Science Learning in the 21st Century:
A Perspective from Cognitive Science
Christine Massey
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania
Introduction.
The invitation for this conference asked for a contribution that characterizes
our current thinking about "what it takes to enable students to learn particular
ideas or skills." Although there are many issues to be raised based on the
experiences of our Institute's precollege research and education programs,
I would like to focus on just a few that I think are directly related to connecting
the contemporary science of learning with the practice of teaching and learning
in K-12 educational settings. The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
has been funded by the National Science Foundation for the last eleven years
as a Science and Technology Center. Centers such as these (STCs) have a mission
that extends well beyond the traditional roles of research laboratories to
engage in scientific research and provide advanced graduate training in the
field. Part of that expanded mission is to participate in building new and
richer relationships between scientific research and education at every level.
I direct a group that has focused on research and development as well as program
implementation at the K-12 level. With funding support from several additional
grants from NSF as well as private foundations, we have been deeply involved
in curriculum development and evaluation in science and technology at the
K-8 level; in basic research on children's thinking and learning in science,
math and technology; in professional development for in-service teachers;
and in joint projects with educators in informal learning environments, such
as museums and zoos. Understanding the nature of thinking and learning processes
and complex intelligent behavior is central to the related disciplines that
make up cognitive science. Thus, we bring to our education initiatives theories,
methods, and knowledge from the scientific study of learning. All of our work
has been carried out through long-term partnerships with local individual
teachers and schools as well as district-level staff and offices in Philadelphia.
We have also been fortunate in being part of a very active effort sponsored
by the University of Pennsylvania to create new forms of partnership between
institutions of higher education and the local community, with a particular
focus on urban education.
Need for more differentiated views of learning.
A problem that we have encountered in all of our educational partnerships related
to SMET teaching and learning is the virtual absence of the means to evaluate
learning in a differentiated way and to develop correspondingly differentiated
teaching responses. School-based assessment activities that receive the most
attention are generally end-of-unit assessments for grading and high-stakes
standardized tests. Not enough attention is paid to diagnostic testing that
is sensitive to and predictive of different kinds of learning and the detailed
progress of ongoing learning processes; nor are classrooms organized to allow
for this kind of learning-oriented assessment. Although the focus of the present
conference is on science learning, I offer an example related to math learning
because it compactly illustrates problems we've encountered repeatedly in
science, math, and technology education alike.
We are currently in the process of completing individual math assessments with
6th-8th graders in one of our partner schools-an undertaking
that has yielded surprises all around. Students are participating in individual
interviews in which they are given a variety of diagnostic problems to solve
or at least attempt, and detailed notes are taken on everything the students
say and do as they work through the problems. A diverse team of interviewers
from the University of Pennsylvania (ranging from senior mathematics faculty
to undergraduate volunteers) is going to the school daily to complete interviews
with each student. Standardized test scores from this school are discouragingly
low, and teachers feel little confidence that their students are entering
at the beginning of the school year ready for grade-level math or that they
are departing at the end of the school year having made much progress. Despite
the many weeks of standardized testing that these students undergo each spring,
their teachers feel as if they have little insight into what knowledge and
skills the students actually possess and what they are prepared to learn.
One of the most interesting-and ultimately heartening-surprises has been that
many students are actually knowledgeable and even inventive in their use of
problem-solving strategies and mathematical algorithms. They nevertheless
perform poorly because they lack automaticity and fluency in basic math skills.
Time after time we have seen students unable to capitalize on the mathematical
knowledge and skills they do possess because they must put too much
energy into incidental calculations, and they lose the thread of the organizing
mathematical ideas and the overall problem-solving trajectory. For example,
when one intermediate step of a solution to a problem involves adding a column
of numbers, students who are unable to recall addition facts from memory must
launch a separate round of problem-solving to generate each step of the addition
task. While they often have strategies for doing this, their performance is
also errorful and it taxes their ability to keep both the sub-problem and
the larger problem in mind at the same time. For some children, the outcome
is a sense of failure, frustration, fatigue, and a reinforcement of the belief
that they are incapable of doing math.
