Scientific illiteracy in the U.S. is no joke—a startling ignorance of basic science is tearing the fabric of our society. What can be done? Here’s one university’s answer.

When it comes to our knowledge of science, are we Americans the world’s number—one laughing stock?

If we’re not—given our appalling level of ignorance about even the most commonplace things we see around us every day—pity the poor, so-called developed country that is.

How is it possible that the nation who gave the world the telephone, Morse Code, the electric light bulb, the first practical automobile, the airplane, a vaccine for polio, open heart surgery, nylon, the mass production of penicillin, nuclear fission (and fusion), the transistor, the molecular structure of DNA, the computer and the computer chip, gene-splicing, the first man on the moon—the list is long—has become a nation of scientific dunces?

The fact that Americans have lost their bearings in the world of science is old news—in 1996, an international study ranked U.S. eighth-grade students 17th out of 41 countries in mastery of math and science topics. That same year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the so-called “national report card”—found that 43 per cent of high school seniors failed to meet basic standards in science knowledge at the 12th grade level.

Given that, it’s small wonder that “man-on-the-street interviews” with young people are a mother lode of fun for TV’s Tonight Show host Jay Leno. With roughly a third of the public unaware that the earth orbits the sun, and not vice versa, and only half aware that humans and dinosaurs never shared the planet together— according to a survey that the National Science Board handed to Pres. Bush in 2002—Leno knows he’s shooting fish in a barrel.

Standardized test scores show that Americans’ descent into scientific illiteracy began long before “dumbing down” became a household phrase. In 1983 the U.S. Department of Education released A Nation at Risk, still viewed by many as the most sobering indictment of national public education ever compiled. The report revealed widening gaps between classroom emphasis on science and math in the U.S. and other industrialized countries and pointed to a critical shortage of qualified teachers of math, earth science and physics in almost every state.

Patricia Hayward—“Pat” to all who’ve come to know her in her long career at Florida State—felt the sting of Risk and took the report’s findings to heart. Working as a coordinator of science education for the Department of Biological Science back then, Hayward was well aware of a growing deficit in highly trained science and math teachers in Florida classrooms. The scathing analysis by the nation’s top educational watchdog only fueled her anxiety over the dilemma, and a subsequent encounter at a social function with a harsh critic of FSU’s “ivory tower” attitude in helping teachers and schools deal with the crisis was her tipping point.

Hayward arranged a meeting with Werner Baum, then the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and pled her case that FSU should get off the bench and do something.

“He told me, well, if we’re going to do something, let’s do it right,” Hayward recalled recently. “And that’s how we got started.

”Last year, FSU’s Office of Science Teaching Activities (OSTA) celebrated its 20th anniversary. Since 1984, the office has brought extended, specialized training in such sciences as math, biology, chemistry and physics to thousands of teachers and has exposed countless students to the excitement and challenge of science both as an avocation and a career.

Now an upper-level administrator in academic affairs at Florida State, Hayward reflected on how far the program has come. Today, the acronym “OSTA” may not be a term many have heard off-campus, but the diverse programs under its banner resonate with thousands of people touched by them over the years.

Even though the office has expanded well beyond its founding mission—to generate a corps of graduates thoroughly grounded not only in science but in the teaching profession as well—this is still considered priority number one.

Since 1984, FSU science students leaning toward careers as science teachers have been drawn to OSTA for its special bachelor of science degree created expressly for the program. Graduates come away with intensive training in “content”—the science discipline they hope to specialize in as educators—as well as traditional training in classroom instruction.

The program’s full-time director since 1992, Ellen Granger, says a “typical” OSTA graduate gets certified in two subject areas—such as biology and chemistry or physics and math—and many wind up with double majors, collecting enough credits for B.S. degrees in a science area and the B.S. from OSTA at the same time. The curriculum is geared to making graduates feel as confident as possible not only in their command of facts and figures, but also in their fundamental understanding of what science is and how it works, she says.

“This kind of training helps prepare graduates for the realities of working in today’s public schools,” says Granger, who earned her doctorate in neuroscience at FSU while teaching in an OSTA program in the late 1980s. “In many schools in Florida and elsewhere, teachers are expected to teach more than just a single science subject. Our people leave here fully prepared to do that.”

