Public Lecture: Asking the Wrong Questions About Science Education

Public Lecture: Asking the Wrong Questions About Science Education



David Micklos, founder and executive director of CSHL’s DNA Learning Center, shares insight on the state of science education in America, and how it compares to the rest of the world.

A CSHL Public Lecture – March 24, 2016

For a schedule of upcoming lectures visit: http://bit.ly/1qsDEbW

Welcome to you all and to some of my colleagues from the Learning Center well you know people often ask me and I often see things in the news that asked questions about what’s wrong with American science education and here’s a few headlines that say that such as US teams trail their peers around the world why can’t us students compete with the rest of the world and so on you may have had questions about science education too but I’d like to get you to turn those questions around tonight and see that will turn them on their heads before I get going any further I really want to thank Lindsay Barone who really helped me put this talk together and did a huge amount of the work if you ask U.S. adults and scientists in the American Association of Science you know how they feel the U.S. ranks in scientific achievements then about half of the public says we’re the best in the world in scientific achievements and ninety-two percent of the scientist so they feel pretty good about themselves but Americans feel pretty good about American science too more as I said more than half think were the best in the world and about more than a half also feel that we’re the best in medical treatment and among the AAAS scientists sixty-four percent so the point of it is is we feel pretty good as Americans and as people of science about the kind of work we do in science but if you ask that same question about how Americans feel about K through 12 science, technology, engineering and math education so called STEM they don’t feel so good only twenty-nine percent of Americans think we’re number one in the world in science and technology education and only sixteen percent of the scientist so clearly there’s a perception that we’re doing something wrong both in the media and among the public and even among scientists well so the question is how do we know know that we’re not doing so well in science education what kind of things would we measure to answer that question and who do we talk about when we do these sorts of studies and that’s what I want to spend the first part of the talk with you about we’re going to at least mention three studies two of them are by the trends in international mathematics and science study and their studies that are done at the fourth and the eighth grade levels you know there’s various things and it tells you some of the kinds of questions the number of questions they ask about life science, physical science, earth science about the types of questions they ask students it’s it’s a test that’s meant to see how what students know about science and a little bit about science thinking what you’ll notice is that not all the kids in the United States take it but just from these eight or ten states here and then around the world a total of about 4,000 students participate but from these countries around the world it’s been done for a while most people think it’s a pretty good study but the thing I want you to know is that that whole idea that we’re not doing well in science education as far as i can tell comes from this test and for the next test I’m going to show you there’s really no other ways that we compare kids in science around the world so that you know this is it and so here’s the ranking of all the countries who did the fourth grade tests and the eighth grade tests you can’t really read it but what you need to know is that in the fourth grade the United States ranked seven out of 50 countries really not so bad and in the eighth grade we drop a little bit to 10th out of 42 countries so you could say the 25th percentile roughly so that’s the way we stack up and these tests have been done for a number of years but that’s the way we stack up in the fourth in the eighth grade really not not badly now there’s another ho assessment that is done for 15 year old kids which would be high school about middle high school kids it also has about 4,000 kids per country again not all of the US is represented just three states and then all of these countries around the world and in this study the so-called PISA study because the program for international student assessment again it’s this list of countries and here’s what seems to really bother people a lot which is were 28 out of 65 countries in that ranking so if you take those three tests together at the fourth the eighth and the edit age 15 we go from position number 7 to number 10 to 28 so as far as I can tell those are three data points that people use to say that we’re not doing very well in science education I think most people focus on this 15 year old data the data set from 15 year old students well I’d like to us to think of it about these tests tests are never perfect and especially international ones or standardized sorts of tests always have problems so I’d like to just go through them a little bit and deconvolute the store scores a little bit and tell you why first off those scores don’t necessarily bother me a lot but then we’ll go on and turn them on their heads so again here’s a summary of the U.S. positions on the three tests fourth grade, eighth grade and at age 15 and here’s two of the top scoring country’s Singapore which you can see ranks in the one two or three positioned on all three of these tests and the highest ranking of the European countries with is which is Finland which also scores very highly so we’re going to in the next