[nabs-l] (It’s Just So Darn Hard) - NYTimes.com

[Chris Nusbaum]

Hi Hai,

This was interesting! Although, it might be a little off-topic 
for this list.  However, I can see the benefits of programs like 
Youth Slam in changing these statistics for blind students.

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Hai Nguyen Ly <gymnastdave at sbcglobal.net
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 14:56:12 -0400
Subject: [nabs-l] Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s 
Just So Darn Hard) - NYTimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-ma
jors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=1&pagewanted
=all

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)

LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first 
White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State 
Dining Room.  He tested a steering wheel designed by middle 
schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot 
that plays soccer.  It was meant as an inspirational moment: 
children, science is fun; work harder.

Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for 
years over test scores showing American students falling behind 
their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore.  How will the 
United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The 
president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 
10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors 
in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.  All the 
Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 
12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope.  
And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number 
of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the 
rise.

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having 
most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs 
into water to test the first law of motion.  The excitement 
quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what 
David E.  Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the 
math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a 
blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with 
hundreds of other students.  And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning 
engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects 
or failing to get any degree.  That increases to as much as 60 
percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the 
strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are 
included, according to new data from the University of California 
at Los Angeles.  That is twice the combined attrition rate of all 
other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being 
built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get 
to college.

“We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science 
talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J.  
Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A.  who has studied the 
matter.  “It’s not just a K-12 preparation issue.”

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from 
disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the 
attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where 
he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified 
students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting 
the best students, the students who go there would have the best 
chances to succeed,” he says.  “But if you take two students who 
have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and 
you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the 
other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that 
Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one 
at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med 
majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for 
medical school fade.  There is no doubt that the main majors are 
difficult and growing more complex.  Some students still lack 
math preparation or aren’t willing to work hard enough.

Other deterrents are the tough freshman classes, typically 
followed by two years of fairly abstract courses leading to a 
senior research or design project.  “It’s dry and hard to get 
through, so if you can create an oasis in there, it would be a 
good thing,” says Dr.  Goldberg, who retired last year as an 
engineering professor at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign and is now an education consultant.  He thinks 
the president’s chances of getting his 10,000 engineers is 
“essentially nil.”

In September, the Association of American Universities, which 
represents 61 of the largest research institutions, announced a 
five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM 
fields to use more interactive teaching techniques.

“There is a long way to go,” says Hunter R.  Rawlings, the 
association’s president, “and there is an urgent need to 
accelerate the process of reform.”

The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle 
problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in 
the humanities and social sciences, which provides another 
incentive for students to leave STEM majors.  It is no surprise 
that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are 
clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair.  Professors 
also say they are strict because science and engineering courses 
build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key 
lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, 
Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last 
year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes 
were among the lowest on campus..  The chemistry department gave 
the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by 
mathematics at 2.90.  Education, language and English courses had 
the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study 
that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their 
courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their 
majors.

MATTHEW MONIZ bailed out of engineering at Notre Dame in the fall 
of his sophomore year.  He had been the kind of recruit most 
engineering departments dream about.  He had scored an 800 in 
math on the SAT and in the 700s in both reading and writing.  He 
also had taken Calculus BC and five other Advanced Placement 
courses at a prep school in Washington, D.C., and had long 
planned to major in engineering.

But as Mr.  Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized 
he had already had enough.  “I was trying to memorize equations, 
and engineering’s all about the application, which they really 
didn’t teach too well,” he says.  “It was just like, ‘Do these 
practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ” And as he looked 
ahead at the curriculum, he did not see much relief on the 
horizon.

So Mr.  Moniz, a 21-year-old who likes poetry and had enjoyed 
introductory psychology, switched to a double major in psychology 
and English, where the classes are “a lot more discussion based.” 
He will graduate in May and plans to be a clinical psychologist.  
Of his four freshman buddies at Notre Dame, one switched to 
business, another to music.  One of the two who is still in 
engineering plans to work in finance after graduation.

Mr.  Moniz’s experience illustrates how some of the best-prepared 
students find engineering education too narrow and lacking the 
passion of other fields.  They also see easier ways to make 
money.

Notre Dame’s engineering dean, Peter Kilpatrick, will be the 
first to concede that sophomore and junior years, which focus 
mainly on theory, remain a “weak link” in technical education.  
He says his engineering school has gradually improved its 
retention rate over the past decade by creating design projects 
for freshmen and breaking “a deadly lecture” for 400 students 
into groups of 80.  Only 50 to 55 percent of the school’s 
students stayed through graduation 10 years ago.  But that figure 
now tops 75 percent, he says, and efforts to create more labs in 
the middle years could help raise it further.

“We’re two years into that experiment and, quite honestly, it’s 
probably going to take 5 to 10 years before we’re really able to 
inflesh the whole curriculum with this project-based learning,” 
Dean Kilpatrick says.

No one doubts that students need a strong theoretical foundation.  
But what frustrates education experts is how long it has taken 
for most schools to make changes.

