Bottom-Up Suggestions to Improve U.S. STEM

  Two years ago, I began volunteering at local middle and elementary schools. My work includes both discussing Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers and judging science fairs. Three interesting patterns have emerged that speak volumes about why the United States lags other developed countries in STEM education. These observations are anecdotal and don’t necessarily reflect systematic causes, merely symptoms. That said, think-tank studies on STEM education policy haven’t prevented the United States from lagging in STEM. Therefore, I propose a bottom-up approach: address the symptom-like patterns directly and locally. Then, adjust policies based on whether they help or hinder efforts to address the symptoms. Grassroots approaches take effort, commitment, and patience, and often fail. But if top-down approaches aren’t working, why not give them a try?

  The first pattern that indicates trouble for developing a STEM educated populace is the concept of uncertainty. It is critical to not only scientific debates but policy debates, but it is not grasped by the majority of middle school students. The second pattern is that while roughly half of the elementary school students I have encountered profess to like math, the fraction of middle school science projects that demonstrate interest in and command of the mathematics is much less than half. And third, the most successful science projects have been directly mentored by or heavily influenced by STEM professionals, often through family connections. 

  Let’s look closer at uncertainty which is rooted in the logic of STEM, but critical to all decision making. Uncertainty is a critical thinking notion that underlies measurement (how we know something) and comparison (what it means). It is a much deeper concept than just knowing how to calculate the standard deviation of a set of numbers. Most people are familiar with uncertainties quoted in poll numbers and in hurricane tracks. We intuitively get there is some “squishiness” in these predictions, but not many people understand how to uncover assumptions about the underlying ensembles that can lead to unexpectedly large errors. Worse yet, when “experts” make manifestly non-quantitative arguments to hide assumptions and complexity—like economic policy experts often do—it is even more critical for citizens to fully understand how things are measured and compared. No one expects middle school students (or their parents) to master Ph.D-level labor statistics. However, if by middle-school the average citizen learned that to claim two things are different from one another there must be consistent measures and comparisons, we’d be a long way toward a public that made better decisions.

 The next pattern to examine is the drop off in math excitement by middle school. My observation is anecdotal, but back in 2007 Microsoft seemed to have noticed the drop off too. Some believe that math becomes too abstract for kids to understand how the M is connected to the rest of STEM. Have you heard this: “OMG, who would ever need this function stuff IRL!” M gets disassociated from practice, and takes ST and E down with it. I happen to agree. Through Common Core middle school kids are learning things like proportionality and functions in their math classes. But a critical failure is that the science curriculum remains qualitative and doesn’t leverage critical quantitative tools being taught on the math side. A quick look at an 8th grade science book shows that it’s focused on definitions and qualitative concepts, not what you can do with the knowledge like plot a course or build a rocket ship.

 The third pattern is that successful STEM students often have mentors who are STEM professionals. Many of these connections are made through family: a relative or a relative’s colleague. There is no shortage of stories on underrepresented minorities in STEM which backs my anecdotal observation. The cycle just reinforces itself. Even the big policy thinkers agree that more mentoring by STEM professionals would be helpful. In fact, learning to view the world from a STEM professional’s perspective goes a long way to addressing the first two patterns as well.      

 What about solutions to these patterns? Again, taking the bottom-up approach from the educator, parent, or STEM-fan’s perspective:

1.     Uncertainty. Don’t just teach facts. Inspire kids to ask how we know things and how well we know them. Example: “So, we learned that the shape of big complicated molecules like proteins matter, not just what atoms are in them. What if one protein differs from another by just a little bit? What if it changes shape?” These questions encourage understanding there is a threshold to what it means to be a different shape than another protein and that putting a molecule in a certain naming bin because it currently fits that description doesn’t mean it won’t evolve into something else. In STEM lingo, “What qualifies as a small perturbation and how good is the static assumption?” The inquisitive student might look up more on the internet and find cryo-electron microscopy—and the research lab nearby that’s pumping out tons of papers on protein folding. The lab just might have a mentoring program too.

2.     Math excitement. Teach math concepts and tools when needed in science; don’t wait for the math curriculum to catch up. Example: “So, we learned that this formula describes the amplitude of an alternating current as function of the independent variable time. If we wanted to build a tool to measure an unknown current, how often would we have to measure the amplitude to figure out the frequency?” This question encourages understanding the link between physical things like the currents in our wall outlets and math things like functions and variables. It also easily shows that a current measuring tool is limited by its sampling frequency. The inquisitive student may explore Fourier Transforms or (God help the teacher) find a novel proof of Shannon’s Theorem.

3.     Mentorship. It’s not complicated. Give back if you are a STEM professional – not just as a favor to friends, but in communities that need to see your example. If you are a STEM manager, make it easy for your staff to give back. If you’re a parent or educator, seek out STEM mentor programs or create one.

 If we address the symptom-like patterns where we can, we’ll inevitably run into problems. Funding. Teacher experience. Time. The local STEM industry. Rigid curricula. When we do, we can ask what policy changes could fix those problems. The bottom-up approach can point to specific outcomes and we can evaluate policies on whether they’ll produce those outcomes. Of course, these patterns are just anecdotes, but patterns that others have noticed as well. In any case, the United States is still lagging in STEM despite some well-funded studies and recommendations. Why not dig in where we can and see what happens?