few minutes compared the United States versus these two countries now you can say why might that not be comparing apples to apples in these countries and one thing that might come to mind is the size of these countries so this is Singapore and it’s about the size it’s a fourth the size of Rhode Island it’s about eight miles by twenty miles it’s about half the size of Long Island or actually about a fifth the size of Long Island it’s pretty small this is Finland I never knew how big it is but it’s pretty much the size of Montana so those number of U.S. states are being compared against these rather small countries now let’s also look at the gross domestic product per capita in other words basically how much money has made per person in the country I don’t know if you knew it but Singapore ranks very high in the world and ranks well ahead of the United States overall Singapore also ranks ahead in the per capita gross domestic product of all of the states in blue that are included in these three three studies that I showed you and you can see that Finland you know ranks down there about the same as Florida or Alabama so there you might see something about Singapore which is they’ve got a lot of money to spend a lot of different things now if you look at the per-pupil spending Finland as a percentage of the gross domestic product all the work of the country Finland comes out ahead with the highest percentage of spending per pupil the U.S. is in the middle and Singapore is the lowest but remember Singapore’s got a very high gross domestic product and if you sort of adjust for it then in fact the spending per pupil in real dollars is actually more than the United States so the point I want to give you here is that these countries spend more per pupil of their gross domestic domestic product on education than the US which might be surprising to you now let’s take a look at the makeup of these countries this is the ethnic makeup of Finland all the states involved in the study and where’s Singapore their and these denote the blue is the minority ethnic group and then smaller sub populations are here or ethnic minorities and if you look at this what you’ll see is that Finland has a really homogeneous society as you’ll know if you’ve ever been anywhere in Scandinavia very low percentage of ethnic minorities Singapore it has about twenty-five percent ethnic minorities which are mainly Indian and Malay and you’ll see that the US as a whole has about thirty-seven percent ethnic minorities and then you can look at the different states that are in the Tims and the PISA study so the point I want to make here is that the U.S. population is way more heterogeneous way more diverse than either of the other two populations in the Tim study what difference does that make let’s just take a quick look at that in Singapore it’s known that the male a population is behind in academic achievement behind the other two population groups which are ethnic Chinese and Indian Finland doesn’t have much in the way of ethnic groups but the one that is lagging behind the other of the Roma gypsies and in the United States there’s an achievement gap in school and also in science between whites and Asians and black Hispanics and Native Americans and this shows up in in the scores of the PISA study that one that’s taken at the age of 15 these are the U.S. numbers for 2012 and what you’ll see is that the average score for whites and Asians are above 500 or more and the scores for blacks and Hispanics are in the 400s so the point of it is is that our scores in the United States are skewed by these relatively large numbers of ethnic minorities who we know struggle in science and it’s a it’s a nationwide problem that many people are trying to work on and so here we can then put that in to perspective it’s a tenth of a percent of this known struggling minority in Finland that is affecting their scores there’s about thirteen percent of the Malay minority that depresses the scores in Singapore and in the US the two biggest groups are Hispanics and blacks who we know lag behind in science achievement so let’s take a look at another thing that the scores say or don’t say and that’s the context the educational context that these tests take place within its really pretty interesting and what’s the philosophy of testing in these countries first off these are the number of school districts in each of the states that participate in the Tims and the PISA studies and you’ll see that there’s a lot of individual school districts within California and the other states it’s well over 2,000 in Finland there’s three hundred and seventeen states or actually their education authorities and in Singapore there’s one now what that’s telling you is in a place like Singapore or or Finland there’s less local control and more control by the central government especially in Singapore and you could imagine that eccentric lot centralized education authority would be a lot better at doing things like standardized tests and preparing kids for tests than in a very disparate sort of school systems like we have here in all of the United States that participate in the studies now if you want to take a look at what the Singapore school system looks like and I spent quite a lot of time in Singapore some years ago so I saw this firsthand I don’t expect you to memorize this chart but here’s the kids in primary school at the end of the sixth grade there’s an extremely high stakes test and that’s going to set your course for a lot of your life if you’re really school smart you’re actually put in this group called the Express and what that means is you’re slated to go to university from the sixth grade on and you’ve got a pretty clear path as long as you don’t mess up now if you’re not one of the