School Science Curriculum Reform in the USA
Edgar W. Jenkins
As with any country, the dynamics of science curriculum reform can be fully understood only when due attention is given both to the social, political and economic factors of the country concerned and to its history and geography. In the case of the USA, building a prosperous national republic from a federation of very different states, the need to assimilateand educatesuccessive waves of immigrants, the lack of federal control over education, the different histories of settlement on the East and West coasts have all been, and remain, significant influences upon the rationale and practice of all levels of education.The concept of elementary and secondary education as alternative kinds of education for different social classes, prevalent in much of Europe until well into the last century, has also been absent from American schooling. The consequent lack of powerful traditional and conservative influences operating upon selective systems of secondary schooling has enabled American high schools to be more flexible than their European counterparts in accommodating a generous variety of science-based courses (academic, vocational and technical) generated in response to perceived local or national needs. The outcome has been great diversity in the quality, extent and nature of school science education, a diversity both encouraged and underpinned by the high degree of administrative and political decentralisation that characterises education within the USA.
Science education was not institutionalised until the first Morrill Act of 1862 which created land grant colleges to teach agriculture, mechanical arts and military science. In the following decades, large numbers of high schoolswere established with the aid of public funds. The science taught in these schools was strongly influenced by the role of the colleges and universities in certification, examination and accreditation, although this was challenged as more students entered the public school system and stayed there longer. Despite the recognition by the so-called Committee of Ten of the National Education Association (1893) that the high school was not simply a preparatory institution for higher education, it was not until the Depression years that enlarged conceptions of the aims of high school education began to prevail.In consequence, significant efforts were devoted to the development of science courses for students who completed their formal education at the high school stage (Caldwell 1920; Isenbarger et al. 1950). For the most part, these courses favoured the acquisition of practical knowledge over the study of the traditional academic disciplines, with the curriculum overall being directed towards ‘life adjustment’.
Although there was some contemporary opposition from academic traditionalists to the development of courses of this kind, it was not until the years after the Second World War that the form and content of American high school education became a matter of widespread and lively controversy (Kliebard 1992; 1995). There were several reasons for this. As in many other countries, the USA faced a rapid rise in the birth rate and the education infrastructure, seriously under-funded for many years before the War, struggled to cope. Attempts to provide federal aid came to nothing, leaving many battles over schooling and the curriculum to be fought at local or state level. Within this context of inadequate resources, the spread of communism and the rise of McCarthyism all encouraged the view that the schools had a major role to play in promoting American democratic values and, just as important, if not more so, in countering subversive, ‘un-American’ activities. In addition, the Cold War itself highlighted the importance of an adequate supply of scientific and technological manpower and lent support to those arguing for a high school curriculum based on traditional academic disciplines rather than the prevailing social-studies oriented ‘life-adjustment’ programmes. The complex elements of the battle over what sort of high school curriculum would best meet the public interest have been well summarised by Rudolph. He concludes that by 1954, despite vigorous public and academic controversy,
Things remained relatively unchanged in schools across the nation.
Although life-adjustment education was no longer a real force, the promise of a new curriculum…remained unfulfilled. The decentralized nature of the United States school system made systematic reform nearly impossible, and the strong tradition of local control effectively blocked any federal initiatives in this area. What was left were the persistent ideological and military threats of international communism…One might say that ground had been broken but a new educational edifice had yet to be built (Rudolph 2002: 31).
Attempts to construct that edifice became possible in the latter half of the 1950s when government succeeded in persuading influential politicians and the wider public of the role of the nation’s schools in maintaining American scientific and technological superiority over the Soviet Union. Americans were forcefully reminded of the scientific and technological capability of the Cold War enemy when the Soviet Union successfully detonated a usable hydrogen bomb in 1955 and, two years later, launched Sputnik into space, although, by the latter date,attempts to reform school science education were already underway (Ravitz 1983; Jackson 1983)
Although the political and public sense favoured reform of the school curriculum, how to proceed was by no means clear. Given that responsibility for that curriculum was a zealously guarded right at the local and state levels, any large scale involvement of the federal government would inevitably arouse suspicion and hostility in equal measure. The necessary initiative was taken by leading members of the scientific community, many of whom had been closely involved in some of the large-scale scientific and technological developments that characterised the alliance of science with military and political concerns during the Second World War, including the Manhattan project to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. This alliance not only marked a step change in the relationship between science and the state; it was accompanied by a powerful and largely unchallenged sense of optimism about science and the contribution it could make to the betterment of society. Today, such optimism sits somewhat oddly alongside scepticism about science and technology and doubt about the role that they have come to play in society but, in the USA as in many other countries, the idea that science held out an almost unconditional promise of a better future was an important element in the science curriculum debates that characterised the mid-twentieth century.
