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

[Jedi]

Alex is right. For the sighted, most math and science classes (even as 
soon as high school) go from a multi-modality approach to a lecture 
approach that really only reaches people who excel at listening, 
watching, and note taking. Even then, these students struggle because 
they're expected to take in a wealth of information that really hasn't 
been engaged in their brains to the fullest extent. Since sight is such 
a strong part of current modalities for lecturing and teaching these 
days, blind students really are at a disadvantage.

What we ought to do is create hands-on and multi-modality curricula for 
everyone that allows multiple methods for learning the material other 
than the typical lecturing. I see this problem in non-STEM fields, but 
the STEM fields really do require so much more intense study to catch 
all their nuances.

Respectfully,
Jedi

Original message:
> Hi, I thought this was a great article. it shows how there is a lack
> of interest in these fields for the typical student. As blind
> students, we most likely face double the difficulty when pursuing an
> interest in the STEM fields, and in addition, we generally don't have
> the support structures that sighted students have when dealing with
> such difficulties.

> Alex



> On 11/13/11, Chris Nusbaum <dotkid.nusbaum at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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