'Hands-on' science teaching gains momentum in Wisconsin
Plastic lab syringes were popping all over Becki Barberino's classroom.
Barberino's second-graders at Yahara Elementary School in Stoughton had figured out how to manipulate air pressure to send one end of a syringe soaring. The accompanying sound was a bonus.
"We discovered something!" cried one child.
At the hour's end, they talked further about how air is invisible yet takes up space. In coming days they would do some related reading.
But in a marked departure from their parents' generation, there wasn't a textbook in sight.
In a move that's recently gained momentum across Wisconsin and the nation -- though not without critics -- elementary and middle schools are increasingly eschewing textbooks for themed kits that let kids experience science in action.
Though the quality of the kits vary, the best ones on the market, produced by companies that specialize in inquiry-based science, typically come complete with everything needed for experiments, as well as supplemental student reading plus printed and virtual support for teachers.
The top-selling companies offer materials from lab gear like test tubes to DVDs that walk teachers through lessons to consultants who field concerns online and over the phone. Sometimes those consultants will travel to a district to do training sessions.
Most schools restock, on their own, items that need continual replenishing, from cotton balls and plastic straws to live critters like crayfish and mealworms.
Some districts, including Madison, have elaborate resource centers with full-time staff who maintain the kits and get them to and from teachers.
In an approach based in Green Bay that has spread down the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 40 Wisconsin districts (though not Madison) belong to a consortium called the Einstein Project, a nonprofit group that buys the kits from publishers, leases them for a nominal fee to schools and arranges teacher training on their use.
Hailed as a national model by the National Science Teachers Association, the Einstein Project began on a shoestring and now has 10 employees, two kit warehouses and a $1 million annual budget supported by the rental fees, year-round fundraising and private and corporate backing.
But critics of the hands-on movement charge that without textbooks and the structured reading, teacher-driven learning and broad memorization of facts that traditionally define classroom science, kids are being short-changed on core knowledge.
A major fight over science curriculum in California got national attention in 2004, as the state weighed a proposal to allow no more than 25 percent of science classroom time for hands-on activities. But in an abrupt reversal after intense debate, the adopted standard reads that at least 25 percent of science classroom time has to be hands-on.
Stanley Metzenberg, an assistant biology professor from California State University-Northridge, said in congressional testimony that reading is critical for scientists and that children are best served through traditional textbooks and teacher-directed instruction.
In a March 2000 issue of School Reform News, Metzenberg offered similar sentiments.
"Reading for understanding is the core process skill of science, and there is no substitute for practice at an early age," he said. "A student who has not developed the skill of learning through reading has no professional future in science."
A widely cited view published in 2004 in the journal Psychological Science further challenged the notion that children in hands-on classrooms have a better grasp of scientific processes like forming and testing hypotheses. In fact, a team of researchers concluded, both types of classrooms produce kids fully capable of such procedural tasks.
But proponents of hands-on science insist that kids are more engaged and excited about science and are more likely to see it as a college and career route. And that, really, is what the movement is all about -- getting more U.S. kids into science fields.
Lisa Albrecht, supervisor of assessment, research and accountability in Sun Prairie schools, where the National Science Foundation-backed Full Option Science System (FOSS) curriculum is in its first year of use, said an initial pilot showed "kids loved it. They went from not really caring about science to being truly disappointed that there was not science that day."
Delta Education, the New Hampshire-based publisher of FOSS, one of the nation's most popular hands-on curriculums, concedes that textbooks expose children to a greater breadth of facts, but backers say that isn't a problem.
"With FOSS there are fewer topics, but they focus on essential topics," said Tally Kruger, a science teacher at Madison's Sennett Middle School, where FOSS has been in use for nearly a decade. "FOSS focuses less on having kids absorb facts, and instead makes them think like scientists, making predictions, observing things, coming up with new questions."
Kathy Blomker, a senior lecturer in science education at the UW-Madison School of Education, said today's hands-on science kits like those produced by FOSS have come a long way since they haltingly emerged three decades ago.