Down to the Sea

Katie McSwean, 13, can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’s huddled with equally excited pals on the deck of a pontoon boat floating in the middle of St. George Sound, the sprawling, shallow bay that serves as the backyard of Florida State’s marine lab. It’s almost midnight.

“What is it!? What is it!?” Katie grips the craft’s handrail and leans over the water as far as she dares.

Bob Lutz, tonight’s captain, has all the boat’s lights turned off. Inky blackness is perforated only by stars and dim shore lights far away. Lutz is vigorously swishing a boat paddle to and fro in water suddenly transformed into startlingly bright, phosphorescent foam.

Lutz enjoys hearing his crew of seventh-graders ‘oooh and aaah’ over what they’re seeing for the first time in their young lives. He’ll soon dip up a water sample and place it in a cooler. Back in the lab, if his crew isn’t too sleepy, he’ll use a hand lens and a microscope to give them a close-up look at tiny critters that can make the night sea light up like billions of electric diamonds. It’s a sight that has amazed humans, young and old, for ages.

This summer, Lutz will be back in his favorite “classroom,” the salty environs of Florida’s Big Bend Gulf. From his staging area—FSU’s Edward Ball Marine Laboratory, nestled on a stretch of marshy beach an hour south of Tallahassee—Lutz directs a summer camp for kids eager to learn about marine ecology. The program consists of four weeklong classes of 10 to 12 students each, all middle-schoolers, plus their teachers.

Lutz’s special camp is a direct outgrowth of Saturday-at-the-Sea, a public outreach program that OSTA runs from April through November. When he was director of FSU’s marine lab, in 1985 Bill Herrnkind launched the program with help from his friend and colleague Hayward.

A well-known marine biologist who once introduced Jacques Cousteau—the late French icon of sea exploration—to the fascinating migratory behavior of the spiny lobster, Herrnkind got the idea for Saturday-at-the-Sea (heard as “SATS” by all insiders) from watching his own children. Whenever he’d haul aboard a trawl net or wade the bay beaches looking for animals for his own research, his kids were always eager to help.

“Directly witnessing sea creatures in their habitat is a wonderful way to inspire youngsters to become curious about nature,” Herrnkind said recently. “I think it’s the first step toward (a serious) interest in science.”Herrnkind had a hunch the program would be a hit, and from the start, it was a big one. Begun on a skinny budget and a “build it and they’ll come” philosophy, Saturday-at-the-Sea has grown to become the most popular program under the OSTA umbrella. Now in its 20th full year of operation, SATS is the vanguard of FSU’s overall community outreach effort. Granger estimates that nearly 40,000 students and teachers—mostly from North Florida schools—are alums of SATS and its spin-off programs.

But the program’s early success almost proved to be its undoing. Word-of-mouth by a growing corps of delighted parents, counselors and schoolteachers created such a demand for the program that by 1990, Herrnkind’s program was struggling to keep pace

Science on Wheels

Since it’s neither practical nor feasible for all teachers—much less their students—to visit OSTA programs on the FSU campus or at the coast, each year two of its offerings burn a lot of gasoline in the name of science education in North Florida.

In 1997, Charles Bowling, then coordinator of SATS, teamed up with Granger and others to put a version of Saturday-at-the-Sea on the road. With a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Sea-to-See was launched to bring marine science directly into kids’ classrooms. Today, Sea-to-See instructors lug bucketsful of assorted live sea creatures into elementary schools throughout North Florida, serving an average of 6,500 students each year.

These kids—many of whom have never set foot on a Gulf beach, despite having grown up within an hour’s drive of one—get their first glimpses of sea life outside of a pet-store aquarium. They get to pick up and handle horseshoe crabs, oysters and barnacles, sea squirts, seastars, sand dollars, sea cucumbers, shrimp—and with extra care—even sharp-spined sea urchins.

Such live expositions of sea critters in their classrooms never fail to enthrall students and teachers alike. Not all of OSTA’s outreach efforts have as much “squeal appeal” among students, but nonetheless are in high demand, says Granger.

In 1998, OSTA teamed up with FSU’s physics department to help put some fresh instruction in physics on the plates of K-12 students in nine North Florida counties. Science on the Move, as the program is called, provides equipment, supplies and expertise for teaching physics not only to students but to their teachers as well.

