EDUCATION
Precollege Science, Math Education Enhanced by Volunteers Project involving use of volunteers to interact with junior high school students exceeds expectations in terms of participation, benefits A pioneering effort to improve science education in inner city schools has just completed its first phase in Washington, D.C. The project involves the use of volunteer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to interact with junior high school students and thus enhance their interest in science and math. So far, the program has met with unanimous enthusiasm and is being seen as a model for school systems around the country. The program—"Scientists in the Classroom"—has been sponsored by the Federal City Council, an organization of business and civic leaders. Begun in the 1985-86 school year, it brings professional scientists, engineers, and mathematicians into school classrooms to work directly with students. In November, the council is relinquishing its management and financial support of the program, and the D.C. school system will take it over. About 170 volunteers are involved during the current academic year, 20% of them women. By all accounts, the project has surpassed the modest expectations foreseen for it when it began, according to an evaluation just completed by Richard N. White of the Bureau of Social Science Research in Washington, D.C. Classroom achievement was not measured, but attitudes toward science and mathematics went up compared with a control group. 42
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White's report concludes: "The number of professionals applying to become part of the project exceeded the expectations and preparations. Those who participate in the program wish to continue to participate. Teachers and principals view the project as beneficial and are willing to continue to apply for volunteers for their schools. Finally, there is evidence that working with a volunteer is enjoyable for students, that they feel they do perform better as a result of working with a volunteer, and that their attitudes become more positive about science and math coursework and careers." Besides the evaluation, a report on the first two years has just been published by the council, entitled "Scientists in the Classroom." (The report can be purchased for $10 from the National School Volunteer Program, Suite 300, 701 North Fairfax St., Alexandria, Va. 22314.) The project is the brainchild of Theodore D. Drury, who dreamed it up back in 1984 while on the public affairs staff at the National Science Foundation. Drury recalls observing how NSF support for science and math education had been waning over the years. But by 1983, NSF was prodded by Congress to reactivate support for the subject. A National Science Board commission was appointed to look into national needs in precollege science and math, and in its final report the Commission found them ailing badly and called for a renewed national effort to improve the situation. Drury, who had been public affairs director for Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) in the early 1960s, thought the volunteer concept could be applied effectively to science education. "I thought the idea was so simple," he recalls, "that
Drury: volunteers were rolling in it was probably going on in several places." But after a spot survey, he couldn't find a project like what he was planning, the recruiting of professionals from government, industry, and universities. Although some corporations would themselves provide volunteers, he says, there was nothing on the scale of recruiting from the entire reservoir of scientists in a single metropolitan area. A natural place to start, he thought, was Washington, D.C/s preponderantly black school system. Believing that success required the backing of Washington's power structure, Drury took the concept to the council. The council was willing to commit $118,000 and asked Drury if he would run it. Meanwhile, NSF gave him a leave of absence under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, "a mechanism," as Drury describes it, "to send government people out as volunteers for one to four years." Council science/math task force
chairman Thomas G. Pownall, who is also chairman of Martin Marietta, sent letters to 25 high-technology firms in the Washington metropolitan area asking for their support in launching the program. Other letters went out to various federal agencies and the area's colleges and universities. About 20 volunteers offered their services by spring 1985. "But by the next fall, the volunteers were rolling in," Drury recalls. The first year was far from easy, however. Although the number of professionals volunteering was not a problem, teachers had difficulty knowing how to use them. Moreover, they were treated like ordinary lay volunteers, not the specialists they were. As a result, some dropped out of the program, lacking anything to do. The following summer, Drury organized a training institute and several workshops for teachers on how to use volunteers. "Science and math volunteers were a new thing," he explains. "We had to figure out how to use them." One of the volunteers is Georgetown University neurochemist Joseph Neale, who puts in about one hour a month at Jefferson Junior High School. He was involved from the first year and is enthusiastic about the program. "Jefferson is really only an ordinary junior high school, not a special magnet school," he says, "so it's a good example of the kind of kids you get anywhere. What I found is that the students attend to what you're saying and they're excited that someone professional in the outside world has an interest in science and in them. They sense my commitment and it reinforces theirs. "Moreover, volunteering isn't something that demands an inordinate amount of time. And you still have that impact on people. I don't care if anyone can prove to me that this population changes two or three percentage points on some index. It's clear to me that this will have some impact on their lives." Neale worked with biology teacher Patty Spady. She says she has used volunteers in the past to give talks to the students or help with science projects. "I also use the volunteers to speak about what it's like to be professionals in terms of sala-