Express students you’re going to work away through this system first off this sixth grade test is going to determine which of these sub tracks you’re put on and my understanding from people I met and talked to in Singapore over a number of years is that once you get on one of these tracks it’s pretty difficult to change horses in the middle of the stream so to speak you wind your way through these tracks and then there’s another big test here at the end of 10th grade which is then going to determine finally whether you go into some kind of vocational job a sort of a vocational technical education or a four or if you make it back up here with the express people to the full on academic preparation those are extremely high stakes tests and they’re there for one reason it’s like when in the sorting hat it’s going to determine which house you go to live in and it’s going to sort out your life pretty much for the rest of your life so these tests are literally for sorting kids onto academic and vocational tracks and I think they’re going to come in here here’s when the first Tims test takes place I guess they’re probably pretty happy there but these other two tests take just after this really difficult test to determine secondary education and just before this test that’s going to determine your adult life for good so these kids are very good at taking tests they know the stakes of tests and it’s ingrained in their society and and administered by one Ministry of Education and remember Singapore is basically the size and the population of Chicago if the Rhode Island didn’t hit you now Finland is really a lot more like us which is they have compulsory education up through high school and then there’s a leaving exam a national leaving exam at the end of the 12th grade and then that’s going to help determine where your college placement it’s pretty much like an SAT but it’s administered by the government so I would say they’re more on the order of our kind of education system than not like Singapore and what’s our education system like well we had this thing called No Child Left Behind which was not refunded by Congress in the last session which was loved by some people but hated by a lot of people educators called it No Child Left untested but the purpose of No Child Left Behind and the thing that has now succeeded it which is every student succeeds which I didn’t even know I confess are not for sorting kids like in Singapore they’re meant to diagnose the school system and the teachers and to make improvements especially in struggling school districts now yes they do give you some idea of how your kids doing versus other kids but there’s no stakes for the kids it doesn’t really determine anything in most school districts about what kind of classes you take or where you would be mandatorily placed they’re still freedom for the students to move around pretty much in spite of whatever score they might get on the kinds of tests they take and no child left behind our tests also focus mainly on English and Math which is which are thought to be the subjects for general literacy and general helping you move ahead in the school system so what I want to say here is if you compare yourself especially to Singapore these school systems and the purpose of testing in those systems are diametrically opposed one is to sort kids out into academic and vocational screens streams and the other is basically to diagnose the school system and the teachers and to see where they can do better in helping student achievement and of course we have plenty of places in the U.S. that just opted out of all of this because they feel their school districts are doing fine without having the federal government meddle in their local control of the school district that happened quite here quite a lot here on Long Island and also in Connecticut okay well here’s my beginning to ask you a bunch of a bunch of other questions okay we’ve dealt with what’s wrong with American science education hopefully you see why I’m have some questions about that but here’s the first of the questions that put this totally on its end which is if our school system is so bad why does everybody want to come here for college and if you think I’m kidding here you go these are doctorates in the United States in 1984 1994 2004 and 2014 and the blue here are US citizens and the yellow parts here are people who are here on visas or some kind of permit and this is all Ph.D.s and the second bar is science Ph.D.s so take a look at either one but let’s look at science you’ll see that 30 years ago about twenty four percent of the science doctorates were to foreigners and now that number is thirty-eight percent for all around Ph.D.s it hasn’t gone up quite it’s gone up a bit too from sixteen percent to twenty-nine percent but the point of it is people like to come here for University and the people who like to come here the most are actually from some of the countries that do the best on the Tims and the PISA studies those international science assessments so what you’ll see overwhelmingly over the last ten years people getting doctorates in the US the foreign citizenship they’re overwhelmingly from China and another top country is Taiwan and I’ll have you note that in the PISA study the city of Shanghai rated number one so some of those students are some of these students next year so I don’t know what that means but it means there’s something about the U.S. education system somewhere that people like now maybe they wouldn’t come here for high school but in fact there’s a big movement among Chinese students to go to school districts in California especially but people like to come here for a college education okay let’s shift away from the testing now I’ve showed you these data that show that the US