The National Science Board, a public advisory body, warned in the 
mid-1980s that students were losing sight of why they wanted to 
be scientists and engineers in the first place.  Research 
confirmed in the 1990s that students learn more by grappling with 
open-ended problems, like creating a computer game or designing 
an alternative energy system, than listening to lectures.  While 
the National Science Foundation went on to finance pilot courses 
that employed interactive projects, when the money dried up, so 
did most of the courses.  Lecture classes are far cheaper to 
produce, and top professors are focused on bringing in research 
grants, not teaching undergraduates.

In 2005, the National Academy of Engineering concluded that 
“scattered interventions” had not resulted in widespread change.  
“Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and 
accepting attrition as inevitable,” it said, “is both unfair to 
students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.”

Since becoming Notre Dame’s dean in 2008, Dr.  Kilpatrick has 
revamped and expanded a freshman design course that had gotten “a 
little bit stale.” The students now do four projects.  They build 
Lego robots and design bridges capable of carrying heavy loads at 
minimal cost.  They also create electronic circuit boards and 
dream up a project of their own.

“They learn how to work with their hands, how to program the 
robot and how to work with design constraints,” he says.  But he 
also says it’s inevitable that students will be lost.  Some new 
students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical 
engineering is.  Other bright students may have breezed through 
high school without developing disciplined habits.  By contrast, 
students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and 
science from an early age.

“We’re in a worldwide competition, and we’ve got to retain as 
many of our students as we can,” Dean Kirkpatrick says.  “But 
we’re not doing kids a favor if we’re not teaching them good life 
and study skills.”

WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, in Massachusetts, one of the 
nation’s oldest technological schools, has taken the idea of 
projects to heart.  While it still expects students to push their 
way through standard engineering and science classes, it ripped 
up its traditional curriculum in the 1970s to make room for 
extensive research, design and social-service projects by juniors 
and seniors, including many conducted on trips with professors 
overseas.  In 2007, it added optional first-year projects — which 
a quarter of its freshmen do — focused on world problems like 
hunger or disease.

“That kind of early engagement, and letting them see they can 
work on something that is interesting and important, is a big 
deal,” says Arthur C.  Heinricher, the dean of undergraduate 
studies.  “That hooks students.”

And so late this past summer, about 90 freshmen received e-mails 
asking if they typically received flu vaccines.  The e-mails were 
not from the health services office, but from students measuring 
how widely flu spreads at different rates of vaccination.  Two of 
the students had spent part of their freshmen year researching 
diseases and devising a survey.  Now, as juniors, they were 
recruiting the newcomers to take part in simulations, using neon 
wristbands and stickers, to track how many of them became 
“infected” as they mingled during orientation.

Brenna Pugliese, one of the juniors and a biology major, says the 
two-day exercise raised awareness on campus of the need for more 
students to get the vaccine.  “I can honestly say that I learned 
more about various biology topics than I ever learned in any 
other class,” she says.

Teachers say they have been surprised by the sophistication of 
some of the freshmen projects, like a device to harvest kinetic 
energy that is now being patented.  But the main goals are to 
enable students to work closely with faculty members, build 
confidence and promote teamwork.  Studies have shown that women, 
in particular, want to see their schoolwork is connected to 
helping people, and the projects help them feel more comfortable 
in STEM fields, where men far outnumber women everywhere except 
in biology.

Seventy-four percent of W.P.I.  undergraduates earn bachelor’s 
degrees within four years and 80 percent by six years.

Most of the top state research universities have added at least a 
splash of design work in the freshman year.  The University of 
Illinois began this fall to require freshmen engineering students 
to take a course on aspirations for the profession and encourages 
them to do a design project or take a leadership seminar.  Most 
technical schools push students to seek summer internships and 
take semesters off to gain practical work experiences.  The hope 
is that the lure of high-paying jobs during an economic downturn 
will convince more students to stick with it.

Some private schools have also adjusted their grading policies to 
ease some of the pressure on STEM students.  The Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology has long given freshmen only “pass” or 
“no record” grades in the first half of the year while they get 
used to the workload.  W.P.I.  lets undergraduates take up to 
three classes for which no grade is recorded if they would have 
received less than a C.  Any required courses would have to be 
repeated.

Ilea Graedel, a 20-year-old junior in aerospace engineering, says 
that policy provides “a nice buffer if you want to try something 
new, like a class outside your comfort zone.”

But what really helps Ms.  Graedel get through the rigors of 
STEM, she says, is hanging onto her aspirations.  She grew up in 
a farming area in Washington State, the only student from her 
high school class of 26 pursuing a technology degree.  She has 
wanted to be an astronaut since she was 3, when her mother took 
her to Boeing’s Museum of Flight in Seattle and bought her a book 
called “I Want to Be an Astronaut.”

The space program has been sharply cut back.  Still, she says, 
“I’m going to hold onto that dream very dearly.”


Christopher Drew covers military technology for The Times.





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