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.”
###
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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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.”
Actually… , the largest source is dissolved CO2, carbonic acid and carbonates in soil water, as the cooler, heavier-than-air, highly soluble CO2 makes it’s way through the root-leaf transpiration process. More CO2 comes out the stomata than goes in as it heats up in the solar-heated leaf tissue along with transpired H2O.
We are all singing from the same hymn sheet.
It is not confined to the U.S. The teaching of ‘science’ in the UK has been ‘dumbed down’, particularly up to age 16. Environment contaminates and dilutes everything.
Teaching respiratory physiology to final year medical undergraduates when they struggle to know the composition of air and have no understanding of barometric pressure, partial pressure etc. is to say the least challenging. And, of course, they are bright and work hard; they just haven’t been taught basics in school or med. school, but tons of ‘ethics’ and ‘communications’.
onion says @11:31 am:
“Well I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that plants build from the CO2 they intake… I don’t actually think either matter really matters for issues of climate change.”
I doubt that there are more than a handful of readers of this site so scientifically illiterate that they believe that trees use material from the soil to grow. If that were so, houseplants in pots would need regular replenishment of their soil.
And the question does have a direct bearing on “issues of climate change.” But it would take an enormous amount of education to get you up to the 6th grade level necessary to understand the connection.
Instead, I suggest you stop cluttering up the threads with the nonsense you obviously get from alarmist blogs, and spend a few months reading the WUWT archives, including the comments. Everyone concerned will benefit.
The root of all evil in American educational systems today is that the verb ‘criticize’ has been banned. Some of you might be old enough to remember when that word was commonplace. I remember very well when that verb was replaced by the noun ‘critique’. It happened first in the business community. My guess is that it started there because no one cared about the differences between ‘criticize’ and ‘critique’ and no one in that community will risk ruffling feathers. The replacement has been successful for some decades now. Now for the bad part: the word ‘critique’ has been banned also. How bad is the situation? Well, over the last couple of weeks, I posted twice on this site in defense of Willis because he had been so politically incorrect as to criticize the work of a Warmist. Back in the BPC days (Before PC), the give and take of criticism was commonplace and no one was offended when someone revealed a prediction that had proved false or inconsistent assumptions. APC, mentioning such matters amounts to a serious faux paus.
I begin each of my classes by explaining to students that they are going to experience something new and exciting in my course, namely, criticism. I tell them that they are expected to develop theses and defend them against criticism from all comers. At first, this is very hard for them to understand because they do not know the meaning of ‘criticize’, ‘criticism’, “to critique,” or even ‘critique’. They learn or they fail. (I do not say these things to my colleagues because they can make one’s life very difficult.)
You might not have registered the fact that no Warmista responds to criticism. They do not acknowledge statements that are critical of their work. Really. They simply do not respond to interviewers or correspondents when they make critical statements. Warmista are living large in the era of PC. (Perhaps the most memorable example of this sort of thing is Obama’s refusal to acknowledge that a majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare.)
The first task of those who would like to see the Kommissars of PC deposed is to restore the word ‘criticize’ to its original meaning. Criticism must once again become commonplace and no less respectable than assertion.
Why bother with all this science stuff when in 10 months can be a Master of Global Environmental Change and you get to drive the bus in one of the millions of Green Jobs mandated in government bureaucracies, NGO’s, MSM and academia?
Click here for one of the top rated and network your way to success!
http://master-in-global-environmental-change.ie.edu/program.php
All it takes is “a clear interest in global environmental issues and institutional/social transformation, as well as in information technology.”
Interesting CO2 factoid in new AGU presentation on “all good” windfarm turbulence effects on crops.
http://www.ameslab.gov/news/news-releases/wind-turbines
The “beautiful plume of increased turbulence that persisted even a quarter-mile downwind of a turbine” with “potential benefit to crops- that increased airflows could enable corn and soybean plants to more readily extract atmospheric CO2, a needed “fuel” for crops. The extra turbulence might also pump extra CO2 from the soil. Both results could facilitate the crops ability to perform photosynthesis.”
Nice to see photosynthesis lives still in DOE sponsored research but wonder about the net soil drying “benefits” for irrigated crops?
Some effort also needed with “a wind turbine is nothing more than a tall tree with a well-pruned stem” in initial computer models.
That was an interesting video, Leif, thanks for the link. Believe me, I now know all about the private physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, biology of students. I taught a “physics without much math” course for health sciences for a few years, and I was always disappointed in the outcomes. The students had all finished (successfully) a terminal college math course (algebra or problem solving), but they couldn’t work anything at all in physics, as far as I could tell.
