Yale astrophysicist’s Washington Post commentary urges science-education reform

In a Washington Post 5 February Sunday commentary headlined “Want more scientists? Turn grade schools into laboratories,” Yale astrophysicist Priya Natarajan called for reorienting science education to let students find out for themselves, in creative ways, that science and math are “tools we use to understand our world.” Her urging echoes a pair of recent commentaries in Science by Bruce Alberts, that magazine’s editor-in-chief.

In “Trivializing science education,” Alberts observed, “Those of us who are passionate about science have thus far failed to get real science taught in most of our schools.” He asked, “Is it time to regroup with a different strategy?” He lamented that “the joy of discovery” may have been eliminated by rote memorization. “Tragically,” he wrote, “we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education. As a result, for far too many, science seems a game of recalling boring, incomprehensible facts.”

A week later, in “Teaching real science,” Alberts announced Science‘s introduction of the “first of 15 winning entries for the 2011 Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction.” He reported, “Our goal is to make it much easier for teachers everywhere to provide their students with laboratory experiences that mirror the open-ended explorations of scientists, instead of the traditional ‘cookbook’ labs where students follow instructions to a predetermined result.” He expressed “hope that these contests will help support a rethinking of science education.”

At Yale, Natarajan conducts research in cosmology, gravitational lensing, and black hole physics. She also currently holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship of the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She chairs Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, serves on the advisory board of NOVA scienceNow, and recently earned a master’s degree from MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

In her Post piece, she focuses on how to build a lifelong interest in science. She declares that “America’s universities are not graduating nearly enough scientists, engineers and other skilled professionals to keep our country globally competitive in the decades ahead” and that if “we want more Americans to pursue careers in STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] professions, we have to intervene much earlier than we imagined.” She charges that “U.S. schools’ approach to math and science lacks, in large part, a creative element,” and she advocates “self-guided or collaborative research projects—something the Internet has made much more feasible.”

“Without firsthand experience of the scientific method and its eventual payoff,” she says at the end, “students will continue to flock to other majors when their science and math courses become too demanding. If we want more scientists and engineers later, we need to teach children about the joys of hard work and discovery now.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.