Science is a low priority in California elementary schools.
Pupils in 80 percent of California’s elementary classrooms spend less than an hour a week learning science, and 16 percent spend no time on it at all, University of California-Berkeley researchers said Wednesday.
In contrast, a national study in 2000 found an average of 125 minutes of science instruction in elementary classrooms.
Though fifth graders have been tested in science since 2004, 41 percent of California elementary teachers don’t feel prepared to teach the subject.
Elementary science tends to be taught on a hit-or-miss basis with a project here or there but no coherence. I don’t think this is new. In pre-NCLB days in California, my daughter learned the parts of a flower (third grade) and, um, some songs about being nice to the environment. There was no serious science curriculum till eighth grade.
A high-tech friend of mine volunteered at a low-income, high-minority school, also pre-NCLB. The fifth-grade teacher said that she didn’t teach science because she didn’t like it and the kids weren’t smart enough to do it. But she let him try, while she did other things. He found the kids bright and eager to learn. But, as far as he could tell, nobody had taught them science ever.
Update: BTW, middle-school science teacher Ms. Frizzle is back and blogging after a year teaching in Turkey.
I find it troubling that such a significant percentage of college graduates certified to teach wouldn’t feel prepared to give lessons on science at the elementary school level.
The science teacher is the most popular teacher in the elementary school where I teach. And note that we have a science teacher — he’s a specialist, like Spanish or art or music, I think precisely because science is a subject few people are prepared to teach. (And it takes ridiculous time to set up all the experiments, so it’s good if you can dedicate yourself to it.)
We’ve deliberately followed that model with our children. We focus on teaching them reading and mathematics at as high a level as they can manage through the elementary years, leaving “science” as a fun, non-academic activity (planting seeds, seeing what water does, etc.) until their math is up to a level for serious science. Then a great deal of science can be successfully taught in a short amount of time. It’s worked so far….
So I have no problem with elementary schools not really bothering about science. *IF* they’re investing the time and effort in a very solid mathematical background. Which I suspect is not happening.
This probably explains why no Californian elementary school kid has won a Nobel prize yet.
Seriously… science in elementary school is a waste of time. Kids should be exposed to background knowledge through reading, but as a graded subject it is usually nothing more than a regurgitation of memorized facts with no context.
My youngest child had a wonderful science teacher in elementary school who used the children’s natural curiosity about the world around them to not only stimulate their interest in science, but also to entice them to read. This proved very valuable as most elementary instruction in reading focuses on stories; then later, when they have to switch to reading non-fiction texts (like textbooks or research) they are unable to apply transfer those narrative reading skills.
I would prefer they have no science classes because the science they teach would make Lysenko weep. Let the kids pick it up on the street.
I can’t believe any educated adult would have trouble teaching science to little kids. Let’s get real, here. We’re talking about simple stuff: ice melts, becomes water and boils to become a gas; the planets of the solar system; life cycles of plants; cells and single celled creatures. I mean how hard is it to line them up to look through the microscope at the wiggly stuff in pond water? Hold a magnifying glass and look at a bug close up? Connect a battery up to a peanut bulb?
You show them this stuff not to give them statistics and facts, but to give them a sense of wonder. Kids of that age are sponges. Get them curious or interested in something and you won’t be able to stop them from learning. Ever see a kid hooked on dinosaurs? You can’t shut them up, they know more about them than any adult ever bothers with.
I’m not a teacher and haven’t taken any courses in child development, but — sheesh — I AM a former child. How could schools possibly be allowed to hold children back from what clearly is their birthright?
I can’t see why we should bother with science instruction.
Science should be used as a method to teach *reading* and data interpretation. There’s no reason to have science labs and the like in schools, and certainly not in elementary school.
I remember science classes when I was a little kid. Sure, we weren’t doing full-blown M.S. degree level experiments, or analyzing stuff statistically – but there is something good about getting the kids out and having them look at caterpillars and mud and changing leaves and stuff.
Even fairly young kids can collect basic data – like, how many birds visit a feeder in a fifteen-minute time span, or how tall a plant has grown each week – and make simple bar graphs from it. You can get more complex and say, okay, how do the number of bird-visitors to a feeder differ on sunny warm days and cold wet days? Or how do plants grow differently under strong light and weak light?
Lots of little kids are absolutely entranced by nature and science stuff. And a lot of them get obsessed by topics – like Rob said.
Maybe I’m unusual because both my parents were scientists, but I remember learning lots of science (not just in school; we had bug books and aquaria and magnifying glasses and all that all over the house) before I was 10. We raised tadpoles and butterflies and stuff like that. And I could identify a lot of plants (not just poison ivy, which I think everyone needs to know) before I was in high school.
