Editorial pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Science Scores, Measures of Success, and National Competitiveness Norbert J. Pienta* Department of Chemistry, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-2556, United States ABSTRACT: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test data, advanced placement chemistry test scores, and success of students in an introductory college chemistry course are discussed. As more students and a more diverse population in high school and college take chemistry courses, new challenges are encountered that include ones that are outside the scope of college teachers. Keeping focused on potential content and pedagogical changes is crucial, and reform needs to be informed by evidence. KEYWORDS: General Public, Elementary/Middle School Science, High School/Introductory Science, Curriculum, Public Understanding/Outreach
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and furthermore, why is the DFW rate3 so large for a matriculating class of such great promise? A recent editorial in the New York Times entitled “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up: In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves’4 addresses this “management of expectations” from a different perspective. They cite the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test data5 as evidence of U.S. high school mediocrity in mathematics and science, pointing out that younger U.S. students compare favorably. Furthermore, they point out only 45% of U.S. public schools offer advanced placement courses6 and that:4 At the same time, a disturbing number of the exams taken by AP students received failing scores in Mayfrom 38 to 43 percent in biology, physics B, calculus AB, statistics and chemistrysuggesting that too many students are not being prepared adequately and taught well. The editorial goes on to suggest more research studies to define remediation of the situation, additional government support, early college admissions, and psychological coaching. The readers’ perspectives were also quite enlightening, although they tend to focus on a single factor, presumably because their short length limits the comments: blame the teacher, do not blame the teacher, blame the student, do not blame the student, blame the curriculum, do not blame the curriculum, and so forth. This is clearly a complex issue where a single factor is not responsible, and a simple fix is not likely to be implemented. Whether we look at PISA, advanced placement (AP) chemistry (in which 59.1% received a score of 3 or higher out of 5),6 or the University of Georgia fall 2013 DFW rate, talented students are not succeeding. By some measures and criteria, the students in our fall class (i.e., 750 in my sections and 1100 in other sections) were deemed worthy and capable of earning a bachelor’s degree. Students not in our general chemistry sections could have been among the 40.5% who earned a 4 or 5 on the AP chemistry exam. We applaud the changes that the College Board is implementing,6,7 but like others will continue to monitor changes in deciding whether to give UGA course credit based on AP test placement. (Further discussion on AP
n the academic world of semesters, another is underway with barely sufficient time to consider the last. What accomplishments, significant or trivial, can inform the next opportunities? In the fall, my “day job” involved almost 750 general chemistry students in the early part of August, albeit significantly fewer by final exam time. There is no happiness in those numbers; in fact, the description lies just short of distress. My strategic plan for the general chemistry program already involves multiple steps, each based on my careful (but subjective) reading of the discipline-based education research (DBER) literature. (Avoiding hypocrisy and promoting job security seem apropos to an editor of a DBER journal.) Everyone teaching introductory chemistry courses should immediately agree that promoting students’ learning while advancing their success are appropriate goals. The challenge is how to accomplish this and has been as far as this Editor can tell for at least as long as the Journal has been published.1 Both at my previous institution and the current one, questions have been posed: What is a reasonable and acceptable success rate in general chemistry? How many students should we expect to earn a grade of C or better? To what extent are we willing to work with them to accomplish this? At both institutions, liberal rules for withdrawal allow students to plod along well into the semester, an option that is of great advantage to a first-semester student. What is a reasonable rate of withdrawals in such a course? Your Editor compiled a list of over 100 courses at the University of Iowa in which the enrollment was greater than 200 and for which the average grade point average in the course was about 2.5. (An assumption is that if the average grade is 3.5 out of 4.0, there is not much reason to withdraw.) The lowest rate of withdrawal was about 3% in a series of introductory courses of a specific program, a number that may well define the combined rate of family emergencies, demise of grandparents, personal crises, and catastrophic injuries or illnesses. At the current institution, this fall’s entering class was declared to be “the smartest class ever” (in my words) or “[T]he most academically qualified first-year class in school history, with the highest GPA and SAT averages on record for entering freshmen”,2 something that they were reminded about during daily clicker activities. So why was this group’s withdrawal rate so significantly higher than 3%, © 2014 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: February 11, 2014 159
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed500060v | J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91, 159−160
Journal of Chemical Education
Editorial
(7) For a description of the AP Chemistry test, see: http://apcentral. collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/2119.html (accessed Jan 2014). (8) Eliel, E. Private communication, 1975. (9) For a description of the Next Generation Science Standards, see: http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards (accessed Jan 2014). (10) For a description of ScaleUp, see: http://www.ncsu.edu/per/ scaleup.html (accessed Jan 2014).
chemistry will be appearing in a special issue of the Journal featuring a set of invited and submitted papers.) During my graduate training several decades ago, an esteemed organic professor, Ernest Eliel, pointed out to struggling organic students that perhaps “they had mistaken an interest for an aptitude.”8 He was not being coy; years later in a conversation on the subject, he expressed concerns that are reiterated here. More students have been given access to a college education and to STEM disciplines, and still more diversity is needed. Has “the system” anticipated the changes and kept up? The College Board is in the process of revamping the AP test and states are struggling with economic and political issues together with a shrinking qualified science teacher pool, yet adopting new curricular standards like the NGSS.9 The high school situation may be characterized as being in some disarray, the result of change and the scale of the endeavor. At the college level, the situation is even worse. College chemistry programs are more likely to be informed by history and tradition than by pedagogy and best practices. At my institution, a dean recently accused me of directing a 20year-old curriculum. He was assured that that was not the case: we were certainly working with something that was at least 50 years old! But we are currently redesigning our lab experiments, curriculum, and organization; planning on content delivery and discussion sessions in ScaleUp classrooms;10 using clickers and flipped or blended content delivery; and conducting selfassessment and testing online. When possible, the decisions are evidence-based and where that evidence is limited, we try to collect some. In the meantime, we continue to worry about DFW rates and hope you do also. There is an entire new generation of students who deserve to learn something valuable, and we should make that happen. We hope that our roles go far beyond simply sorting students and shrugging our shoulders while reporting outcome statistics.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) For the earliest examples, see the table of contents the first issue of volume 1: http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/1/1 (accessed Jan 2014). (2) For information about the UGA Class of 2017, see: http://news. uga.edu/releases/article/uga-first-year-students-set-academic-criteriarecords/ (accessed Jan 2014). (3) “DFW rate” represents the grades of D, F, and W (withdrawal). My apologies to my former colleague with those initials; he endeavors to represent success. (4) “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up: In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves”, New York Times, Dec 15, 2013, http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/in-math-andscience-the-best-fend-for-themselves.html?hp&rref=opinion (accessed Jan 2014). (5) For a report on the 2012 PISA test results, see: http://www.oecd. org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf (accessed Jan 2014). (6) For details about 2013 AP test results, see: http://media. collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/STUDENTSCORE-DISTRIBUTIONS-2013.pdf (accessed Jan 2014). 160
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