doesn’t do so well in achievement science achievement at the pre-college level and the question is does that really matter does that really say anything about how we’re doing in science remember the first slide I showed you is that everybody really feels pretty good about what we’re doing in science and medicine but do the scores on these international assessments have anything to do with that and the answer is I don’t think so here’s Nobel prizes over the last hundred and fifteen years and what you’ll see is in medicine chemistry and physics about half of all the Nobel prizes awarded in that period of time went to people who were affiliated with U.S. institutions so half of all the Nobel prizes how about patents these are patents awarded all the blue ones are from the US and all the Bruins are foreign ones and here in 2014 that number is a little less than fifty percent so about half of all the Nobel prizes awarded two people working in U.S. institutions about half of the patents to U.S. nationals how about citations in some of the major scientific journals in the world and those of you from science know that these are very important general science journals here medical journals here and another general science and what you’ll see is the U.S. authors who published in these journals range from about thirty percent oh sorry from sixteen percent to forty-eight percent depending on the journal if you look at the citations in other words how many times a paper is cited or mentioned by another person and then you map them on sort of a web so if you imagine a telephone web or web of all the people who are interacting with you on Facebook and some people have a lot of connections and some people don’t have any well this is sort of a connection map of citations of scientific articles around the world with the country sized according to a citations at what you’ll see is the citations in the U.S. are about equal to all of the citations of Europe and about twice the citations of Asia so it doesn’t appear that however we perform on these international assessments at pre-college science education they don’t seem to be affecting us much in our performance of science at least by those several ways I showed you so let’s now shift to the end of the talk and let’s talk about what’s right about science education well it’s local and it’s phenomenological and let me tell you what I mean by that there’s 13,000 school authorities in the United States and Long Island is a great example of local control because here on Long Island virtually every school district in Nassau and Suffolk County is about one or maybe two high schools several middle or junior high schools and several elementary schools and you control them now yes the New York State we have a New York State curriculum yes there’s certain things that come from No Child Left Behind from the federal government but your local school boards have the authority to set curriculum in each one of those districts and that’s the case to some greater or lesser extent and mostly greater in all of these 13,000 school districts in the United States now some people would say that local control and the lack of central authority means that we do things over and over again and quote recreate the wheel but I’m actually of the mind that that’s probably one of the things that’s special about American education which is every school district has the ability to innovate or not move ahead or not and the best school districts of the United States in fact innovate and move ahead and of course some suffer because they can and some of that of course is monetary so I think this is actually a good thing the local control of school systems and the local control also of course of the university system how about a local example Syosset High School it’s a modest-sized school district by most means it’s sort of even modest by Long Island size about 2,000 students high number of kids attending college and the thing I want you to realize is that they have about 25 different courses that are offered at Syosset High School that you could take and you’re free to take virtually any of them so long as you meet some minimum other requirements of the Regents curriculum and if you actually look at a chart of the things you don’t need to look at this very much these are a couple different tracks in that kids can take but what I want you to see here is that as a student progresses from eighth grade through 12th grade their choices in science increase so in other words as a kid goes through science they have some basic things that they have to take and then you know for those kids interested in a science there’s an awful lot of things available I can tell you at my high school ward Melville it’s probably twice the number of science courses but this is 25 just in a relatively small school school district like Syosset well compare that with the same sort of chart from Singapore and I actually wrote to some of my friends in Singapore and got their charts these are real ones and what’s interesting is that at the 7th and 8th grade they have a little bit of choice and that choice actually gives less and less as they go through the school system and if you compare these you see these kids being increasingly channeled with very little choice as they get more and more mature and here in the United States you have kids as they become more mature having more choices I think that actually is telling you something about the philosophy of the school systems now what does this all mean because remember the only way that I ever was able to compare the students that we see here on Long Island and international students were these three tests that I started out talking to you about but I actually had a way to test some kids in a more direct