editorial
Influences of High School Science and Math
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n an Education Forum article published this summer in Science (2007, 317, 457–458), Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai described a statistical analysis of the following question (which I paraphrase here): how much grade benefit is obtained by students who take introductory college courses in biology, chemistry, and physics per year of high school courses taken in those subjects and per year of high school math? This is a fascinating question that should be of great interest to college professors and advisers and to parents of science-inclined high schoolers (or parents who wish to see their high-school-aged children prepared for college science). Should Sammy or Susie be encouraged to fill up on biology to enhance the chances of eventual medical school success and skimp on the other topics? Or should Bob and Barbara be urged to load up on high school chemistry so they will be prepared to follow their parents into careers in analytical chemistry? The study described by Sadler and Tai used a sample of 8474 undergraduate students enrolled in 122 introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses taught at 63 colleges and universities of an assortment of sizes. The numbers of students taking courses in the three disciplines were approximately equal. Some of the results seemed intuitively obvious: taking more biology, chemistry, and physics courses in high school improved the students’ introductory college success in biology, chemistry, and physics courses, respectively. Less obvious outcomes were that taking a lot of chemistry in high school did not improve college performance in physics and that taking a lot of high school chemistry modestly improved performance in biology; the level of improvement in the latter case was not very different from the one that resulted from having
© 2007 American Chemical Societ y
taken a lot of high school biology. The big message, however, was that taking more math in high school improved performance in all three of the science subjects, including biology. Parents, take your cue from that message! Lots of high school math paves the road to success in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics college courses. To me, it would also make sense to have a balanced diet of the sciences in high school. Of course, we could wish that the study gave us answers as to whether this preparatory bias provided by math continues to be useful as the student progresses to higher-level courses in biology, chemistry, and physics—and into life! But that’s a much harder question to evaluate. Praising the benefits of mathematics instruction doesn’t mean that one can’t complain about the style of that instruction. My long-standing gripe is that math instruction mainly uses anonymous variables—such as a, b, and c—as opposed to real quantities—such as moles, seconds, and grams—that are related to one another in some scientific manner. Students are seldom forced to look at a modestly complicated equation that contains real quantities and ask, “What does the equation say to me about how, for example, the number of moles responds to the number of seconds in an equation about coulometry?” I sometimes have great difficulty in persuading students to hear the equation speak! The use of real variables generally is found mostly in the biology, chemistry, and physics classes. Perhaps the benefits of taking high school math in fact require that the student also take some science classes where real variables are found in real equations.
O c t o b e r 1 , 2 0 0 7 / A n a ly t i c a l C h e m i s t r y
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