Granger says the program is a shot-in-the-arm for school districts strapped to keep good science teachers on their payrolls, much less keep their lab equipment updated. Science on the Move puts physics-trained instructors in classrooms from one- to three-day stretches a year, and also trains teachers apart from these periodic visits. Teachers who train through the program can check out equipment that they can use on their own.

Granger says the program now serves more than 4,000 students—from elementary grades through high school—each year. It’s become so popular that in 2002 it spun off a professional development course for science teachers called Motion, Forces & Energy. Available in two formats, one for elementary grades, another for high-school, this program can turn teachers into specialists in teaching physics in ways tailor-made to fit their grade levels—and earn them graduate credits in physics education to boot.

Future Stock

Interestingly enough, about the same time FSU was taking a hands-on approach to science education in Florida public schools, a national effort was preparing to do the same.

After surveying the bleak landscape of the country’s science literacy, in 1985 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—an arm of the National Science Foundation—launched Project 2061, a comprehensive effort to overhaul the way science and math are taught in American classrooms.

Named after the year that Halley’s Comet is due to show up again near the sun, the effort is a direct response to the nation’s increasing deficits in science instruction and popular science literacy. Project 2061’s supreme challenge: to have the American public ready to handle the demands of science and technology on society by the time Halley comes ‘round again.

A tall order, to be sure. But one also anticipated 20 years ago by a group of scientists at FSU enthused over the university’s sudden interest in science outreach. Kirby Kemper, a physicist (now vice president for research), along with Bill Long, a campus meteorologist, and Joe Mott, a math professor, sat down with Pat Hayward and created a summer math and science camp for high school students. Their idea was to bring kids with high aptitudes in science and math to a kind of “boot camp” where they would be immersed for six weeks in hands-on projects with ready access to good equipment and top researchers.

Such was the start of one of OSTA’s most ambitious programs. Begun with a small grant from the Florida Department of Education, for much of its first decade the program drew support from the National Science Foundation’s Young Scholars Program. After funding for that phased out in 1998, FSU’s Young Scholars Program (it adopted the name) was one of the six OSTA projects tapped that year for line-item support from the legislature.

Each summer, the program brings 40 of Florida’s brightest high school students to Tallahassee for an intensive, six-week project in a science area of their choice. The students, selected from high schools throughout the state, tackle coursework in math, computer science and physics or genetics and work on individualized research projects—on topics ranging from marine ecology to robotics—under the direction of a mentor scientist.

A common misconception about the Young Scholars Program, says Granger, is that it’s all about enticing the crème de la crème of Florida’s high school students to make FSU their university of choice after graduation. If that were the case, the program could very well be called an abject failure—only about a third of the kids who go through the program choose any Florida university for their training.

“These are the straight A, high SAT kids who can go anywhere they want,” Granger says. “Some do come here, though, who otherwise wouldn’t.

”Still, recruitment isn’t the goal, she says. The Young Scholars Program mainly exists as a tool for keeping exceptional students headed in the direction of a future in science.

“We’re keeping kids in the science pipeline, pure and simple,” says Granger. “Every university in the country should be concerned about this—keeping kids in the science pipeline—because that’s so critically important.

”In her Young Scholars Program file, Granger keeps letters and e-mails from “graduates” of the program. She delights in trying to track her “alums” after they leave high school where their career paths take them. One of her favorite exchanges came last year from a student who went through the program in 1992.

Carlos D. Bustamante e-mailed Granger to offer his volunteer help for anything she might need to help keep the Young Scholars Program strong. Now an assistant professor at Cornell, where he teaches and does research in statistical genomics, Bustamante credited the program for his career.

“I personally feel that (the Young Scholars Program) is an incredibly important and valuable experience for Florida’s youths interested in science,” he wrote. “The program is the reason I went into science—as it turns out, had I not gone to YSP, I would most likely have become an attorney.”

It’s the Teachers, Stupid!

When critics point to blame for young Americans’ abysmal lack of knowledge about science and technology, a national scarcity of qualified, highly motivated science and math teachers typically tops the list.