Unfortunately, these students attend a school in which "drill" is out of fashion
and teachers are fearful of being caught doing anything that looks like it.
From a cognitive perspective, this particular learning problem is neither
mysterious nor untreatable. It is to be expected that when the component processes
needed to execute a strategy are effortful, there will be an overload on working
memory and on the executive processes controlling the problem-solving plan.
Fluency and automaticity can greatly reduce this cognitive load, and both
can be achieved by targeted practice. (This, by the way, need not take the
form of endless worksheets or flashcards of disembodied math facts. This area
is ripe for the application of efficient learning technologies based firmly
on cognitive principles, not just impressive graphics.)
Two points in particular distress me about this experience. The first is that
the kind of diagnostic assessment that we are helping this school perform
is seen as extraordinary and beyond the normal mission and capacity of the
school environment. An educator might protest, with good reason, that the
typical classroom teacher cannot possibly conduct lengthy individual interviews
with each child to develop a profile of his or her learning in every domain.
I would agree. However, that should not be a reason to abandon the goal. It
is time to consider deeply whether incremental changes to the traditional
organization, training, and staffing of public schools can accomplish the
work that must be done to improve educational achievement in science and math
(and other domains), or whether we must envision very different environments
and practices for teaching and learning.
The second distressing point is that the conventional "wisdom" about what constitutes
good teaching and learning is potentially biased, uninformed by evidence,
and out-of-touch with the real learning needs of students. In the example
above, a kind of teaching and learning that has an appropriate and necessary
role in achieving competent, functional levels of mathematical performance
has been dismissed from the repertoire for no adequate reason. (We have seen
a similar scenario play out in the area of literacy, where "phonics" and "whole
language" approaches to achieving literacy have been pitted against each other.
In science learning, there has been a somewhat less heated tension between
"process" and "content" approaches.) From a cognitive point of view, any complex
human activity almost always involves an intricate interplay among different
kinds of knowledge, perceptual discriminations, motor and cognitive skills,
strategies, and performance demands and contexts. Correspondingly, many kinds
of learning are involved, and they are not all achieved in the same way. The
learning landscape within a particular domain will depend on the totality
of this configuration, as well as where a particular learner is starting from
within that landscape. In science, these cognitive landscapes are surely complex,
involving conceptual change, representational fluency, epistemological development,
technical skill, modeling ability, rich bodies of factual knowledge, quantitative
and qualitative reasoning, and more. Of course, there is still much work to
be done to map these landscapes in different domains and to find navigable
pathways through them for various learners. We need both powerful, focused
theories and systematic ways of generating and applying useful data in order
to do this work. Neither one-dimensional prescriptions nor generic teaching
"methods" will help advance this goal.
Need for robust connections between education and scientific research on learning.
While educators (and the public at large) are fascinated by popular media accounts
of "brain research," they routinely overlook well-established understanding
from behavioral cognitive science that could have much more immediate and
direct application to teaching and learning.1
Curriculum and educational technology that is well-grounded in cognitive research
is within reach, but we have not developed a systematic capacity to produce
it. Cognitive science is generally not well-represented within professional
schools of education, and there may be little communication between these
fields. Indeed, there may be profound differences in the theoretical commitments,
methods, and cultural practices of the cognitive science research community,
on the one hand, and educational research and the professional training of
teachers on the other. Undertaking research programs with explicit goals related
to advancing educational practice has not always been highly valued within
the cognitive science research community. Well-defined professional career
paths for research and development activities that bridge the gap between
the learning sciences and education hardly exist.
Standards and curriculum.
The movement in this country toward more systematic national standards for
science education has generally been one that I welcome. Project 2061's Benchmarks
for Science Literacy and the National Research Council's National Science
Education Standards represent serious, well-informed efforts to present
more uniform goals for what American K-12 students should know and be able
to do. Both sets of standards present an ambitious learning agenda for public
science education, and they also emphasize that this level of education should
be achieved by all students, starting in the earliest school years.