Kids are information junkies and they have brains like sponges.
And if nothing else, it gets the kid interested so he or she wants to keep learning it later on.
I can’t believe that people want to defer science until high school.
For me at least, science was the only part of elementary school that didn’t suck; we got to learn about the world, planets, etc. And I had a teacher in fourth grade that let us blow stuff up…
It was lots better than the insanely boring reading and math assignments. I suspect I would have cut school even more if there had been no science.
I wonder if there’s a connection between no science instruction and the general boy-unfriendliness of modern elementary school.
How about we make a deal… I will give the schools one hour of science instruction daily, in return for the discontinuation of new math and whole language. Deal?
Doesn’t some of this have to do with the stages of learning (grammar, logic, and rhetoric)? While some introduction into science is to be supported and fostered, the serious study of science naturally falls into the logic stage of learning. Granted, there are some great “hands on projects that are concrete and can be done with younger children (and I’ve done them myself with my children), but serious science is going to move into abstract thinking and learning how to extrapolate data. While I think 8th grade is a little late, I can’t see pushing it down below 6th.
As homeschoolers, we’ve had little projects and experiments coupled with some parent- child readings through 6th grade. We began “science classes” when our first child reached 7th. On the other hand, our 5th grader will probably start next year.
The students who succeed in science fairs participated in them in junior high. Those students who won science fairs in junior high were capable of understanding the oversimplifed scientific method of hypothesis, experiments, results before that point. If you want women to care about science, waiting until junior high is too late to interest girls.
Does a first grader need science? I don’t know, but there is no excuse why a 3rd grader can’t do Faraday’s Observations of a Candle. None at all. In fact, I bet most 3rd graders can do it better than 15 yr olds, who have been taught or at least inferred that measurement is only done with rulers and protractors, and have grown too jaded.
My 17 month old child understands cause and effect, and has for months. He certainly performs experiments. He repeats them over and over. Extrapolation of data? He turns wheels on his truck toy, and then runs to other wheels on bikes and trains and turns them, too.
Well designed science courses that teach gravity, momentum, inertia, potential energy are certainly within the grasp of children. So are the ideas of homeostasis, of differentiation, of conservation of mass even in biological creatures, of neurons sending signals, of exothermic and endothermic reactions, of the stability of things that are spinning, of the brightness of things which are hot, etc. And just like math facts are the basis on which a child can grow to do more abstract math, teaching a child basic physics and biology facts gives them a foundation on which to hang science. If your kid already knows from intuition from physical experience that objects of different mass STILL fall in the same amount of time (not because you asked him to discover it, but because you told him so, and showed him so, and demonstrated so), then he’ll remember that and be more confident when later, he derives that answer using algebra.
I think our basic understanding of what is science, and what science is, are so poor that most people don’t understand how it could be taught simply.
Elementary and early middle school years should focus on easily-observable scientific knowledge – animals and plants (general anatomy, basic processes, identification) and basic chemistry (phase changes, simple chemical reactions and safety). There should be an emphasis on data collection and representation (tables and graphs).
If I found more students coming into high school Biology with this background I would be elated. Unfortunately most of my students have trouble telling the difference between a line and bar graph, let alone how to make them.
The schools are just making sure that the students will be prepared for Examination Day .
While I hate teachers who blame earlier teachers, I have to say as a Middle School teacher I sometimes wonder just what the Elementary Schools are teaching these days. I have students who cannot read an analog clock, have not memorized the times tables, cannot identify parts of speech and do not know the names of the planets.
I teach Social Studies, but I can sometimes be persuaded to discuss sciece with the students when there is time. The students seem to be genuinely interested in Science, (much more so than History, alas) asking me questions such as what is the sun made of?, how does it burn in space where there is no air?, why does ice float?, etc.
They are astounded to learn that our sun has a name (Sol) and some are even able to deduce that that is why it’s called the solar system.
“I can’t believe any educated adult would have trouble teaching science to little kids.” It depends on how you define “educated”. It’s obviously possible to get a college degree and neither comprehend the principles of science nor have a good understanding of the established laws of many branches of science – I run into such people all the time, and Congress seems to be full of them. Education graduates are no better than the graduates of any other non-science program.
Science at the elementary level has been seriously “squeezed” by testing pressures for reading, math, and writing. It’s a shame because children love learning about nature and how things work. Science taps into their natural curiosity about life and their world. It is the one subject that allows them to experiment, touch, change, and discover in a hands on way. My elementary students look forward to science more than anything else we do in the school day (well, perhaps with the exception of recess!) If we cut back any more on science and social studies, we may soon find the students don’t have anything to read and write about.