After reading this I asked myself: Is it any wonder college students get sucked in to emotionally based eco-causes/NGO’s that spout claims based on questionable science? This troubling press release comes from Michigan State University. A link to the full paper follows below, which is well worth reading because it gives insight into the questions and answers given. It is quite an eye-opener. – Anthony
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change, according to research published in the January issue of BioScience.
The study, whose authors include several current and former researchers from Michigan State University, calls for a new way of teaching – and, ultimately, comprehending – fundamental scientific principles such as the conservation of matter.
“Improving students’ understanding of these biological principles could make them better prepared to deal with important environmental issues such as global climate change,” said Charles “Andy” Anderson, MSU professor of teacher education and co-investigator on the project.
The study was led by Laurel Hartley, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver who started the work as a postdoctoral researcher at MSU. Co-researchers include Anderson, Brook Wilke, Jonathon Schramm and Joyce Parker, all from MSU, and Charlene D’Avanzo from Hampshire College.
The researchers assessed the fundamental science knowledge of more than 500 students at 13 U.S. colleges in courses ranging from introductory biology to advanced ecology.
Most students did not truly understand the processes that transform carbon. They failed to apply principles such as the conservation of matter, which holds that when something changes chemically or physically, the amount of matter at the end of the process needs to equal the amount at the beginning. (Matter doesn’t magically appear or disappear.)
Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.
Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”
The researchers say biology textbooks and high-school and college science instructors need to do a better job of teaching the fundamentals – particularly how matter transforms from gaseous to solid states and vice-versa.
It won’t be easy, Anderson said, because students’ beliefs of the carbon cycle are deeply engrained (such as the misconception that plants get most of their nutrients from the soil). Instructors should help students understand that the use of such “everyday, informal reasoning” runs counter to true scientific literacy, he said.
The implications are great for a generation of citizens who will grapple with complicated environmental issues such as clean energy and carbon sequestration more than any generation in history, Anderson said.
“One of the things I’m interested in,” he said, “is students’ understanding of environmental problems. And probably the most important environmental problem is global climate change. And that’s attributable to a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And understanding where that carbon dioxide is coming from and what you can do about it fundamentally involves understanding the scientific carbon cycle.”
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Michigan State University has been advancing knowledge and transforming lives through innovative teaching, research and outreach for more than 150 years. MSU is known internationally as a major public university with global reach and extraordinary impact. Its 17 degree-granting colleges attract scholars worldwide who are interested in combining education with practical problem solving.
The full study is here (PDF) and is well worth the read.
h/t to Indur Goklany
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“They failed to apply principles such as the conservation of matter, which holds that when something changes chemically or physically, the amount of matter at the end of the process needs to equal the amount at the beginning. (Matter doesn’t magically appear or disappear.)”
They only introduced conservation of matter / energy equations to the IPCC climate models during AR4 didn’t they? Seems the experts also break such fundamental rules.
Studies about students’ understanding of history, government, math, etc., have shown pretty much the same thing as this one. The reason for this is simple, students don’t spend much time studying. We did a survey of our Freshman and found that half studied 10 or fewer hours a week and only 8% (if I remember correctly) studied 20 or more hours per week.
Students at non elite colleges value grades divided by effort. They will admire a friend who gets a C with minimal effort more than one works works very hard to get an A. They might even view the second friend as a sap. And mostly likely the second friend is a goody-goody type who wants to impress her or his professor or parents and does not really care about what they are learning.
Learn Chinese.
I’ve encountered this when training undergrads and now even grad students. A big problem is the customized major. Students can pick and choose their courses and avoid the harder science courses. I spent days trying to teach a grad student, who graduated with honors, how to pipette. She made it through without a research methodology, chemistry or biosci lab course, but still thought she could do a genetics based PhD dissertation.
That’s part of the reason why I chose this internet moniker.
I’m pretty sure I learned this in the sixth grade. At least the basics of the process. We breathe in oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. Plants take in CO2, put out oxygen. I thought this was basic science that everyone who goes through high school is supposed to know. How are they supposed to save the planet if they don’t even have the slightest idea to how it works? This is massive, epic fail.
Students that can’t grasp science and mathematics take liberal arts classes and become teachers, teachers that can not teach science and mathematics, teachers that put down the “nerds” that understand science and mathematics. No one that is “cool” would even try to understand math and science. How can students aquire an understanding of things that the teachers don’t like or understand? Liberal arts professors teach Junk Science as part of their philosophy and students have no reason to believe they are being lied to. This yields more teachers teaching junk science to ignorant students. When I was in school 50 years ago I was correcting teachers in class when they presented erronous facts. Science and math teachers made the correction and thanked me. Liberal arts teachers hated me and tried to get even.
My wife’s Alma Mater BTW- I remember struggling through Pre-Calc, Calculus,
Organic Chem. (didn’t use any of it. ) and ah, Shakespeare all in the name of a good
set of courses and well-rounded education-Confess that Shakespeare still gives me nightmares at times. But I would not trade any of my undergrad years for the
World…
Sad Commentary on today’s educational system..
“A buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere”? Who’ll teach the teachers?
Two words to explain this phenomenon, “Agenda 21”. Bush senior brought this to the USA. The dumbing down of America is deliberate.
Similarly, there is a study that is often done at college campuses to determine the percentage of students who can adequately explain why we have seasons. The results are staggering. In the last study that I reviewed, less than 30% of Harvard grads understood this basic concept.
o’neill has a way with words:
4 Jan: Spiked: Brendan O’Neill: The icy grip of the politics of fear
The snow crisis of December 2010: what a striking snapshot of the chasm that separates the warming-obsessed elite from the rest of us.