The scope of this enterprise far exceeds what has been attempted in the past
in science education and poses new and somewhat varied challenges for education
at each grade level. For example, in early elementary classrooms, the idea
of science as a major primary subject is not yet well-incorporated and the
in-service teaching force is not well-prepared for it. At the high school
level, not only has the quantity and sophistication of the material to be
taught in science courses increased, all students should now be learning
at this level, not just a self-selected few.
Standards are a statement of desired learning objectives and outcomes, not
a detailed description of the curriculum and processes for helping students
achieve them. Yet time and again, we have seen teachers and administrators
who seem to believe that standards-based teaching means that teachers must
look at standards documents (or perhaps just brief summaries of them) and
then invent or piece together their own curriculum day by day during a 30
minute prep period or on their own time at home in the evening. This is related
to a tendency to treat standards superficially, as a set of topics that the
curriculum should be "about." Thus an educator may conclude that growing marigolds
on the window sill is a science activity that is "standards-aligned" because
it is a hands-on activity and is about living things and their growth. The
appropriate question, of course, is not whether a curriculum appears to be
topically related to standards headings but whether it is reliably able to
achieve the learning that is targeted in the standards.
Curriculum development should be done by teams of qualified professionals who
have the capacity to engage in a robust, extended research and development
process. AAAS and the NSF have played important roles in improving the quantity
and quality of science curricula available, but there is still much to be
done to raise many educators' level of discrimination in evaluating the quality
of science curricula. Further, the odds are often stacked against the adoption
of good curricula (a point that is probably not lost on curriculum publishers
concerned with thin profit margins). High-quality science curricula are especially
difficult to implement under the current conditions faced in many classrooms,
and they demand more of both students and teachers. They are more time-consuming
to prepare for and implement; they demand more resources and are logistically
challenging in terms of time, space, staffing, and facilities; and they are
expensive.
Envisioning systemic change.
Incremental changes in education-slightly smaller classes, more hands-on equipment,
more workshops for teachers-may amount to no more than tinkering around the
edges when what is needed is the development of an entirely new system and
vision for how we develop, evaluate, and deliver teaching and learning environments
that can yield consistent, high levels of science achievement for the broad
cross-section of students that American schools are supposed to serve. As
hard as it is to achieve systemic change within the bounds of the current
borders of public educational institutions and organizations, that may not
be enough. Even with an influx of new resources, the field of education may
not have sufficient internal capacity to reinvent itself to the degree required.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an analogy with the transformation of
medicine and healthcare in recent decades. Can you imagine modern medical
schools and research and teaching hospitals that had no place for people with
advanced expertise in molecular biology or organic chemistry or bioengineering?
No systemic capacity to conduct focused basic scientific research on the mechanisms
underlying various medical conditions? No systemic capacity to do large, well-controlled
clinical trials of treatment protocols, leading to empirically justified recommendations
for practitioners? No mechanism for doing comprehensive diagnostics for individuals
or for updating the professional knowledge of practitioners? Can you imagine
a system in which a physician who participated in research or attended a conference
on the latest findings on prevention and treatment of heart disease would
be criticized as negligent for being out of the office? The National Institutes
of Health, for instance, have played a key role in funding national laboratories
and institutes, teaching hospitals, and research centers that create an effective,
functional pathway between research and clinical practice. Although we still
face difficult decisions in providing adequate, affordable health care to
all, there is no doubting that the state of medical knowledge and the standards
for practice have improved phenomenally in recent decades in the field of
medicine. We cannot claim the same dramatic progress for education. Despite
advances such as new computer labs and internet connections, the structure
of most present-day educational systems is still closer to the lone family
doctor from the first half of the 20th century with a minimally
equipped office and a black bag. We need entirely new capacities as well as
a solid national process for generating and evaluating progress. Of course,
the analogy between the practice of medicine and the practice of education
is not apt in all respects, but I think it is instructive to think in terms,
not just of a profession, but of an entire sector that is essential to the
quality of our modern life and that is in need of a major overhaul.
Although I am in many ways critical of the current state of public education,
I do not mean to be harsh toward educators-especially classroom teachers.
Adopting punitive and denigrating attitudes toward educators only undermines
their ability to strive for excellence and to attract capable new people to
the profession. High-quality ongoing professional development is certainly
necessary for practicing teachers to be able to reflect on and improve their
own knowledge and practice, and our group regularly devotes a lot of attention
to developing professional learning experiences for teachers and to providing
an integrated community of support for them. However, I do not think that
workshop after workshop will solve fundamental systemic problems. I think
of the underlying problem not as one of providing more individual educators
with individual opportunities to overcome "deficits" in their background,
but as one of creating a pathway for the occupation of teaching to transform
into a much more sophisticated profession. This transformation will not be
rapid, and we should perhaps be thinking in terms of generations within the
profession. Steering such a long course would require resolve and strategic
oversight over many years.
Helping to develop and support communities of educators who are interested
in changing their practice is, perhaps, a useful intermediate strategy, but
I fear that it is insufficient as a mechanism for large-scale transformation
in science education. Our experience has been that such communities are difficult
to grow beyond a certain size and to sustain over time. They require massive
amounts of external support-both in terms of outside personnel and resources,
and they tend to be fragile and easily disrupted by any of the many disturbances
that characterize public schools. Our situation is perhaps unusually challenging,
in that we tend to work with distressed urban schools, where there is a high
turnover of staff and administrators, unreliable resources, a prevailing crisis
atmosphere, and frequent abrupt changes of policy at the district level. The
difficulties of this environment, of course, lead directly to the heart of
the challenge inherent in improving science learning opportunities for all
students.
At a minimum, improving science education in a dramatic way requires the involvement
of higher education institutions in a newly committed form-and not just schools
of education, but the scientific research community as well. Colleges and
universities can contribute to K-12 education not just by graduating a new
generation of highly qualified science educators but by coming to the table
in other ways. Institutions of higher education are potentially an invaluable
partner for public education, providing leadership, expertise, human resources,
vision, stability, and physical resources. This magnitude of systemic reform
also requires the involvement of other sectors outside of education, including
government, private foundations, business, professional organizations, and
leadership in local communities.
I believe we also need to think seriously about creating new career paths and
possibly even new institutions in which people who presently have no secure
professional home can work in this crucial juncture between research in the
learning sciences and professional practice on education. Although there are
noteworthy exceptions, graduate schools of education, with their focus on
the professional training of teachers, have not done as good a job with basic
and applied research in learning. People who can successfully move between
the scientific research and professional practice communities are rare and
may feel, professionally speaking, that they are neither fish nor fowl. Professional
curriculum development or the development of new learning technologies or
providing professional development for teachers, for instance, may fall awkwardly
between the gaps of institutional missions. To the extent that these activities
are not basic research, people who engage in them may have difficulty finding
a home in research-oriented academic institutions. Few school districts-even
very large ones-have the capacity to carry out these missions successfully
in-house. Professional publishing houses or publishers of educational software
may not be interested in underwriting either the lengthy and extensive research
efforts that should underpin major efforts in curriculum and technology and
or the kind of ongoing professional development that supports implementation.
Short-term grant funding does not lend itself to cultivating a highly experienced
group of professionals with an appropriate mix of advanced scientific and
professional training. Valuable staff and their collective experience may
be lost when a funded project ends, and it can be difficult to assemble or
reassemble an experienced team to pursue new initiatives.
Yes, this kind of overhaul would be expensive, and, yes, we'll continue to
have painful and heated debates over how much we can realistically afford
to spend on education-just as we have these debates in health care. But I
am increasingly drawn to the conclusion that it is better to have a research-driven
understanding of what an educational sector would look like that is demonstrably
capable of achieving high levels of achievement for all students than to keep
pouring money into a system that was not initially designed to achieve the
goals we now require of it and that may never have the capacity to do so.
1 A comprehensive analysis of this issue is provided by
John T. Bruer in the November 1997 issue of Educational Researcher.
Bruer, J. T. Education and the brain: a bridge too far. Educational Researcher,
November 1997.
