

Why Not Try A Scientific Approach To Science Education? - b-man
http://www.scientificblogging.com/carl_wieman/why_not_try_scientific_approach_science_education

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jerf
Why take a scientific approach to _science_ education? Why not take a
scientific approach to _all_ education?

(I mean, sure, start somewhere. But let's set proper goals.)

Sometimes I wish I could start a school of my own, and this is what the school
would do, to the extent it could; study the problem of education aggressively
scientifically. You'd start with a fork of the current curriculum just to
"play it safe", and there are many details you'd have to work out to make it
work and make it safe, but I would lay money the end result would be worth it.

~~~
ggchappell
> Why not take a scientific approach to all education?

Because it has been tried, and it does not seem to work very well.

This is not a new idea. University programs all over the U.S. are required to
have "outcomes assessment" plans in place. These generally detail the various
goals & objectives of the program and how the degree of program success is
measured.

So, people are doing this stuff all over the place. Have you ever heard of any
significant improvement in the quality of education coming out of it all? As a
university professor, I've been involved in outcomes assessment in various
ways for years, and I haven't heard of anything like that.

Keep in mind that the scientific method, as applied to figuring out how the
world works, is not just something we do because we believe in the principles
behind it. We do it because _it works_. And there are a huge number of success
stories to back this up.

But apparently, it doesn't work for education. Why not? Perhaps we don't know
how to do it right. But that brings up a meta-problem: perhaps we need to take
a scientific approach to figuring out how to take a scientific approach to
education.

Is anyone doing that? If not, I suspect this idea won't get anywhere.

~~~
jerf
"perhaps we need to take a scientific approach to figuring out how to take a
scientific approach to education."

That's part of what I meant by "aggressive". I've actually been involved in
some education research too and was generally unimpressed by the end result,
which I would define as "impact on the education given to real students".
(Ultimately, isn't education research a very practical thing? In the end,
abstract research results are irrelevant.) Partially, the problem is the same
as the one nutritionists face; it's a complicated system resistant to the sort
of reductionist analysis that science really thrives on. All any given study
can do is nibble around the edges, with no guarantee that the edge in question
has any particular relevance.

On the other hand, there are _massive_ structural problems too. I don't see
much evidence that any of this science is actually feeding back into schooling
itself; it seems very detached from the process, whereas schooling remains
dominated by political concerns and people just sort of spouting theories off.
It was _certainly_ that way when I was a kid 20 years ago (I clearly recall
being on the receiving end of educational theories that when I checked up on
them ten years later _never_ had anything remotely resembling a scientific
background, it was just some educator's pet theory), and I'm not seeing a lot
of evidence that has changed much. Schools are now too busy teaching to the
state mandated tests to have any room to try anything new that might fail. The
feedback loop between science and schooling seems to be almost entirely
severed. Please do correct me if I'm wrong on this. But in all the endless
debates about school I hear I sure don't here much science getting cited.

Note that for both issues, I have no beef with the researchers doing real
science.

Perhaps, at the risk of offending the scientists who wrote the initial post,
what we need is a more _engineering_ approach to schooling. Engineering of the
sort that engineers do when they have to run ahead of the science a bit, but
still produce results. Certainly looking at it from a computer programmer's
point of view, I see a system that needs to be rolled back to step one of the
engineering process. Now, you might think I mean "burn it down and start from
scratch", but I actually mean, it's time to sit down and do _requirements
analysis_ again. Do we even have a clear sense of what we _really_ want from
schooling? I'm not even sure we have an answer to _that_ question, and from an
engineering standpoint that indicates to me we're not starting on a firm
foundation.