My friend, Adachi, says to me “They can’t work algebra ’cause they can’t handle fractions.” I didn’t believe him so I added a lab that made use of the lens equation and sure enough they would do things like add 1/20 + 1/32 and get 2/52…they would add the numerators and denominators separately, and tell me that this was good enough for high school. Things like 1/4-5/4 would have undefined results! They were, mathematically, helpless people who are then expected to do things like figure dosages of X-rays or medicines. Scary, isn’t it?
Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach. Those that can neither do nor teach, go into sociology or media studies, where they spend the rest of their lives making up little stories about why they can neither do, nor teach.
Anthony:
As a former teacher in science in junior high and then later as a professor in the engineering department of a large university, the issue of the inadequacies of science education is one that I was partly responsible for creating and later became a victim. In that sense I am probably qualified to comment on the issue raised by the MSU researchers. Before me there are at least 60 comments about the cause of the problem raised by MSU.
From my vantage point when I taught junior high students, they did not want the think. In an effort to gain approval they gave back what they thought I wanted to hear. They didn’t like when I asked the next question, how do you know that is the correct answer? Some might call this critical reasoning. When I faced college students I experience the same response. Help me find the answer you want on the test.
While Associate Dean I conducted a series of interviews from recent engineering students about science principles they will be using in their future careers. The questions were simple concepts from physics and mathematics that one would expect them to have mastered. I also video taped the answers and gave a copy to the university administration. I never got the tape back. I don’t blame them. It is embarrassing that the best students don’t have the ability to apply the principles to a question in science.
The question about science education is very complex as one can discern from the many comments in this post. The question I was always asking myself, how can I teach a student to think about the information they have at their disposal? The question is not easy to answer. The correct answer depends upon who is asking the question, what the students knows, the correctness of the information at their disposal, their ability to recall the knowledge, and their ability to connect the dots
If the experiment run by Harvard, MSU, and others reveled in this BLOG are valid, something is radically wrong with science education. Maybe the paradigm that has constituted science education, particularly in America, is not correct. Science is not knowledge alone, particularly when the information is tainted or watered down. Science involves careful consideration ideas with plenty of debate and discourse and skepticism. Is that what we are teaching?
Each tonne of carbon you burn takes two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere – carbon has mass 12, oxygen has mass 16, therefore a CO2 molecule is 3.6 times heavier than a carbon atom, so yes the CO2 is a lot heavier than the coal.
What do you expect from kids who were, for the most part, nothing more than consumers of a mass produced product (government education) that is characterized more by social promotion and grade inflation than by the transfer of knowledge. It’s hard to recover from 12 years or more of being taught what to think rather than how to think!
Neo says:
January 9, 2011 at 9:28 am
… 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.
Actually, The combustion of 3 thousand tons of anthracite coal (nearly 100% carbon) would make ~11,000 tons of CO2. The ratio is roughly 3.66 to 1 which is the ratio of a mole of CO2 (44) to 1 mole of Carbon (12)
Quote from the release:
“And probably the most important environmental problem is global climate change. And that’s attributable to a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Who will teach the teachers?
From Kevin Kilty on January 9, 2011 at 12:36 pm:
Thankfully modern medicine is taking care of this issue. In the interest of Quality Control, brought about by the overwhelming need to avoid lawsuits in the face of skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums, the correct dosage will be “whatever the computer says it is.”
With the human element removed, all errors can be eliminated as computers are infallible. Just in case, the computer can be queried three times with the same info inputed, and dosing can proceed as long as two of the three results are “close enough” to agreement. This only needs to continue until Cost Containment decides any error rate is negligible thus the computer only needs to be bothered once.
Besides, if there would happen to be an error (highly unlikely), it is obviously the fault of the company that programmed the computer, thus they will be the ones who get sued. Thus to promote Quality Assurance and reduce health care costs, at the likely insistence of the computer programmer, they’ll have a second computer automatically verify the results of the first computer.
Really, since the way to make everything better and remove all possibility of error is to sit back and let the computers do the thinking, as is found throughout our modern society, what does it matter if humans can calculate those things at all?
To be fair to the students in this, I think the “teachers” are poor at posing questions, and had an axe to grind. If I was to compare the oxidation reaction of fat (an organic chain) to the oxidation of octane (an organic chain), and were to use a short phrase to compare the two, “burned off” is actually fairly descriptive.
In octane, the hydrogen combines with the oxygen to form water, and the carbon combines with oxygen to form CO2 which are ejected into the air as gases/vapours in a process known a “burning”.
