The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded grants to three Lynch School professors who are researching new ways to teach science, math, engineering, and technology that will stimulate student interest in those fields.

Photographs: Lee Pellegrini

Claims broker

Science is about much more than discovering or memorizing facts, observes Lynch School assistant professor Katherine McNeill. As scientific knowledge grows exponentially, “We need to focus on fewer key ideas and consider the practice of science more broadly, so that students can learn how to construct and evaluate scientific claims,” according to McNeill, who researches and designs middle school and high school science curricula that do just that.

Supported in part by the NSF, McNeill and University of Michigan science education professor Joseph Krajcik spent nine years working in Detroit and Boston schools, researching and developing an instructional framework that teaches basic scientific concepts by guiding students through the process of scientific inquiry—claim, evidence, reasoning, and rebuttal. Their new book, Supporting Grade 5-8 Students in Constructing Explanations in Science (Allyn & Bacon), is packed with explanations and illustrations of the process.

Among them is a description of a fifth-grade group that created terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in soda bottles, and hypothesized how they would develop. Over the course of a month, they observed and recorded conditions (such as whether the water was clean) and developments (how many insects survived) in journals. Then, using their recorded observations, they determined whether the ecosystems were stable, and if evidence backed up their first assumptions.

Virtual evidence

A bedrock principle in the study of biology, the theory of evolution is considered extremely difficult to understand and teach. That is because evolution is based on phenomena that occur over long periods of time and cannot be directly observed, explains Laura O’Dwyer, Lynch School associate professor and a co-investigator in the Evolution Readiness Project, a collaboration between Boston College researchers and education technology specialists at the nonprofit Concord Consortium.

The project uses computer models to introduce fourth graders to phenomena such as interdependence of species and adaptation, a quintessential element of evolution. One model is a virtual greenhouse that allows students to plant different types of seeds in soil exposed to varying amounts of sunlight. As the virtual plants either grow or wilt, students learn about the characteristics of heredity that allow some plants to survive.

Particularly important to helping students achieve a greater understanding of evolution, according to O’Dwyer, is moving from reasoning about individual organisms to reasoning about populations of organisms, and then to multiple populations in an environment. O’Dwyer’s research focuses on surveying students’ understanding of evolution, and their views on scientific inquiry in general, before and after using the interactive models.

“There is evidence,” notes O’Dwyer, “that people who understand the scientific basis for evolution are more likely to accept it.”

 

Street wise

Boston high school students in Mike Barnett’s urban ecology program take digital recording equipment into city streets during the summer. They test how noise affects bird communication, study air quality’s impact on city trees, and explore urban ecosystems.

Research shows that students living in urban areas often feel disconnected from nature, and tend to benefit from participating in programs “that help them recognize that nature not only exists in a city but thrives in urban settings,” says Barnett, a Lynch School associate professor.

Barnett is a leader in a five-year, interdisciplinary effort among Lynch School researchers, the environmental studies program, the Urban Ecology Institute, and the College Bound program to research and develop urban ecology programs, texts, and teaching tools that combine hands-on science and technology education with college and career readiness. The NSF, which has awarded four grants worth more than $6 million to Barnett and his collaborators since 2005, last year called the Boston College Urban Ecology, Information Technology, and Inquiry Science for Students and Teachers program “exemplary.”

“Each grant has taught us how to better engage and prepare students to become scientists, enter college, or develop better scientific skills,” says Barnett. And in the past four years, 45 students who participated in the summer urban ecology program are majoring in science and technology in college.

Read more by Tim Czerwienski