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
Virtually every child in the past 3 years has seen “An Inconvienient Truth” in science class. I think it has replaced the carbon cycle portion of the curriculum. In Canada we get our climate science guilt trip from Dr. David Suzuki, who states that Rachel Carson is his hero. Of course having a PhD. in the sexuality of fruit flies qualifies him to be the Canadian God of Climate.
“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.”
My belly is a carbon sink!
@ur momisugly Stop Global Dumbing Now says:
Could we perhaps start with spelling? To be dumb is to be bereft of speech (which is far from the case in many). Dumm is German for stupid, hence the American term “dumbing down”, to become more stupid, is evidently a victim of itself.
Please rectify and describe as “Dumming down” in future.
If you really want to be depressed about the future of humankind, try asking a college student a question that begins with “what do you think …” or “why do you think …”. I had a history teacher in college who quite often asked “why do you think this civilization did these things?” The students hated that teacher. He had the audacity of making them think. They were expecting to be lectured.
Modern academia does not teach us to think, it just gives us knowledge. Students accept whatever the instructor is telling them; they don’t know better because they were never given critical thinking or personal thinking skills. That is the real tragedy. Sure science students not knowing science 101 is a tragedy. But the root cause of that problem is because instructors and teachers only lecture and never let students think.
An excellent way to control people is by keeping them ignorant. If people can be ignorant and without original thoughts, even better for those who wish to control. This is the real tragedy. We need to teach thinking instead of obedience to instructors, obedience to Hollywood, and obedience to fads. I’m just glad my parents made me think.
Robert Wykoff says:
January 8, 2011 at 11:15 pm
Doesn’t splitting atoms “magically” make matter disappear?
Gary Mount says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:16 am
Matter can be turned into energy. So its conservation of energy, not matter isn’t it?
You know that E = mc^2 equation.
That’s what I was taught at school, and burning matter meant that some of the matter involved was converted into energy. The the problem being that c^2 is an extremely large number and therefore m is not easily measured in most reactions.
What I’m getting from this discussion is, you are not worried so much about what’s NOT being taught, as you are worried about what IS being taught – “INCONVENIENT TRUTH” and other propaganda in the classroom. I agree.
Simple solution: homeschool your kid. No, my kid will not work for NASA like his grandpa does, but we don’t care. He made a barometer out of a rice milk carton, and it worked! He made snow one night with a hose sprayer and a squirrel cage fan, and it lasted for two days! (we built this ramshackle sled run out of scrap plywood – cowabunga!)
Whenever my kids, or my husband for that matter, want to accept something without questioning, I make them drop two things out of an upstairs window — gets ’em every time!
Science is not a course in school, it’s a way of thinking that children learn, mostly I think from their parents. It’s the art of questioning instead of being fed. That is what education is, a habit that you learn. And like Caesar Chavez said, “Once you have education, nobody can take it away from you.”
Frankly, I think public school kills more brains every year than marijuana.
I’m not getting that the investigators are any more versed in the science than the students…
Clearly Science has become a subset of Religion & Politics. What actually happens in reality no longer matters – it is what you choose to believe that is important today. The science behind physical processes is whatever you want it to be in order to support your Religious & Political beliefs. CAGW being a prime example.
One thing that is most definitely lacking is teaching of the philosophy of science, as best elucidated by Karl Popper. The key is to never cease to re-examine prior assumptions, and to demand testability from a theory. Sadly, many popular “theories” of today fall far short of being testable, and are sometimes not even based on observational evidence.
The scientists themselves don’t seem to fully understand the cycle – CO2 from cement making slowly returns to the cement (in concrete) over time in a phenomenon known as concrete carbonation. The fully degraded old concrete has sucked up the most CO2. Plaster – another cement- made by burning limestone to lime, too, over time sucks back its lost CO2 and makes the plaster back into limestone.
This thread reminded my of some research done in the US (in the 80’s I think). I cannot remember all the details but I think the students involved were about 5th grade.
They were given five questions. One of these was to guess how much of a log of wood was made up of water, how much came from the soil and how much came from the air.
The questions were chosen because these were topics that were to be studied in the next semester.
The teachers were then asked to estimate how correct the students answers would be and how correct they would be at the end of the course.
What the teachers did not know was that the researchers were going to come back at the end of the course and test the students again.
The results were more traumatic for the teachers than for the students.
Again the details are a bit fuzzy but from memory the students were about 50% accurate before the course (compared with the teachers estimate of 25%) and only 25% accurate after the course (compared with the teacher’s estimate of 75%).
So the teachers underestimated the basic reasoning skill of their pupils and overestimated their own ability to educate.
The researchers came to the conclusion that most of us establish a basic understanding of how the world works which is surprisingly accurate. Education tends to undermine our confidence in these intuitive models as teachers replace them with well researched but very abstract models, often simplified to the point of uselessness. Because they are also presented without any real life context they are difficult to rationalise and validate and we are left confused.
Are we surprised that so many of us have swallowed AGW as truth?
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 8, 2011 at 9:58 pm
http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html?pop=yes&pid=9#
“have a look [click on the VoD ison to play] and weep.”
GOOD GRIEF. We were better off in medieval times.
Imagine when these types gets into government. We are DOOMED!
I guest you could say that science has run amuck. I just sent the following, email to my eleven year old granddaughter, because of her abilities in math and science and concern for the environment. I would like for to read the right information about CO2.
http://WWW.homeharvest.com/carbondioxideenrichment.htm
There is a very good reason the Atmospheric Carbon Cycle is not taught in our schools. If it were, the light bulb would go off above every students head, and they would rightly conclude: “This global warming stuff is a lot of baloney”!
comprehending – fundamental scientific principles such as the conservation of matter
This reminded me … I’ve been having this problem with some of the CO2 numbers I come across that seem to take thousands of tonnes of coal and have them making tens of thousand of tonnes of CO2.