ries, work hours, and the kind of work involved. It's not the kind of information students get in a book." Spady says the benefit of having someone like Neale as a volunteer was the opportunity to motivate the students. "I've never gotten a really negative response from the students about the volunteers," she says. "They'll often say something like, 'He was really interested in me. He really wanted to hear what I wanted to say.' " Spady says the presence of volunteers has no effect on the selfesteem of the teachers. The science teacher is still the one in charge. "I try to plan for the volunteer just as I would any other activity," she says. "I wouldn't ask volunteers to come unless I had something special for them to do. So it's no problem for me. Sometimes I'd like to have students hear something differently." Adds David Merenda, executive director of the National School Volunteer Program in Alexandria, Va., "The role of the teacher as the sole imparter of knowledge is no longer valid. They are managing resources in the classroom, and volunteers are another one of those resources." Merenda's organization, a nonprofit corporation, is in the business of introducing volunteer programs in school systems around the country and is preparing a how-todo-it booklet on setting up volunteer programs for science and math in schools. It is also in the process of introducing a science/math volunteer program in the Salem, Ore., school system, modeled after the D.C. effort. It is being supported by a $148,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education. "We're excited about what Ted [Drury] has done," says Merenda. "He proved that it was possible to recruit this category of person and that they would in fact come forward and volunteer if they were asked." Whether the idea will really mushroom around the country is anyone's guess. The science and engineering community is worried that interest in science and math among precollege students is continuing to decline. A series on Washington, D.C., high schools published in the Washington Post last week described
how good scholastic performance was discouraged through ridicule by other students in the classroom. That is why Drury's program focused on the junior high level and below, where attitudes could be formed and solidified. Where chemists fit into the picture is questionable. In D.C, fewer chemists offered their services than those of any other discipline. But voluntarism is beginning to become a part of American Chemical Society educational activities, at least as something desired. Sylvia A. Ware, director of ACS's Education Division, says implementation plans for the society's Chemistry in the Community curriculum call for "encouraging teachers to invite working scientists into the classroom to add their perspectives." Wil Lepkowski, Washington
Videos provide realistic form of lab instruction
N W QKUEANS Computer-assisted interactive videodisks are proving to be a valuable tool for teaching chemistry laboratory techniques. Indeed, some studies suggest that students learn more
Smith: more rewarding lab experience September 21, 1987 C&EN
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Education from the videodisk exercises than from traditional "hands-on" experiments. In a presentation to members of the Division of Chemical Education, Loretta L. Jones and Stanley G. Smith described the interactive videodisk program they are developing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Smith, a professor of chemistry, is a pioneer in computer-aided chemistry instruction. Jones, a consulting scholar from IBM's Academic Information Systems division, is associate director of the school's general chemistry program. Videodisks contain the same kind of television images and accompanying sound that videotapes do. But there's an important difference: The images can be accessed randomly. Also, the information they contain can be incorporated into a computer program. In the Urbana system, a workstation includes a microcomputer, a videodisk player, a monitor
that accepts signals from both computer and player, and an interface that "overlays" the two signals. This approach allows not only computer control of video images but also display of computer text and graphics over video, on the same screen. At Illinois, some 3000 students per year work with the interactive videodisk lessons in a learning center equipped with 36 microcomputers, all "networked" to a larger computer that manages instruction, gives quizzes, and records grades. So far, 18 interactive videodisk lessons—on kinetics, equilibrium, and the chemical and physical behavior of gases—have been prepared and evaluated in the classroom. Other lessons on chemical reactions and equations are still being worked on. Each lesson takes about 30 minutes to an hour to complete. The use of live-action video images controlled by the student can provide a very realistic introduction to chemistry and to laboratory
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procedures. Also, the technique allows phenomena from outside the lab to be incorporated into the lessons and related to chemical principles. For example, in an interactive video lesson on gas stoichiometry, students "collect" an air sample from a video site of their choice and "analyze" it for one of four pollutant gases. They must decide how to make up standard solutions and learn to use a spectrometer. In doing all this, Jones and Smith say, the students make more decisions and are exposed to more techniques than they would use in a hands-on laboratory exercise—and they also learn something about atmospheric chemistry and air pollution. Attitude surveys revealed that a majority of the students liked using the videodisk materials, found them more useful than the related lab experiments, and wanted to see half or more of their lab experiments replaced entirely by videodisk lessons. In an experiment designed to measure the effect of videodisk instruction on achievement, students with no chemistry background were divided into two groups. One group received videodisk instruction; the other did traditional lab experiments. Both received the same quiz on the material. The videodisk group did significantly better. In another test of the method, science and engineering majors were similarly divided into two groups. One used the videodisk material as a prelab preparation, the other the standard written prelab assignment. The videodisk group took less time to perform the actual experiment and made fewer errors. Despite that sort of finding, Jones and Smith don't expect that videodisks will replace traditional laboratory experiments. Instead, they say, "We hope to redesign them to make better use of the unique advantages of hands-on labs, such as the opportunity to learn time management, organization, and manipulative skills, and to gain a sense of accomplishment. With interactive video preparation, we may be able to offer students more challenging and thus more rewarding laboratory experiences." Ward Worthy, Chicago