In fat, the hydrogen combines with the oxygen to form water, and the carbon combines with oxygen to form CO2 which are ejected into the air as gases/vapours in a process which does seem to rather similar in those fundamentals.
“Melting away” is pure marketing speak from anti-cellulite creams however.
Further more, the majority of the plant is actually water, and this does (in most plants) come from the soil. The solid bits are just to keep the water the right shape. Even then, the solid bits in many instances come from the soil. Nitrogen (fixed by soil bacteria), phosphorus etc. That’s why manure spreading is so important – it’s not done for fun. Again, a poor question.
So despite my usual criticisms of the standard of edukashun (TM), I think the students were hard-done to in this particular instance. The “teachers” need to be slapped a bit, and made to up their game.
What do you expect when universities such as Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada offer degrees in Environmental Studies. The list of lectures would make David Suzuki smile.
david beattie , it was interesting to read your comments about the state of science education in Calgary schools. I did junior and senior high in Calgary graduating in 1971 and the science labs were well equipped and available for use for those of us who were interested in conducting experiments after hours. I’m sure that many of the experiments that we did even in junior high school would be considered to be too dangerous in our current risk-averse age. We were quite comfortable around sulfuric and nitric acids the science teacher only reigned us in when we tried to make TNT (only got the first nitro group on).
What surprised me was that the physics we took was equivalent to first year physics at the university of Ottawa where I did my undergrad and the final year math class included calculus. The state of science education in Ontario at that time wasn’t even close to what was available in Calgary.
Also, in 1969 the Calgary school board made a large amount of computer time available for student use at the University of Calgary and a number of us lived at the UofC data center programming and trying to find new places to hide from our parents who had strange ideas like we should be sleeping at night, not writing programs.
Science fairs were large affairs at that time and were places one could meet fellow nerds. The elementary plant physiology that started this discussion thread would have been taught at a grade 9 level in Calgary. The biology courses that I took in high school included biochemistry and physiology and a knowledge of mathematics was assumed for all science courses.
I still have my high school textbooks in storage and should compare them to modern textbooks to see how much science has been dumbed down. I’m not sure if the same division of students into various groups still applies as I was in the group of people who were expected to go into university. The other group was those who were interested in going into a trade and they had a different level of science/mathematical education and finally there was the lowest group that were headed for secretarial and other work who had an even lower level of mathematics and science. This group was primarily female and the only course which I took at this level was typing and we annoyed the teacher to no end as we were the only 3 males in the class and we easily determined that all we had to do to pass the course was to type fast enough and never bothered with learning how to setup letters and other documents on typewriters but just made it through with blinding typing speed.
“When you see a tree growing,”Anderson said,”it is much easier to believe that tree is something coming out of the soil rather than the scientific. . . .”
A common picture of a forest in latitude 55 to 65 N. is that the soils have been transported by the big Ice some 20,000 years ago. Down in a valley you have a creek. Production of wood and trees are high low down in the valley. Depending on climate, soils and moisture content the production is maybe something between 10 to 15 cubicmetres a year and hectare (m3/yr/ha/. When you come higer up on the slope one can see the trees are shorter and smaller also in diametre and if you check one can see that the production is much lower maybe only 2 to 5 m3/yr/ha. The soils seems pretty much like what you have on the bottom of the valley but it is dryer and not as deep. Still higher up you have the rock and hardly no production at all.
Through the photosyntesis process in the green parts of the plants oxygen and carbon splits. Oxygen is transported out of the plant. Carbon mix easily with solved carbonates and carbon acids and other compounds that the root sucks up from the soils.
The processes are not as simple as one can believe from the post. It is much more complicated. In this post all carbon compounds are called for CO2. It is the same mistake as the AGW do, when they call carbon dioxide for carbon. Now AGW people and governments want to sequester carbon down to the under world. What happens if they take too much and the content of carbon dioxide will be too low.
I don’t blame the kids that they believe the trees or plants are coming from the soils. Why do there parents fertilize there gardens and the farmers their lands. We havenot started to spray the plants with CO2 to get them grow better. Our poor media does not like to mention that the production of our lands has increased by 10-15 % during the last decades caused by increased carbon dioxide content. The media is to blame that they donot give us. kids and grown ups the truth and all the truth, but a lot of lies about the climate changes. Jo
“Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” When at school in 70s UK we covered the experiments of (I cannot remember who) which showed that a tree growing in a pot of soil of known weight gained in size and weight over time with only the addition of air and water. So what are they teaching now?
