Sharon Eversman
Biology
Montana State University-Bozeman
Alan Cromer is a physicist at Northeastern University, involved in physics education (SEED: Science Education through Experiments and Demonstrations), working with elementary and secondary school students, and prisoners who want their GED. As an active teacher of physics, he excoriates a current philosophy of education known as constructivism.
Constructivism, as explained in science teaching methods books for elementary and secondary teachers, encourages teachers to not think of science questions and activities in terms of coming to "right" or "wrong" answers. Students experience laboratory activities, concentrating on the process of arriving at some conclusion, and examining the ways at which they arrived at their conclusion, whether it is correct or not. Teacher feedback focuses, again, not on the correctness or accuracy of a conclusion, but on the steps used to arrive at the conclusion. According to Cromer, constructivism emerges from post-modernism, which questions objectivity of scientific observations and truth of scientific knowledge. One can detect constructivism even in the current National Science Education Standards which promote inquiry methods with open-ended and real problems, reflection, and construction of understanding (so far, so good) but which provide little or no real guidance in accurate scientific principles with which to construct that understanding. Interesting demonstrations are used to illustrate principles, but orderly understanding of theories are not built up from the basics and the demonstrations lead to confusion and misconceptions. For example, density and buoyancy are demonstrated without first building concepts of length and width, area, volume, mass and ratio. In biology, this is like teaching evolution without first acquainting students with the different kinds of plants and animals that inhabit the earth, and basic genetics.
Cromer further characterizes constructivism as being long on thoughts and short on standard scientific background. It starts with complex concepts unknown to students, and students must try to reason out the simpler basics, rather than starting with the simpler basics that build on each other and lead to understanding the complex unknown. He says that most science educators (those who teach teachers) are unfamiliar with basic science and the process of real science research. He accuses constructivists, including many academics in non-science disciplines, of being uneducated about the scientific process, and says that constructivist doctrines arose among those academics most ignorant of science. Cromer implies that the concept of many correct answers to a question perhaps is all right in some disciplines, but for most biological, mathematical and physical sciences, there is frequently only one correct answer to a given question or problem.
Cromer's references to two other publications about classroom teaching and constructivism drove me to those sources. One was a paper in a 1991 issue of Science Teacher by my former undergraduate advisor, Bob Yager, who supports constructivist methods of teaching science. Yager criticizes the current 'behaviorist" model where teachers provide stimuli and reinforcements likely to get certain student responses. Yager states that it is difficult to accept and justify concepts of right and wrong answers: "Constructivist teachers would rather explore how students see the problem and why their paths toward solutions seem promising to them." Yager presents a multi-step process by which solutions are arrived at, but one only hopes the teacher knows enough science, and that awful behaviorist technique, to get students to scientifically accurate conclusions with the experimental techniques used. The second reference, Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, is a reply to critics of science who, according to them, do not understand the rigors of the scientific method. I agree with Gross and Levitt, and with Cromer, that the idea of exploring process with no resolution to right and wrong answers based on theory and correct conceptual procedure is frightening, and that critics of science do not understand the rigid rules of repeatability and the tightly controlled boundaries within which each experiment must be conducted. Hypotheses must be stated within a plausible theoretical background and be statistically or mathematically testable, with results reported objectively and within the boundaries of the conditions of the experiment or observations. Other researchers must be able to duplicate the results.
In addition to criticism of constructivism, Cromer discusses general policies of public education in the U.S. He says, for example, that despite claims to the contrary, a standardized national test does exist that measures certain kinds of academic achievement of students: the GED. The GED is not a test of facts as much as a test of reading, writing, interpretive, and mathematical skills. Cromer maintains that this basic-skills test, normally only given to adults over a certain age, should be given nation-wide to ninth graders. Those that pass it could honorably leave school if they wish with a certificate and enter the workplace without the stigma that drop-outs currently have. Students who pass the test could presumably have a much more rigorous high-school experience. Although a national test is only a remote possibility with the 16,000 independent school districts in the country, this recommendation does make a certain amount of sense.
Since it is fashionable to point out all the shortcomings of public education, Cromer takes his turn also. He compares U.S. education, where many schools do not have enough books to go around, with Greece where all students keep their own textbooks in every subject and build home libraries. Wouldn't it be nice, he suggests, if our school districts used small paperbacks, instead of the monster textbooks that no one likes to carry. Students with no books in their homes then could have them to keep. Textbooks written with funding from the venerable National Science Foundation, he argues, often have incorrect information and are poorly written, introducing terms and concepts out of logical sequence; e.g., chemical compound terms are used before atoms and molecules are mentioned, and antibodies before proteins are defined.
Cromer supports a classroom organization that I experienced and truly liked, but has been discouraged because it is not "democratic"--ability grouping. Students are not tracked college/non-college, for example, but are placed in subject-matter classrooms according to their abilities in that subject. Each class in a grade has the same material, but at a different level. The first level (Level I) concentrates on the basics, working on reading and writing the subject matter and using lots of hands-on relevant activities. [Remember, college professors--we only see the top half of students from public secondary schools.] Level II can cover the basics, go to a slightly higher level, and include more reading and writing. Level III spends little time on the basics which have already been mastered, going on to read major literary works, original science and mathematics papers, study theory and have individual research projects. Level III students presumably are the types who are in Advanced Placement classes now. The beauty of this system, in my experience in a middle school, was that Level I and II students needed repetition that Level III did not need, and we could go deeper into the subject with the higher-level students. We all covered the same material, but at different depths. Pressure against this system comes both from parents, of course, and from educators who, Cromer claims, are not supposed to admit that students have different levels of intelligence, only different "learning styles," an educationally acceptable term.
Cromer includes some chapters on teaching of physics (applicable to the teaching of other disciplines), history of education, IQ testing, human intelligence and interpretation of statistics, opinions on how urbanization occurred, social structure, and the value of some simple learning tools rather than fancy expensive equipment. Some of the chapters seem rather peripheral to his main theses, but they make for interesting reading.
Cromer's main messages in the book, I believe, are that formal education provides a framework of basic knowledge from which individuals build understanding of the world, and an accurate framework is necessary if people are to have a common base from which to work. Students deserve an orderly presentation of content in science disciplines, correct within conceptual and theoretical frameworks, with applications that can be connected to the real world.
Many of Cromer's comments made sense to this reader, who keeps struggling with the best ways to teach biology to college students, but who doesn't think everything new is the best. There are some time-tested methods that have been around for a long time; they work. While I think Cromer was a little harsh on constructivism, I share much of his criticism of education and its philosophie du jour approaches. It helps to have some philosophical frameworks such as Bloom's Taxonomy with which to work, but basically we who teach are trying to deal effectively with individual differences (the buzz-words when I was in education classes). Since no one method works best for every student, teaching is a tough job and needs constant examination. Cromer's approaches are worth examining.