are the connective tissue which makes it science: first of all, science practices – doing science – and engineering practices, because applying your knowledge in a design challenge is also a way to learn to understand the science more deeply. The second [dimension] is a set of crosscutting ideas, like the idea that scientists are trying to understand cause and effect, mechanisms for cause and effect in a system, and that that’s a question that is the same question an ecologist is asking or a particle physicist is asking. Understanding those common questions, those common ideas, which are tools for thinking across all of science, is also very important.

BERTRAM: I remember back in 2001 I was just appointed as principal of a large urban high school [with] 2,400 students; 25 percent of our kids were dropping out of the school; another 25 percent, conservatively, were graduating with a diploma that was almost meaningless to them because they didn’t have the skills to be successful when they graduated from high school. 

So I approached my superintendent. His instructions for me [had been] really simple; he called me in one day after a month on the job and said, “Your job is to fix it.” And I started talking about [Project Lead the Way and] project-based learning and activity-based learning, and how we can encourage students to think differently, creatively and critically about problem solving. 

My superintendent asked what project-based learning [was], and I gave him an example. It was really not a Project Lead the Way example, but I said, “Here is a group of students.” I gave him a list of our top 50 students and said, “If we were to give them a book on how to make a birdhouse and we asked them to study the book and at the end we gave them a test, how many of these students could pass the test?” He said, “All of them.” I said, “Yes, but not a single one could make a birdhouse.” They don’t know how to apply the knowledge that they’ve gained, and it’s that knowledge that allows them to think deeper and learn at a different level. It’s that critical thinking that we believe is so important for our students.

That’s what we do at Project Lead the Way; we give students real problems; we make learning relevant. Not only do [students] understand how to do this stuff, but they [also] understand the relevance of other disciplines. They understand the importance of mathematics, the importance of science.

BARTELS: There’s been criticism out there that not all hands-on [education] is equal, a notion that sometimes you see hands-on [activities in a classroom] but the [students’] minds aren’t engaged. It’s hands-on but not minds-on.

BEST: At DonorsChoose.org we try to channel the voices of teachers, because we think that dedicated classroom teachers know their kids better than anybody else in the system, and if we can tap into the pent-up, front-lines expertise we might unleash the smartest, best-targeted, most innovative micro-solutions that are possible. We see hands-on resources, resources that are necessary to take the subject matter out of a book and put it into the hands of students. Those are the resources that teachers most often request on our site. You’ll see very few textbooks being requested at DonorsChoose.org. [Laughter.]

BARTELS: Frank Oppenheimer, the founder of the Exploratorium, famously said, “Nobody flunks museum.”

You see in the maker movement and other things where people get to design their own things that there’s this wonderful learning that happens through failure. But it seems to me, today especially, that the room for failure in schools is very, very tiny. In fact you have, I would guess, more students very afraid of failure because of they way we set up the system, where everything is driven by getting the correct answer.

For the teachers, on the one hand they probably instinctively know that there’s value in failure, and great power, but at the same time you’re covering this huge amount of content and you’re judged by what’s on those standardized tests at the end.

If you were speaking to a teacher right now, how would you advise them? How would you help reconcile that?

BEST: The good news is that schools like KIPP [Knowledge Is Power Program] Charter Schools are showing that big gains in student test scores – those standardized tests that often feel like they threaten to be rote – can go hand in hand with experiential learning. KIPP schools are at once schools that post incredible gains in student test scores and are also the schools to send your kid to in a low-income community, if you want them going on fieldtrips.

And that’s what we see at DonorsChoose.org. The teachers who use our site, who do so overwhelmingly to put in place experiential learning, to go beyond the mandated curriculum, to go outside of the standardized test, are also the teachers who tend to post the greater student test-score gains.

BARTELS: Charles, you actually bring up a great point, which is: How do we know experiential learning works? What’s our evidence?

BERTRAM: There have been over three dozen studies done on Project Lead the Way [PLTW], and, almost without exception, there were positive results on science and mathematics scores and overall performance.

We track students beyond high school; we look at them in college, and our PLTW students outperform, out-persist their non-PLTW peers almost without exception. Universities are recruiting our students. The University of Minnesota just reported that a third of their freshmen class in the College of Engineering are PLTW students. Employers are looking for these students because of the skills they have; they want these kids because they do better.

BEST: I think a critical turning point for me was reading a study by David Carraher, who did a study of street children in Brazil. A number of the children were still in school, and a number had dropped out at very young ages. He took a look at upper elementary mathematics skills and tested both sets of children.

It turned out, believe it or not, that the street children outperformed the kids in school in basic mathematic skills, which was a very interesting, counterintuitive finding. And then what he discovered was that the street children were basically running their own businesses – some of them licit and some of them illicit – and in fact were using a lot of basic mathematics to run a business and would say, “I don’t know any mathematics,” but were actually outperforming the kids in school.

BARTELS: What is the role of the online world in experiential learning? How do we think about experiential learning, and is there a place for online learning or blended learning or flip classrooms or some of these things that are coming on now as technology becomes prevalent in student use?

QUINN: You know, technology is a tool; you can use it well, you can use it badly. There are opportunities that technology presents for many things. One of them is to reinforce the standard kind of learning, which is basically what the Khan Academy [khanacademy.org] does, supports students, gives them a chance to go back and see somebody argue through the way to do the problem one more time.

There are things that are available through technology, for example, simulations; there are many times when a kid can’t do something to see things at the atomic scale or to see things at the solar system scale, but by working with online, three-dimensional simulations, they can begin to have a model of what’s going on at those scales which supports their understanding and learning of new ideas about structure and function, about how it works, about why the universe is the way it is.

While there’s a huge place for working with real stuff and doing what you can do hands-on, there’s only a part of the world you can reach that way. Technology gives you a way to take the interest and the attention that you’ve learned in the real-world problem and take it into situations where you don’t have the equipment or the space to examine it directly.

BERTRAM: We have to stop seeing technology as a threat – many of us don’t, but I remember as a high school principal, some new technology would come out and I’d say, “Well, it’s about time for a faculty meeting,” because I was sure we’d have to come up with some policy to ban the technology. But how do we embrace technology in a way that enhances learning – the kind of technology that students have in their hands today? That’s a difficult shift.

I had a student ask me [about this problem] recently. We were in a classroom and he had his iPhone out and he said, “What I don’t understand is we can’t have our iPhones in class and yet our teachers can have it in class and why can’t this be as helpful for us as it is for the teacher in class?”

One last piece: learning cannot be confined to six and a half hours, 180 days a year. We can use technology to open learning 24/7. We want students when they leave our school to continue thinking about what they’re doing and working on. Once they get engaged, we stop because the bell rings?

I had a recent situation [talking to a] little seventh grader in New Orleans. I was in the class with the kids and I asked him, “Do you like this class?” And the little seventh grader looked at me and said, “I love this class.” I said, “Really? Why do you love it?” He said, “Because it’s last period of the day.” [Laughter.]

I [thought,] Great, I’m not really sure where this is going. I said, “You’re going to have to elaborate.”

He said, “Because I get to think all day about what I get to do in this class.” Then all of a sudden the bell rings and school’s over and he has to shut his computer off or put the project away. Technology can open this so that the day doesn’t end when the school day ends.