Teaching scientific inquiry
DURING the question-and-answer period, after the speech of Education Secretary Jesli Lapus on cyber education to the first plenary session of the National Academy of Science and Technology (NSAT) on July 11, a young woman from UP’s Open University asked: “How is science inquiry to be taught by television?” These are not her exact words but I think I captured her thought accurately enough.Secretary Lapus was not prepared to answer such a pointed question. He took the easy way out. He quoted himself. Cyber education will widen access and close the gap between excellent, middling and bad schools by giving all students the same lectures by the most qualified teachers through satellite-beamed science lessons.
This answer is way off the mark. The young lady had the bell curve in mind while Secretary Lapus was thinking of squashing it flat.
I’ll allow that a Cabinet official whose experience and training are in private business and Congressional politics, cannot be expected to answer such a question, but I do hope that he will not forget it when he continues to flog to an increasingly skeptical public the wonders of Chinese educational technology.
Teaching scientific inquiry is “at the heart of science and science learning,” to quote the US National Science Education Standards.
The purpose is to replicate in the classroom the practices of scientists in research laboratories. In this way, science becomes more interesting—but also more demanding—if students become understudies or apprentices of professional scientists.
This is not easy to put in train; it requires institutional coordination, financing, and a curriculum that permits direct exposure to scientific practice.
Few science teachers know how scientists work. Classroom science moreover cannot be made to simulate what takes place in research laboratories.
What’s great about teaching scientific inquiry is that it’s not a dumbing down of science. Individuals can shine; there is healthy intellectual competition among peers.
However, students in grade or high school do not yet know enough science to be able to identify science problems and the arguments that will lead to their “solutions.”
How then can science inquiry be taught in a classroom?
I’ll take off from the keynote address of Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, SJ, who’s also the president of the Ateneo de Manila University.
I was impressed by what Ateneo has down for the schools in Payatas. The key interventions were ownership by the community of the schools and detailed teachers guides in science and math. Nothing was changed—not even class size. But the performance of the Payatas schools in standardized tests was astounding. Their charges increased their scores by at least 20 percentage points.
The ground is ready to introduce the teaching of science inquiry in Payatas. Ateneo can second to these schools a physics or chemistry teacher and a math tutor to teach measurement.
The project that the Payatas kids will be interested to work on is methane. As a former dumpsite, Payatas is literally oozing with methane. CH4 is a colorless, odorless, flammable gas that is the main constituent of natural gas. It’s the simplest of the alkanes and is used as a fuel and as a source of other chemicals.
Schoolchildren in grade 6 and high school can be grouped into teams to handle the different components of the project.
The chemistry of gases could be taught by following John Dalton’s simple experiment: a lighted candle is allowed to burn for a minute before it is covered with a large glass. Within seconds the flame is extinguished. Combustion is a chemical reaction that depends on oxygen. The byproduct of this reaction is carbon dioxide, the gas that replaced the oxygen to mix with all the other gases in the atmosphere.
Even the experiments of James Joule were carried out with simple equipment. To discover the mechanical equivalent of heat, Joule used a hollow copper cylinder that was immersed in an insulated jar of water. Once he had established that the temperature of the water and the cylinder was the same, he pumped air into the cylinder until the pressure reached 22 atmospheres. Using Robert Boyle’s theory of gases, Joule was able to calculate the mechanical work required to reach that point.
Great science need not depend on expensive equipment.
Small-scale experiments on the composition of methane, its energy content, including ideas on how to liquefy it are good starting points.
The kids will have to be required to record their observation and their experiments—the key skills in real science.
But the records must be in a form that could be passed on to other groups and even to succeeding classes because these studies will last for several years.
It’s inevitable that they will be find themselves needing the math to do the measurements, gather numerical data, and formulate hypotheses. Their introduction to the real number system, the complex number system, and even to differential calculus will be based on a felt need rather than on a requirement imposed by a teacher.
Competition between teams and individuals within the teams should be fostered by the teachers who should function as referees rather than as sources of knowledge or information. The children themselves will essentially be teaching themselves. The teacher can then gauge the aptitude of each student for science or technology.
Those who have a bent for technology can design a system of pipes so that the methane may be used for cooking in their homes. If someone could donate a used engine they can even experiment on methane as a fuel.
From physics and chemistry, it’s a small step to biology. Methane is produced by anaerobic microbes. It is also emitted by trees, plants, and cows. The biggest producer of methane are rice fields.
Before the kids leave school, the role of methane in global warming can be discussed, not in terms of slogans, but on the science that underlies climate change.
This, Secretary Lapus, is how science inquiry is taught. Can your cyber education do all this?