Those debates spawned a global movement for science curriculum reform. By 1972, the eighth report from an international clearinghouse at the University of Maryland on science and mathematics curricula developments ran to 858 pages (Lockard 1972), with curriculum projects in the USA accounting for almost half of the volume. Further insights into the scale and nature of the reforms in the USA which give rather more detail about a number of small-scale local curriculum initiatives are given in an account of new developments in high school science teaching published by the National Science Teachers Association in 1960 (NSTA 1960). Thescience curriculum projects listed in these sources range from anthropology, geology, ecology and environmental education to earth and space science, chemistry, physics and biological science. Some projects attempted to integrate science with mathematics or with the humanities, others focused attention on computer-assisted pedagogy or individualised learning programmes, and most were local, or state-wide rather than federal in scope. Yet others sought to provide science education courses for particular groups of students, such as the Activities in Science for the Educable-Mentally Retarded (AIS-EMR) initiative based in Los Angeles and the four year science sequence for academically talented students developed in St. PaulMinnesota.Despite this diversity, the majority of the science curriculum initiatives were directed at the academically talented (NSTA op.cit.: 3) and, in this, they reflected the focus of the much larger, federally funded, programmes that have come to be known by their acronyms such as PSSC, ChemStudy. BSCS, SMSG, IPS and CBA.
An undertaking on such a scale became possible only when the federal government and a number of leading US scientists came to recognise that the severe shortage of scientific manpower during the 1950s required more than additional graduate fellowships funded by the National Science Foundation or attention to science curricula at the college level. Towards the second half of that decade, it was the quality of high school science teaching that gained the higher political salience, although this could not be easily separated from a severe problem in the supply. Although the Foundation had experience of supporting summer institutes for science teachers, it was understandably very wary of becoming involved in curriculum development, the more so at a time when the cold war had heightened suspicions about any form of centralised control or influence. Nonetheless, as the technological achievements of the Soviet Union impacted upon the political, public and scientific consciousness of the USA, the Foundation began to consider how it could meet two objectives. The first was to improve the quality of high school science teaching without being seen to trespass unduly on well-entrenched local and state interests. The second was to effect such improvement in ways that best served the interests of the scientific research community. Rudolph (op.cit.: 79-80) has described in detail how the Foundation ‘cleared the field of all competitors’ and sought to exclude the influence of science educators as represented, for example, by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching(NARST) on the grounds that the Association was ‘definitely more education – than – science oriented’. It is also significant that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) ‘made no attempt to design and seek funding for any massive curriculum development of its own’, although, according to its Executive Secretary, this was because the Association believed that reflected the view, ‘no single program can or should be designed for use in all or even a majority of the school districts of the nation’ (Carleton 1976: 70).
It is not merely unsurprising, but to be anticipated, that the major high school science curricula developed with federal funds channelled through the National Science Foundation would be up-to-date and academic in approach. Such features were regarded as constituting the minimum condition necessary to secure the better supply of well-qualified scientifically and technologically qualified personnel needed by the American defence industries. However, the curricula were underpinned by a wider motive, namely to introduce students, and hence future American citizens, to the nature of scientific research and the conditions needed for its effective and rapid prosecution. At the level of the curriculum in practice, this translated into requiring students to reason scientifically from empirical evidence, understood as requiring students to behave and think as far as possible like practising scientists by engaging in appropriate practical activities. In Rudolph’s judgement, this wider motive was the scientists’ response to the anti-intellectualism that leading members of the scientific community saw as endemic in American society and which had to be overcome if science was to achieve its full potential.
Despite the wariness, even disdain, of the leading scientists involved in the major science curriculum development projects for the education research community and their commitment to promoting scientific ways of thinking,pedagogies are inevitably justified and sustained by assumptions about how students learn. In the mid-twentieth century, those assumptions clustered around ideas captured by such phrases like ‘active learning’, ‘learning by doing’, learning by investigation and learning by discovery’, ideas that owed much to the ideas of Piaget. The emphasis in Piagetian psychology upon the role of experience in students’ conceptual development could be invoked to justify a hands-on approach to learning science by doing science, although the limitations of learning science in this way seem to have had much less attention than they deserve. Such an approach constituted a major challenge both to the behaviourist tradition that dominated American education and to the way in which science was taught in many high schools.