way and we’ve been doing that now for two years it’s not a lot of kids and as you know you know low numbers sometimes can be misleading but we’ve had students coming to the DNA Learning Center from Beijing 166 high school I should have had some photos in here for you but it’s a high school in central Beijing it’s in the old part of Beijing it’s about a half a mile from the Forbidden City about a half a mile from Tiananmen Square most of the students that go there their parents are public servants doing something in the Chinese national government or in the Beijing city government so it’s quite a good school and it was designated as a special school of biology now I wouldn’t want to say that it’s anywhere near as say Stuyvesant High School in New York City or the Bronx High School of Science or Brooklyn Technical High School in New York I don’t think it’s in that league but it’s trying to be the designated biology high school in Beijing which is a city of you know you tell me 15 million people or so well the students who come here when they come here we give them a general test of literacy items about genetics because that’s what we’re interested in we didn’t make up these questions so in other words these questions are not biased by things that I might think are important or what we have the learning center we took them from a set of validated questions developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the questions that are used by quite a lot of people who might be interested in looking at genetic literacy like I could give the test to you and it’d be a pretty good one the tests are in Chinese so there’s not a language issue as far as we know and those kids from Beijing 166 very good urban up-to-date cosmopolitan school when we give them this test their average score on this test is fifty-five percent don’t worry about 55 don’t think of it like a failing grade but just it’s just a percent they get fifty five percent of the questions right and they’re high school kids and they’re coming to take one of the DNA Learning Center’s courses the Long Island kids coming to take that same course score twenty five percentage points higher on those tests and this has held up over several years because I wasn’t sure if this effect when I first saw it I actually couldn’t believe it but it’s held up over a number of years and this is actually pooled data so what does this say to me it says to me that’s great all of the standardized test testing that’s done in Asia in different parts of the world but at least in our corner of the world which is genetics these kids from very good high school in Beijing are not as well prepared as the kids here on Long Island now the reasons why they’re not as well prepared in genetics some of them have to do with the fact that kids here on Long Island could come to the DNA Learning Center before this time but a lot of it has to do with that ability of those kids to progressively choose more and more science courses as they can at syosset and also of having more opportunities of visiting science science oriented museums, science centers and show is about science on TV so it’s a whole syndrome of things available to those kids on Long Island that we’re comparing that makes their science world really much more rich than for those students in Beijing and it shows up here but it doesn’t show up on the Tim’s or the PISA studies well the last thing I want to talk about is my idea that am not my idea but the idea that education is phenomenological meaning that the real education occurs at the point and that interaction between a student and the teacher but also phenomenological meaning that in a system of local control the local school board and the local people can say these things are relatively more important to us in shaping the experience of students than these things that you might say to us from Washington D.C. or Beijing phenomenology focuses on an individual’s first-hand experiences rather than the abstract experience of others and I’ve got to tell you all of the standardized tests they deal entirely with abstract experience now about 15 years ago there was an educator by the name of Howard Gardner who came up with the idea of multiple intelligences which basically he said that people have eight different ways of learning some of them are kinesthetic like when you touch things and moves things around some of them are logical some of them are linguistic and there’s a whole list of eight different what he called intelligences and his point was this if we all had exactly the same kind of mind and there was only one kind of intelligence then we could teach everybody the same thing in the same way and assess them in the same way and that would be fair but once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds different strengths some people are good at thinking spatially some in thinking language others are very logical other people need to be hands-on and explore actively and try things out then education which treats everybody the same way is actually the most unfair education because it picks out one kind of mind which I call the professor mind somebody who is very linguistic and logical and says if you think like that great if you don’t think like that there’s no room to train you standardized test only tap the professor mind absolutely in a hundred percent maybe a little bit of the linguistic mind so if you have a country that strives to do very very very very well on standardized tests and Singapore is one you can’t possibly do right by all of the rest of the intelligences and however scattered and however repetitive or redundant the school systems are in the United States at least many of them are striving to help kids learn in those other ways that’s not to say that in Singapore