This was a chief complaint cited by the writers of A Nation at Risk in 1983. Now 25 years on, many school districts around the country can boast remarkable gains in beefing up their science curricula with not only science-savvy teachers but also those who actually care about their profession. But too many others, say federal surveys, are no better off than they were a quarter century ago—and a shameful lot of them have lost ground.

In Florida, where salaries for K-12 teachers ranked 29th in the nation in 2003, student performance in science is predictably dismal. A 1998 assessment by the NAEP of Florida 8th graders—the only survey available—found only 23 percent “at or above” proficiency in science.

Moreover, in 2000, only 13 states had 80 percent or more science teachers with a major degree in science (Florida wasn’t among them.) Gerry G. Meisels, a chemistry professor and director of the Coalition for Science Literacy at the University of South Florida, reports that currently, fully “90 percent of the new middle school math teachers in Hillsborough County are not certified” to teach mathematics.

Honing the skills of science teachers is thus an OSTA priority. Science on the Move is only one of the programs aimed at doing exactly that. One of OSTA’s most popular offerings is called Great Exploration in Math and Science (GEMS). The program is actually a nationally known, standardized set of math and science curricula designed for teachers of grades K-10 by researchers at U. California-Berkeley. Since 2000, Florida State has been a certified GEMS center, a source for a variety of teacher workshops directed by OSTA instructors in science and math. Just since 2002, the program has served nearly 400 teachers and their students.

But in 1999, Granger and Herrnkind won a sizeable National Science Foundation grant—nearly $1 million—for a five-year training program specifically targeting teachers. Named Science Inquiry for Teachers, the program provides teachers the opportunity to develop and conduct real science projects they design themselves.

Herrnkind says the summer program—which may end this year since the NSF unit that originally funded it has been cut—goes to the heart of what he sees as one of the biggest problems within the ranks of middle- and high school science educators.

“How do we expect teachers who have never had any real experience in doing science to be able to convey the inquiry process to students and the wonder and awe that science represents?,” he asks. “Scientists aren’t a bunch of magical geeks—we don’t do black magic. This program is aimed at showing teachers that they can think like we think, and as a consequence, bring that insight into their classrooms and become better teachers.

”The program, not surprisingly, focuses on marine ecology—Herrnkind’s stock in trade. Teachers who sign up for the program get quick immersions into the rich world of marine life all around their base, FSU’s marine lab. Assembled into teams, the teachers go on field trips led by Herrnkind and staff who help them come up with plausible theories for things they see around them. Then its up to the teachers to figure out the best ways to use the scientific method to test their theories. Even though he’s spent nearly four decades as an educator himself, Herrnkind never tires of the proverbial “aha!” moments that his days at the coast with teachers frequently afford him.

“We don’t throw a lot of data at these teachers, we just let them exercise their curiosity. They come away with an intellectual investment in what they’re doing. They really get into it and it’s exciting to watch.”\

To the Battlements

Blame it on what you will—apathy, lethargy, nihilism, a conspiracy by mass marketers or science-hating religious zealots—America’s morass in science literacy is costing the nation dearly, say analysts within the AAAS.

At stake is nothing less than the fuel that drives the nation’s economy, say any number of concerned scientists. Distortions of what science is and what it means, abetted by an ignorant populace (including journalists—editor), are coloring science policies at the federal level, says Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of Science.

“Both the U.S. policy climate and funding trends for science are deteriorating, and those changes pose significant risk to the future of U.S. science,” Leshner wrote in a Science editorial last October. “We need to focus our full energy on the U.S. home front, because the serious erosion of the climate that originally led to American’s preeminence in science is now threatening its very eminence—and thus its future.

”It’s to this mission—beefing up the “home front” in the name of science education and literacy—that FSU’s Office of Science Teaching Activities is largely dedicated, says Ellen Granger. Overall, FSU’s effort is exceedingly modest—perhaps even quixotic in some minds—but the encouraging news is that the program complements dozens of similar programs around the nation pulling hard in the same direction, fully aware of the consequences of giving up.

“We want everybody to be a scientifically literate citizen because it’s so vitally important in our highly technological society,” she says. “And with society becoming even more heavily reliant on science every day, we’ve simply got to have (more) people able to make appropriate decisions based on an understanding of science.”