“Conservation of matter” would say otherwise.
So, now that we know our children lack even the most basic knowledge of science. Are we handing out less degrees associated with the sciences?
I doubt it.
Most Americans lack scientific literacy.
cal says:
January 9, 2011 at 8:19 am
interesting post – but it also illustrates the benefit of practical ability and demonstration in conjunction with my previous comment about working from basics. Teaching something in a responsible manner is of course the realm of the teachers, awakening the natural curiosity in kids and channelling it into active ‘interest’ is the key, IMHO. Modern students (schoolkids), in my opinion, do not get enough ‘hands on’ anymore, too much internet, ‘coursework’, powerpoint presentations and lack of practicals (health and safety and all that gubbins!) and I genuinely believe it makes them less capable in the real world, indeed half of them seem to be ‘automatons’ who cannot do anything unusual without directions first!
So I don’t think simple ‘lecturing’ the kids is the best way forward, and the best teachers probably know this?
We are all guilty of the ‘I’ve heard it before’ moment, where you just ‘switch off’ and don’t listen because you already ‘know it’. I confess to doing it all the time when reading articles, I tend to speed read and skip stuff I have ‘read’ before, believing it is likely irrelevent or not worthy of deeper consideration – then get flipping annoyed when I have to go back and re-read stuff to actually understand a point!
And as any parent here will admit – you simply cannot tell modern kids anything! LOL – so for me – teaching has got to be the hardest job in the world to do well, and I respect the teachers I had and the good ones around today.
The MSU study is inspiring: teaching principles not indoctrinating politics. That is the real problem.
So: Could these wise professors offer us online or book examples of how we can study the principles ourselves?
thank you!
Can’t say as I’m surprised by this article. I graduated from high school back in ’87 and the criteria on math and science was rather lacking. All that was needed was 1.5yrs of science, 1.5yrs of math but 4yrs of english. Is it any wonder todays college students are not well grounded in the sciences?
While reading through the study, I see that there is a link to a website that teaches the principles. http://www.biodqc.org/ Looking for more help if anyone, particularly the professors from that MSU study on students’ overreliance on informal reasoning, can offer assistance.
Thank you again!
One more comment about this state of ignorance we are in:
Even these best MSU, principle-based teachers will have a tough time breaking through 100 years of accumulated nonsense in the hard heads of our youth. They have been taught culturally that there are NO principles at work politically, religiously, even scientifically. There is only what they subjectively see, want, feel and engineer! Pretty retro, that power drive, but when you disguise it as “progress” in the language of experts, it works for a while.
In fact, it was precisely because of new findings at the atomic and molecular level in the last 150 years that suddenly all principles were thrown out (Newton’s laws etc) perhaps because even our brightest could not see a way to connect all those levels of activity together in a principled way. (elusive unified field theory).
Nonetheless, true science perseveres and may even be aided by the principled hand of God, even at this late date. If that’s too much of a reach for some, stay with the meek though secular search for truth.
College students don’t only lack scientific literacy. Many of them are just plain functionally illiterate in general. Yet they graduate anyway: click
The link above was gleaned from my second-favorite blog, Maggie’s Farm. Here’s a list sorted by “Education.”
“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.”
Well I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that plants build from the CO2 they intake although deep down I knew but I hadn’t really thought about the question of what material plants use to grow and nutrients from the soil would have featured in an answer I would have given too. I don’t actually think either matter really matters for issues of climate change.
I retired from teaching in 1996. For most of my carreer I was an elementary school science teacher and had the backing one of the finest science departments in North America. (Calgary). I know how remarkable it was because of a report from a parliamentary committee and feed-back from the National Science Convention in New Orleans in the early 90’s.
The grade one students started in the science lab three times a week in grade one and finished with a very solid foundation of science methods and knowledge at the end of grade 6. They had six years of hands on science, both in the lab setting and out in the field. From grade three and beyond they were encouraged to enter projects in the annual school science fair and the top projects from grade 5 and 6 were entered in the city science fair. It was a joy to see the gym filled with close to 200 projects some years. There were over 500 hundred students soaking up science in that room every three days. The kids were at ease in a lab setting and as a school, scored consistantly in the top ten for the province on provincial exams at the grade six level. Without a strong team in the science department it would have been difficult to do what I did. What was important to me was the fact that the students did science, they didn’t just study it. They made C02 and experimented with it. The same with oxygen and hydrogen. As you can imagine, the highlight with hydrogen was the flame test with a flaming splint into a vial oF freshly made gas. Thankfully, no grade sixer thought to try the flaming methane gas test.
Unfortunately, during those years, I had to put up with the mantra from the educators down town that elementary school teachers don’t teach subjects, they teach children. A strong principal and supportive parents kept the wolves away from the door. It wasn’t to last.
A year after I left the science room and the school administrators retired, the science department was closed down and all the equipment and supplies scattered every which way. The floor of the science room was carpeted and a new Assistant Principal took over the room for her home room.I subbed for a while and saw the sorry state of science in many schools. It was not unusual to see a single table set up in the corner of the class room where some “science” could be done after doing other assignments. Most teachers had little or no science background.
I’m confident that many of the students who had the opportunity to be immersed in science,would, as young adults now, see the sad state of science today. I hope that someday our society will see to it that we get back on track but probably not in my life time. The Russians provided the imputus in 1959. Maybe ever increasing science and engineering graduates in Asia will provide the needed push down the road. With increasing numbers of blogs like this one, there just might be some hope in spite of the odds.
My heart-felt thanks to Andrew and all those who share their knowledge with those of us who are trying to learn and understand.