How Can We Improve Science Education? Bring Curiosity Back!
A crisis looms in science classrooms across the nation. It affects students from all walks of life: wealthy and disadvantaged, middle schoolers and college seniors alike. Step into any STEM classroom and you’ll stare out upon a sea of students, covering the spectrum of interest. Some are feverishly taking notes. A few are snoring into their textbooks. The vast majority are staring slack-jawedly ahead, completely lost. Something about this situation unsettles you, so you pose a question to the class: Is anyone curious about [insert class material here]? The students’ minds race: is this a trick question? Will this be on the test? Not a hand goes up.
Sure, they’re curious enough to want to pass the class, but is anyone curious enough to actually learn?
Children and scientists are naturally curious people. They stick their inquisitive noses into anything that interests them, asking that simultaneously-enlightening-and-aggravating question, Why? Why is the sky blue? Why is fire hot? Why does cancer spread? This curiosity, and the unquenchable thirst for more knowledge it engenders, drives scientific exploration. From Galileo to Darwin to Neil Degrasse Tyson, scientists have drawn on their curiosity to ask bold questions and make equally bold breakthroughs. For these figures and many others, science is not a cookie-cutter answer-set you bubble in your midterm; it’s an adventure, a road map to discovering the beauty of the universe around us.
This conception of science is marvelous in theory, but things look very different when we try to teach it. Burdened by ineffective teaching strategies, a crippling lack of funding, and a destructive over-dependence on high-stakes testing, many STEM curricula do a terrible job of harnessing intrinsic motivation. In many classrooms, the curiosity and wonder so vital to the scientific process are unintentionally extinguished; in their place is the brutally utilitarian desire to simply “get an A”.
Given this, it’s no surprise that actual learning gets shoved aside. As a full-time college student myself, I have seen how counterproductive the results can be. Rather than learn to love science, many of my peers learn instead to game the system; after all, we all have GPAs to maintain! We mindlessly cram equations and facts in our heads, and hold them just long enough to dump them back out on a test. After we finish their exams, we delete the knowledge from our brains to make room for the next test; rinse and repeat until the quarter or semester is over.
Clearly, this strategy is not conducive to learning. How, then, can we fix this? I acknowledge that the scope of this question is too wide to address in one essay, and many different solutions are being proposed; as someone who is still in school, I’d like to offer my two cents: Bring curiosity back.
All of us — educators, scientists and students alike — can do our part to bring awe and childlike wonder back into STEM education. Rather than presenting science as a dry, esoteric jumble of equations and formulae, we must instead spark an unquenchable fire of curiosity and inquiry in students and the general public. Invite folks on lab tours! Crush cans with thermodynamics! Make ice cream with liquid nitrogen! Anything to engage the audience’s intrinsic motivation and get them asking why.
Granted, not every student has their sights set on a career in the sciences. The lab can be a monotonous place, and “Eureka!” moments are hard to come by. However, conventional methods of teaching science are failing our students, and doing something is better than doing nothing.
The way we teach science desperately needs an overhaul: it stomps out the very curiosity and love for discovery that science depends on. To improve our STEM education system, we should work towards inspiring our students to get excited about science and want to learn. Curiosity, not a GPA, is what motivated great scientists and engineers throughout the ages. And ultimately, it’s this same curiosity that continues to motivate the great researchers and teachers of today.
Wouldn’t it be something, truly something, if that same curiosity motivated our STEM students as well?