The "kitchen science" kits she remembers testing in the early 1970s let kids dabble, but offered teachers virtually no guidance on the bigger scientific ideas that children were supposed to learn. "We were playing around in science; we never got the content," Blomker said.
Today "students are held accountable," Albrecht said. "There are expectations that they know certain content ... and that they know how to organize data and how to interpret it. To me that far exceeds a textbook."
Proponents say the order of modern hands-on lessons -- experiments first, followed by reflection and reading, gets to the meat of the learning after a child's interest has been piqued, contrary to textbook learning where occasional experiments may come only after listening -- and perhaps tuning out -- a teacher's lecturing.
"I think we really are tapping into kids' natural curiosity. We hook them quicker by starting with the cool stuff and then rolling into the content and background," said George Mavroulis, assistant superintendent for educational services with the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, where FOSS has been used exclusively since 2004.
Proponents also say special needs children and those who speak English as a second language, who tend to struggle with textbooks, do better hands-on. "It evens the playing field for everyone," said Kruger.
And there is evidence that test scores rise among schools that embrace a hands-on approach. Recent research at UW-Green Bay showed fourth-graders in the Einstein Project consistently outscored their peers across the state on the science portion of the statewide Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam. Delta Education and Carolina Biological Supply Co., which produces the nation's other most widely used hands-on curriculum, Science, Technology and Children (STC), both cite numerous studies on their Web sites on their benefit to test scores.
Vocal critics of hands-on science are hard to come by in Wisconsin, but it is still far from universally accepted here.
FOSS and STC, both developed with support from the National Science Foundation, are used in only about one-quarter of Wisconsin public school districts. In Dane County, only a half-dozen districts use either of the two curriculums.
No one officially tracks what the other three-quarters of state public schools are offering. State science educators say anecdotally that some may use lesser-known hands-on curricula, while others may still use textbooks and occasionally weave in their own experiments.
Potential reasons abound for the gap between educators' enthusiasm and actual practice.
Brian Bartel, a chemistry teacher at Appleton West High School and president of the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers, said belt-tightening may be leading districts to delay new text purchases. It's typically at textbook replacement time that hands-on science kits, comparable in cost to textbooks, are introduced, Bartel said.
Dan James, a spokesperson for Carolina Biological, said in some districts across the nation, parents who want to see their children bringing home a textbook have put up a fight. James said he knows of "a couple of school districts where they bought a textbook and they also use something like STC, just so parents have their book."
And teachers themselves may not be pushing for the shift.
For reasons that may extend back to their own bad or nonexistent memories of elementary science, Bartel and the UW's Blomker said science is often an elementary teacher's weakest subject.
So when they're asked to rise to the next level -- from guiding textbook readings and having kids answer end-of chapter questions to facilitating an exploratory process where "kids are discovering things on their own, and they might be discovering things that a teacher doesn't have a direct answer for" -- teachers can feel hugely ill-prepared, Bartel said. "It can take a teacher out of their comfort zone."
Incentives to work differently are few.
Intense pressure on elementary teachers to prepare kids for standardized tests and to meet federal No Child Left Behind requirements, both of which emphasize math and reading over science at the elementary level, can relegate science teaching to the back burner.
While standardized tests measure factual knowledge, they don't measure elementary students' grasp of scientific processes. So scientific labs are often a low priority, Blomker said.
She added that the time needed to do a hands-on lab -- which takes about twice as long as reading a text chapter and having kids answer accompanying questions -- might not fit into the already crammed elementary day. "To do a 90-minute lesson that used to take 45 minutes is very hard for teachers to justify," Blomker said.
But those who have made the transition say they're glad. "The more we teach FOSS the harder it is to go back to textbook science," said Sennett's Kruger.
Stoughton is wrapping up its first "exhausting" year of FOSS use, Barberino said. She expects it to get easier. "With support and training, we're getting better. Next year we'll be more comfortable."
Michelle Stocker/The Capital Times
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Sennett Middle School sixth-grader Steven Karis works with a hands-on science kit that is part of the National Science Foundation-backed Full Option Science System.
