Photograph by Matthew O'Shea

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Big Science

By Stefene Russell

Dr. Robert Taylor, former superintendent of the Festus School District, is now regional representative for the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. He cites several districts that are outstanding in the field of science education, including Rockwood, Clayton, Parkway, St. Charles, Festus and Crystal City. (“I’m not superintendent of that district anymore, so I can say that!” he adds, grinning.)

The most successful programs, he says, provide (big surprise) hands-on experience rather than lectures, forcing kids to problem-solve rather than just memorize. In the process, kids realize that science is relevant to their own lives. Schools using this approach have raised standardized testing scores across the board, even among students who have no natural interest in—or even an instinctive aversion to—the sciences.

Clayton High School’s “Physics First” program, developed in the early ’60s, was one of the pioneering programs. It’s a simple idea but still rare nationwide: Entering freshmen start with physics, not biology. “The whole idea behind this was that physics is the science that underlies and is the foundation for all the rest of science,” says Clayton physics teacher Rex Rice. “Starting with physics makes so much sense. The models we can build in introductory physics are a whole lot easier to see because you can build them around things you can directly observe. Then in the later part of the year, we build scientific models around things that you can’t directly see, that you have to infer from some kind of experimental evidence.” Science-department chair Mike Howe, who teaches chemistry, says that when these kids arrive in his classroom as sophomores, he continues to encourage them to think scientifically. For instance, during labs, he’ll ask them to measure temperature changes and graph them—even if the work isn’t relevant to the lesson at hand. “All of a sudden, those equations become relevant—the graph is something that represents an event that actually took place,” Howe says. “It’s not some kind of abstract writing on a piece of paper. It has meaning.”

Project Lead the Way, a hands-on science curriculum that’s being used in 1,000 high schools across the country, was adopted by the Rockwood School District in 2004. Steve Ayotte, coordinator of practical arts for the district, says it’s basically a pre-engineering program (next year’s seniors will intern at Ameren and Boeing), but it has boosted science and math achievement across the board by demonstrating to kids that science is relevant to their lives, not just a bunch of abstractions in a textbook. For instance, in a unit on DNA, kids might role-play as detectives collecting forensic evidence from a crime scene.

“Students say, ‘Wow, now I understand why they keep telling me these physics concepts are important,’” Ayotte says. “The kids in this program achieve at an alarming rate. And it’s not just for the upper-level kids; it’s also for middle-level and some lower-level kids, who just want to learn in a different way.”