James Bull
The very young are real scientists. They examine everything for cause and effect, and want to know how the world works. As soon as they can understand and speak people talk, they are told fairy tales instead of facts. Techno-babble instead of reality. For some season the least capable teachers are pushed to the 2nd & 3rd grade where administrators think they will do the least damage. Actually they do the most damage, if students can read well and do arithmetic by the 4th grade they can teach themselves.
Now with the NET that covers the world the old way of the educated elite controlling knowledge is over. Anyone with access to a computer can call up all of the knowledge in the world and communicate with anyone even in different languages.
The modern personal computer is the greatest invention ever created! the amount of human knowledge now doubles every 7 years! and every genius can communicate with every other one. These are very interesting times. pg
One of the things I am not interested in is the fact that plants make their carbon from CO2 from the air (actually most of them have to get their protein-forming N from the soil). Because if you do not know yet, you learn this in middle school (K-9 or something) in civilized countries. Now it appears the best and brightest university students struggle to understand it. Yay.
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. ”
To sum it all up: this is the case of one moron seeking to teach other morons.
I’m scheduled to teach our course designed for non-majors meeting their science requirement. I sent the students the following list of 20 scientific questions/puzzles for them to review over the Christmas break.
1. What is the circumference of the latitude line on which Los Angeles is situated?
2. What is the significance of the Tropic of Cancer? The Arctic Circle?
3. Sometimes no water condenses on the surface of a glass of ice water. What does this tell you?
4. How did Eratosthenes determine the circumference of the Earth?
5. A coiled spring upon which rests a five pound ball is placed vertically on the locomotive of a one-mile long train traveling at a constant 60 mph (1 mile/min). The spring is released and the ball ascends 50 ft above the train before falling back down. How far back from the spring does the ball strike the train?
6. You are traveling 100,000 miles/sec (really fast) in relation to some designated fixed point. You flash a light in the direction of travel. A person located at the fixed point measures the speed of the light to be 186,000 miles/sec. What speed do you measure for the light? (See question 12.)
7. You are driving your car at a steady 40 mph. In the car is a helium balloon “resting” on the car’s ceiling. You apply the brakes and lunge forward as the car decelerates. In which direction does the balloon lunge?
8. Beaker A contains 100 grams of water and beaker B contains 100 grams of alcohol. You pour 10 grams from beaker A to B. You then pour 10 grams of B into A. Which beaker contains the “purer” solution?
9. Is the velocity of a falling object proportional to the distance fallen or the time fallen?
10. Is it possible to estimate the time by observing the moon at night?
11. You travel one mile south, one mile east, and one mile north and arrive at the starting point. Identify all locations on the globe for which this is possible? What is it about global directions for north, east, south, and west that make it possible to do this?
12. Why does it usually take more time to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo than the other way?
13. How long does it take light to travel from the Earth to the Moon? From the Sun to the Earth? From the next nearest star to the Earth?
14. How hot is the surface of the Sun? How do people who know this, know this?
15. How hot is the interior of the Sun? How do people who know this, know this?
16. What are the definitions of circles and ellipses?
17. What is Euclid’s fifth postulate? How is it related to our current understanding of gravity?
18. What is the surface area of a cube with a one-meter edge? What is the volume?
19. How much does one cubic meter of water weigh?
20. Two objects start moving from the same start line at the same time (say t=0). Object A moves at a constant velocity, v[A], and object B uniformly accelerates such that
v[B]=k x t, where k is some constant and x is the multiplication symbol. Show that both objects cover the same distance when v[B] = 2 x v[A]. This is basically what Galileo showed for falling objects which uniformly accelerate. The problem reduces to either a simple geometric or algebraic solution. Your call.
Leif is dismayed, but surely the Earth if flat? isn’t it?
In Prehistoric times such a study could not have been done. No academic would have sunk this low. As for your students, can they write, can they speak, can they count? They are indolent, insolent and incompetent.
When I went to school, in prehistoric times in a small country, we had to take something like 11 subjects all through the years until the end of high school. No options. You had to pass them all. To go up a year.
At he age of ten I was taught biology. The sciences and humanities al the way to the end plus a language. School was for half a day. Three hours or so of home work every day.
Marking was not an exercise in statistics. 5 was excellent, 1 was a fail. We where tested constantly. In the first five or so minutes of the class some where asked questions about the last lesson. And marked in a little book, 1 to 5.
I was not brilliant mostly 3s some 4s. I am still living on my high school education. A nation of uneducated people will decline rapidly and thirty years can’t be reversed.