…extant school programs in the 1950s underemphasized academic disciplines; …little support existed for academically talented and high-ability students and…teaching methods omitted laboratory experiences… Traditionally, science teaching consisted of lecture, discussion and recitation. Science teachers relied on a single textbook, introduced few, if any, laboratory experiences, and used only an occasional film. (Bybee 19897: 11)
However, it seems clear that those who developed the major science curriculum projects initially gave little or no attention to theories about how students learn. The central and immediate task was to devise curricula that introduced students to up-to-date and engaging science-related activities, although a conference in 1959, headed by Jerome Bruner, brought together a wide range of experts to discuss how ‘to provide immediate support for the ongoing curriculum projects’ (Rudolph op.cit.: 98). It was Bruner who, in a memorable and seminal phrase, advised teachers that the ‘schoolboy learning physics is a physicist’ (Bruner 1960: 14).
The ‘learning by investigation’and the reasoning from empirical evidence that characterised at least the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of science curriculum reform in the mid-twentieth century, can be regarded as part of a long-standing commitment to introducing students to the ways in which scientific knowledge is generated and validated, i.e., to ‘scientific method’.Although Armstrong’s heurism had little influence in the USA, American science textbooks quickly came to define scientific method as an entirely logical and stepwise approach based upon an unvaryingand unproblematic series of steps from problem definition, observation and hypothesising to experimentation, data collection, the drawing of conclusion, testing and theory building (Henry 1947). In contrast, the National Science Foundation funded curriculum projects referred to above assumed that scientific method could be caught rather than taught but it was not long before the attempts to reify and codify such method reappeared. They took the form of emphasising science as a process based upon discrete skills that could be taught, and perhaps as importantly, be assessed. The skills identified were the familiar ones of observing, measuring, classifying, predicting, hypothesising, controlling variables and interpreting data (Wellington 1989) and a curriculum based upon a ‘process approach’ to learning [1]science was published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1967 (AAAS 1967).
Interestingly, these shifts in terminology bear little relation to the profound changes that took place in the philosophical understanding of science during the twentieth century. By the end of that century, seminal scholarly insights into the generation and validation of scientific knowledge had not only raised important questions about the confidence that can be placed in such knowledge but had rendered obsolete the view of science that had sustained science teachers for generations (Ravetz 1989). That obsolete ideology has been characterised by Millar as the ‘standard view of science education’ that claims no specific links with any particular philosophical view of science method’ and which, at the time of writing, he judged to be ‘strikingly at odds with that… current among historians, philosophers and sociologists of science’ (Millar 1989: 40). Elkana has claimed that science teaching has tended to lag behind developments in the philosophy of science by at least 40 years (Elkana 1970) but Layton’s judgement that the philosophy of science has been ‘drawn upon selectively, raided even, to underwrite purposes that have their origins in considerations remote from philosophy’ is perhaps more illuminating (Layton 1992:37).
The take-up of the new NSF funded science curricula by the schools was not impressive and certainly less immediate than that hoped for by some of the leading advocates of reform. In 1964-65, only 20% of students were studying introductory physics ‘in PSSC classes’ (Bybee op.cit: 11)and the percentage (19.6) of high school seniors studying any physics at all was less than it had been in 1948-9 (25.8%) (Watson1967). A study of the impact of the CHEM Study program on enrolment in chemistry and physics between 1962 and 1965 in a sample of 109 high schools in which this was the only chemistry course used concluded that ‘introduction of CHEM Study had no effect on chemistry or physics enrollments’ (Merrill and Ridgway 1969:59). A little over a decade later, it was estimated that ‘over 64% if all school districts had adopted at least one curriculum program and that some 19 million students were involved in some way with the reformed science curricula (Weiss 1978; 79). While Rudolph is undoubtedly correct in commenting that themagnitude of this collective attempt at science curriculum reform was ‘indeed phenomenal’ in terms of scope and funding (Rudolph 2002: 2), the overall impact of the new curricula could still be judged disappointing given the resources allocated to effecting change(Weiss op.cit.).