the you know they don’t do that at all but I’m just saying the heavy bent on these high-stakes tests for funneling and tracking kids where they go in education are mainly tapping into one kind of mind and they produce students and I know a lot of Singaporean students very capable students and a very large number of very capable students but the Singaporeans will tell you themselves that that kind of education blunts the highly creative people that are sort of at out of the middle and this is the reports that you also get in science of Singaporean and some Asian students which is and even some European students at that kind of regimented education it is not that good for create for creativity so the final passage I want to explore with you is okay well based upon what people who are interested in science education in the United States what are they thinking about these days let me just tell you a little bit in the last 10 years there’s been these five studies they’re pretty much like most studies which is to get a big or a small group of people in a room there’s supposed to be experts and they thrash around what’s important and what’s not important and then they come up with some kind of a consensus in these documents these documents all say the same thing, you don’t need to read them I’ll tell you what they all say which is how do you reform science education these happen to focus on undergraduate education because remember even though everybody wants to come to our undergraduate universities they actually probably do a worse job at science education than the pre-college element which seems to be so bad that’s what I’m here to tell you because that professorial sort of learning is even more entrenched in the collegian system than it is in the pre-college system in other words there’s more focus on that sort of one type of intelligence in the university in some cases than at you then at the pre-college level so what do all these documents say you should try to get kids to think conceptually at a higher level and to think about how science really works the practice of science rather than memory of memorizing stuff like facts and terms now everybody knows that but but that’s key if you have to actually believe that you can’t just say that stuff and then give people a lot of standardized tests it’s antithetical you need to adopt ways that kids can ask questions inquire and work from themselves outward like I said in that phenomenological way they have to be student-centered and kids especially I have to be able to ask their own questions we find that’s extremely important you can’t ask the questions for the kids you need to help them work between disciplines and biology is a great example of a science that has a lot of different things going on it it has math, it has computers, it has chemistry, and as a little bit of physics and that has biology has a lot of stuff so that’s a good example of interdisciplinary study and you have to work collaboratively the idea that a science scientists goes into some lab by themselves does gray stuff and comes out and then discovers stuff that does happen sometimes but today if you’d read papers in journals there’s long long lists of scientists on one paper sometimes some the list is so long that they can’t even put it at the front of the article they have to put it like as a footnote so people are working collaboratively especially on things that involve computers and big sets of data and so forth research experience that kids can have let them do these science practices try stuff over again it doesn’t work and have to try it again that’s reiteration and they have to discuss their results they have to be like scientists they have to be like when scientists come into this room and argue that hey I did these experiments I think they’re valid and this is what I think they say and you can say to me I tried some similar ones I don’t think you’re interpreting the right that them right so let’s go back and try them again that’s what happens in this room but kids have to learn that as a part of science not to sit there and figure out what answer they give on a standardized test and the sort of holy grail in undergraduate biology education right at this moment is to take these ideas and to develop experiments that you can scale up because traditionally a few kids have been invited into the labs of professors when they were say juniors or seniors I was and you can work on some project and that would be helpful but it tended to be later in your school career like when you were junior and senior and it was only a few kids but now what we’re trying to figure out is how can we scale up a research experience experience maybe not as intense and maybe not as mentored exactly by one professor that one-on-one but how can we scale up something that’s very close to research that could involve a whole class of kids at the same time and that’s called course-based research experiences and it literally is the holy grail every competent striving university in the United States is implementing them and implementing them early because all of the data say you need to get these experiences in for kids when they’re freshmen and sophomores if you don’t capture them then they walk out so one of those studies there this ugly one here was by the president’s councils of advisers in science and technology they call it PCAST and what they said I don’t know exactly why they said this but they said we need a million new workers in science technology engineering and math over the next decade and they said if you can increase the number of kids who stay in a science track in other words they come in as freshmen and say hey I want to be a scientist if you can increase by ten percent the number of kids that actually stay