It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies – and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis…
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10046/
What a bunch of techno-mysterio speak. He makes no sense, but since he uses scientific jargon it can be published by the University because no-one, but him understands it.
This is junk hyperbole. The school needs to educate its editors. What a rip off for this school’s students and their parents.
If he honestly wants to teach about the carbon cycle I would suggest he look at paleo-measurements of CO2 during the last glaciation cycles and base his conclusions on hard data vs. speculative models.
This statement is a joke – and to make matters worse, apparently no one at that institution has the information necessary to correct or refute this garbage. Our science has been infiltrated by the unlearned, but well spoken illiterates.
My sad understanding of this is that……young’ens are too dumb to brainwash
In a richer country where decently-paid jobs are available, young people tend to avoid diligent work.
The situation is the same here; students like to play with IT gadgets and don’t want to read textbooks.
However, such may have been as old as human history, as evidenced by old men’s complaint on a stone monument, excavated from a Mesopotamian digging site…………
Anderson: “One of the things I’m interested in,” he said, “is students’ understanding of environmental problems. And probably the most important environmental problem is global climate change. And that’s attributable to a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And understanding where that carbon dioxide is coming from and what you can do about it fundamentally involves understanding the scientific carbon cycle.”
If Anderson teaches this “understanding”, his students will still lack scientific literacy.
http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html?pop=yes&pid=9#
have a look [click on the VoD ison to play] and weep.
I learned the basics of photosynthesis in fourth grade. In my obviously limited experience, I came to believe that most reasonably knowledgeable people, over time, become acquainted with the basic biographies and contributions of history’s great scientists and discoverers.
Last year a leading “climate scientist” (with a Ph.D.), in a widely circulated letter to “climate science” students and faculty, referred to Einstein as a watchmaker turned physicist. Though her statement spurred hundreds of comments, almost none of them challenged this basic error.
It is obviously possible for someone to earn a Ph.D. in a hard science, become a tenured faculty member at a university, and become widely published in scientific journals without encountering even a basic 3-paragraph biography of Albert Einstein.
Yet we are supposed to believe that these people can decode Nature?
So I’ve read the whole paper and what annoys me the most is that these authors had a preconceived conclusion and matched that to real world responses in a way that denigrates those responses because they did not follow their their preconceived notion of scientific thought correctness. This is another example of supposed “scientific consensus” being violated. If any of these individuals have tenure, it should be challenged for competency. What a vacuous paper.
Right now I’m scheduled to teach environmental science next quarter. One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of introductory (conceptual) general science books now use global warming as an example of scientific theory as opposed to “pseudo-science”. I think I’ll take a slightly different approach, LOL.
Here is some more scary stuff very well articulated and easy to understand. When you see this, you may need a stiff drink.
Concentrate the attention on the carbon dioxide cycle and ignore the fact that that a cold carbon dioxide gas cannot re-radiate to a much warmer surface until the gas volume is at the same temperature, or above, the surface temperature. Even then only about half gets back to the surface. That is about half the 8% or so of the total energy from the surface that the gas is capable of absorbing anyway.
So, let’s see.. most of plant mass of annuals *does* come from the soil in the form of water. I do hope they specified dry weight, otherwise the test givers fail.
Secondly, conservation of matter is one of Piaget’s developmental stages at around age 7. So, the students actually have this. As for “the atoms in fat molecules”, hydrogens outnumber carbons by about 2:1. So, most of the hydrogens are converted to water by supplying reducing equivalents to the oxidative phosphorylation pathway and leave the body via urine, the digestive tract, sweat, tears and humidification of breath. I do hope they specifically asked where the majority of the *mass* of fat goes, otherwise the test givers fail. This is a common mis-conception that can be cleared up in biochemistry in about 30 minutes. No big deal, unless they haven’t had any biochemistry.
Furthermore, whoever said “understanding the scientific carbon cycle” is an idiot and is throwing in “science” to intimidate freshmen (or reporters). Just another slam job on students by people who shouldn’t be giving tests.
Do you have an authoritative link to an E.O. (Executive Order)?
.
Yes, but how many are marketing majors, ‘organizational leadership’ majors and so on? What bearing does the carbon cycle have on the federal rules for evidence, GAAP, being a social worker, etc. I doubt that many people ever even knew about the carbon cycle in the first place. Point in case: AGW theory run amok.
Somewhere it is written that it is much more difficult to have people “unlearn” things than it is to learn them. I’ve had entry-level college students tell me it is impossible for a substance to change from solid to vapor without melting. So I ask if they have ever seen old ice cubes in a modern freezer? They say they have but still believe something else happened – usually because a 9th or 10th grade “science” teacher told them that the proper way was to go through the sequence of solid-liquid-gas.
They go away thinking the instructor (me) is crazy, that sublimation is a magic trick, and their high school teacher is smarter than anyone in the physics, chemistry, geology, or geography departments at the university.
Consider:
Charles “Andy” Anderson, MSU professor of teacher education, says
“When you see a tree growing, . . . it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”
I shudder to think how this confusing statement gets incorporate into the newly minted teacher, regurgitated in a beginning science class, and melds into the developing intellect of a young teenager.
It isn’t so much that the universities do not teach science as much as most students avoid science classes as much as possible. Most students take as little math and science as possible. The end result is what I call the advanced high school degree.
I work with many competent scientists and engineers that know their stuff, but them the people with the liberal arts degrees know less science and math than 8th graders because it is at least fresh with the kids.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic