Adriel Paderanga
On the whole, I found this article fascinating as I focused on two points in particular – the “U-shaped pattern of Americans’ comparative performance on science literacy measures,” (488) and the importance of “free-choice learning” (486), which is credited for supplying the scientific education for the other 95% of our lives.
Science, in its simplest definition and form, is an ordered line of questioning designed to answer why “something” happens in the environment. It requires a curiosity that comes with early childhood, but is quickly quashed in many as they approach their tweens. I believe that after a certain age, many children disassociate that intrinsic curiosity from the results it produces. Science becomes something to be memorized and discarded at semester’s end, not internalized for the satisfaction of learning. The focus shifts from “learning for its own sake” to “learning for the grade”. It’s for this reason I think that elementary U.S. students outperform their counterparts on TIMSS and PISA, perform at a mediocre level in middle school/high school, and do better in college. Relative to how I learned in elementary and how I’m learning now, in college, I struggled to finish my work in any science-related courses such as biology and mathematics. Before, I’d read my textbook for the pleasure of it, and then it became a chore, work to be avoided until absolutely necessary. Science in school was divorced from reality.
In college, I had the freedom to choose my own courses, and with that came a sense of ownership and subsequent responsibility regarding the course matter. In making that choice, I started to regain some of the curiosity I possessed in childhood. Learning was still work, but my fascination with the information I gained made it much more bearable. I’m reminded of Tom Sawyer and his fence. He managed to make his friends enjoy the drudgery of fence painting by pretending it was fun. Mindset is everything when it comes to learning, and if we can change the K-12 education system to incorporate more freedom in course selection with regards to science, I imagine we’d see an increase in performance. Which shouldn’t be the end goal, but is a nice bonus all the same.