and graduate with a degree in science or technology if you could increase that number by ten percent that would give you 750 thousand kids over ten years in other words 75,000 kids per year that’s called retention when kids actually stay in the field of study that they said they were going to do and that’s about the only thing that you can really measure in undergraduate education so one thing you might get from this talk and I hope you do which is there’s relatively few things that you can really measure very well in education that’s why we take these really poor and uninformative studies between countries because it’s very difficult to measure these things but one thing you can measure is the kid that comes in and says I’m majoring in biology when they’re freshmen and you can see when they get out of the University four or five years later they don’t count them if the kids that you know take some seven years to get a degree but four or five years are they still a biology major or at least till a science major or they switch over to economics or business it’s very easy to measure and here’s what I wanted the last part of this one part is the University of Texas at Austin has one of the oldest course based research programs not very old it’s only about seven or eight years old 800 students per year they’re gearing up to have the possibility that any freshman in all of the University of Texas at Austin could have a research experience with a professor in the first year and what do they find they find that kids who go have that freshman research experience twelve percent greater retention in the sciences than kids who don’t have it and they’re all matched for economics for socio economics for race they’re matched perfectly because this was it was a re-study so what does that say if a kid has a research experience in their freshman or sophomore year you do exactly what this President’s Council asked us to do which is get at least ten percent more retention of kids in science and then imagine if you take that research experience back to the high school you might have another ten percent so that could give you twenty percent more kids interested in science just by having research experiences once in once in high school and once when they’re in college and I’m happy to say that the New York State legislature is on the ball they mandated that every student who graduates from the CUNY to the University of New York or the SUNY system State University of New York every student has to have an experiential science learning element to their graduation as a requirement and they list some of the things that could be service learning activities, internships and the part that I really like undergraduate projects and the very last thing I want to leave you with is just a couple of examples of things that we do at the DNA Learning Center that’s in line with what these consensus studies have said because we’ve been interested in experiential discovery learning kind of learning where kids ask questions whether they’re their own questions or guided by the teacher we’re really we’ve been interested in this for a long time so here’s just a couple of the things we’ve done over the last 20 years I didn’t go back any further than that but so in 1995 we did the first experiment anywhere in the world where kids could get some DNA out of some cheek cells it’s simple and easy and doesn’t hurt and I could look at a bit of their DNA and use that to compare their DNA with people from around world and that’s meaning that means diversity how are we diverse genetically and we’ve been doing that experiment since 1995 and it’s one that’s done you know all around the country and to some extent around the world next we came along and did an experiment in 1997 which was the first experiment anywhere that I’m aware of that allowed students to look at a bit of their own DNA sequence the ATCGs that make up our genetic code and again they look at that bit of sequence it goes into a database and then they can compare their DNA with their friends which is interesting but also compare their DNA with people from around the world including ancient specimens like Ötzi the Iceman who’s replica is at the DNA Learning Center or Neanderthals who are our cousins and we mix it up with a long time ago so that’s fun and just to give you an idea of what you can do if you do something like this and stick with it and you know are fastidious as we try to be over a hundred thousand students have their DNA in our database and this was long before you could do FamilyTreeDNA or 23andMe or the Genographic project we were doing a similar sort of thing for free here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and 1.6 million people have gone on to that website and analyzed their own DNA or somebody else’s DNA then we came along and worked with these little tiny worms called C elegans and this was a set of experiments that are very good for the college level which can let students sort of knock out a gene make it stop working for a while and then try to study what effect that has on the worm and it turns out that this worm, it’s a teeny thing but it has most of the same genes as us so you could for example think about a gene that’s involved in cancer or one that might be involved in a disease that’s in your family say and a student could look that gene up find the similar gene in this worm and knock it out and see what does it do to the worm it may do something it may do nothing so this is the kind of projects that the kids can start with their own question like you know I have chronic fatigue syndrome in my family do we know anything about those genes and if I knock out one of those genes in this worm you know does it look tired well that sounds funny but that’s a pretty