But hope for reaching these kids is coming from an unlikely source: the first-year college science course. Across the country, teachers are experimenting using everyday experiences to explain technical material. They are also using a new. wave of easy-to-grasp textbooks like “Great Ideas in Physics” by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Alan Lightman. “Traditional science education for nonscience majors has failed because it doesn’t connect to the students,” says Lightman. “My book uses a student’s background and interest in the humanities to show the broad humanistic impact of deep scientific ideas.”
In addition to raising scientific literacy, educators want to update courses that haven’t changed in decades. But the most important goal is to recruit more students to major in the sciences. “There is a group of very able students who could do science but are choosing not to,” says Sheila Tobias, an authority on science education at the Research Corporation, a Tucson, Ariz., foundation. At Yale University, for instance, about half of the freshmen who enter intending to concentrate in the sciences change their majors before graduation. “The last time there was really a big flourish of innovation and new textbooks in science was post-sputnik,” says A. Truman Schwartz, a chemistry professor at Macalester College. “But that attracted mainly science nerds and seriously neglected the average citizen who is not going to be a scientist. This time around we’re trying to reach both.”
At Macalester, Schwartz coedited “Chemistry in Context,” a new textbook that’s being used in introductory courses at 18 schools. In it, the concept of molecular structure is taught by examining the composition and the physiological effects of drugs such as anabolic steroids or “the morning after” birth-control pill. In class, Schwartz is the “discussion facilitator” who provides the science expertise. He assigns extra reading and expects students to come to class prepared to draw on lessons from areas as diverse as economics or sociology. In a recent class, for example, Schwartz led a discussion that began with the fact that the difference between the male and female hormones is just a few atoms. That being the case, he asked, why were birth-control drugs developed for women before men?
More than a dozen schools, including Bryn Mawr College and Williams College, are using Lightman’s text in first-year courses. “In traditional first-year science courses,” says Lightman, “there is too much attention on facts and not enough on concepts. Introductory science is a case where less is more.” His slim textbook concentrates on four landmark concepts: the conservation of energy, the relativity of time, the wave-particle duality of nature and the second law of thermodynamics. Aside from giving mathematical equations, the book discusses the impact of the scientific principle on the work of such nonphysicists as Immanuel Kant, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov and historian Henry Adams. An assignment to read Adams’s book, “The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma,” led one student to write an essay that used the second law of thermodynamics to explain the dissolution of Hirohito’s Japanese empire and China’s Ming dynasty. “The second law of thermodynamics says that isolated systems should get more and more disordered in time,” explains Lightman.
It’s too early to know if the changes are working. But schools are hopeful their efforts will pay off. Yale has budgeted at least $20 million to revamp its science programs and facilities. The reform at other schools is funded by private and public money. The National Science Foundation, which is slowly returning to the education field, doled out $18 million to schools in fiscal year 1992. But even proponents say there’s no such thing as a magic textbook or curriculum. In order for the reform to have long-lasting effects, the entire science department at a university must become committed to teaching undergraduates, says Tobias. While we wait for that commitment to take hold, it’s reassuring to know that the nation’s freshmen will be introduced to some great literature, even if it is in a science class.