good question actually this is a super fun experiment that actually was first done here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the 1930s where they determined whether you can taste some certain bitter things and all of you have probably done this experiment where you take a little piece of paper and you put it in your mouth and some people go oh god it’s so bitter and some people say I can’t taste it will it’s determined by gene that ability to taste that and now we let kids look at that gene determine what their gene looks at like and then predict whether or not they can taste the bitter taste well that’s exactly what you do if you have certain kinds of cancers and they take a look at your genes and say they say well judging by the look of your genes this specific treatment would be best for you and this one would be virtually useless that’s called precision or personalized medicine in this experiment lets kids understand that another thing that we’ve done is to go into cyber infrastructure which means the computer stuff the big computers and the trackways and the internet that allow people to analyze things in biology and we’ve been working on a big hundred million dollar project to do education part of the education for a hundred million dollar project to help scientists and teachers learn computer resources like super fast computers and computers in the clouds and things like that and the last two things that we’ve done which are super fun is DNA barcoding which we started a few years ago which let kids go out into the environment or out into the grocery stores find something that’s alive or once was alive my favorite is bird’s nest use the bird’s nest soup and you can actually buy that bird nest and say is that really a bird nest is that really made by a bird it’s just like some stuff because who would know but you can actually extract the DNA out of that bird nest and show that there’s DNA in that bird nest that comes from the proper swift in Asia that makes that nest and build it with its saliva and in making it deposit some of its DNA there but you can also go out into Cold Spring Harbor as we’re doing and survey all the small organisms that might be difficult for you to figure out what they are but by the DNA barcode you can tell pretty easily what they are are they the same species that there were there a hundred years ago when Charles Davenport first came here and had people study in the environment well the answers we’re finding out that some of those things are gone and some of them have been replaced by other organisms and where did most of those organisms come from they came in under the bottom on the bottoms of boats from Europe and other places and the final thing that we’ve just started a couple years ago this is a very ambitious project probably really and truly I think the most ambitious large-scale education project you’ll find anywhere which is a project that helps faculty at smaller colleges and universities have an organism that they’re interested in and then through this project and through the funding that we have we allow them to get a whole set of DNA information on that organism when I say a whole set of DNA information I mean a picture of all of the genes that are working inside of that organism under one condition or another and it’s literally billions and billions tens of billions of DNA letters worth of information that then have to be analyzed using high-performance computers of the sort I mentioned to you before so you can see that i’m not down on U.S. science education I actually think we’re headed in the right kinds of directions I’m happy that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the DNA Learning Center have been involved in that effort to try to move it along and I thought I’d leave you with just something totally different which is another question which is we’ve got this great science education system that’s getting better all the time we’ve got this great research system that does half of the Nobel Prizes, half of citations, half of the patents in the world so how do you keep that going and so the question I wanted to put to you is what do you think it takes to become an independent researcher meaning what do you have to do to get there and the answer is 42 years so the average age of someone who’s getting their first grant that’s called an R01 that’s an independent investigator grant it’s the sign that you’ve made it as a researcher the average age of the granting of those is now 42 years old now imagine a career that you might choose where you’re going to of course go to university you’re of course going to have to do something rather some kind of apprenticeship or graduate school or this or that but imagine going through that until you’re 42 years old to say yeah I’m finally in my career and that’s the reason why that is so is because despite the fact that we love our science and we love our medicine here in the United States and we’re pretty we think we’re pretty good at funding it there’s still not enough money to go around for the best people to do the best work so you have to sort of get in that queue and wait until you’re 42 years of age and as a consequence we’re losing many many American researchers and who are we losing it to those foreigners who come in and would love to go to college here so anyway I don’t know what all of that means but to me it’s an interesting story and I hope you think about some of those questions I also think that when you see questions in the media about science or education that you maybe take some time to look at the answers behind those questions so thank you all for coming and have a great night.

#Public #Lecture #Wrong #Questions #Science #Education

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