As any person who has approached high school graduation knows, there is a moment of fear when you realize that either you have no idea what you want to do with your life or your plan that you have had for years could very easily fall apart at the seams. At a highly crucial time in a person’s life, just as they are about to start deciding what direction their future will take, there are often many programs and people pulling students in a number of directions. Military recruiters start showing up for visits at high school cafeterias, colleges start sending out a barrage of post cards and emails, even the ACT has a career interests survey that allows you to determine what you should do with your life. The problem is that this is when the scientific community suddenly stops talking to students, and that is just the beginning of a much bigger problem.
There are a number of programs that exist for the sole purpose of inspiring young people to love science. If you have ever been in a middle school physical science classroom you have probably launched a rocket made out of a 2 liter bottle and a bike pump. If you have spent any time around science in the schools outreach programs you have probably seen things lit on fire or flowers frozen in liquid nitrogen and then shattered. If you are like me, there was a man who came to your elementary school every year with a lot of fancy glassware and showed how the distillation process worked and related it to how the water cycle on earth works. Looking back now, I realize that man probably made moonshine in his spare time, seeing as he had a lot of fancy lab equipment, knew a lot about boiling points, and always looked like he came out of the woods, not the lab. Either way, he was the person who excited countless elementary school students about boiling water, which is pretty impressive.
These are the types of programs that go on all over our country. In the last few years this has taken the shape of STEM education programming that is done in the classroom, of which I am honestly quite jealous. These students are doing things that even now I would consider really exciting, and they bring out the childish sense of wonder about science that I still have to this day. The only problems is that there is no equivalent programming for students once they leave middle school.
When most people think about their high school science classes, the majority remember having at least one teacher that was pretty crazy, if not borderline insane, or they remember how tedious, seemingly irrelevant and banal the class was. Between the constant memorization and the seemingly irrelevant case for the real world application of the material, the average high school science class is seen more as a requirement for graduation than a stepping stone into something bigger. Even the Advanced Placement science courses (and related college in the schools programs) are frequently seen as just another way to get college credit so you won’t have to do it later when the classes are harder. An NSF compiled data set showed that only 17% of all high school students took an AP exam in math or science, with only 54% of those students actually passing the test (but that is another story).
Science education does not hit the right buttons in high school students. It doesn’t do the job of inspiring them to actually pursue careers in science, and it often does not give them a whole lot of career guidance. Most often the case for pursuing a career in science is made by college professors in introductory classes and by then it is often too late to really change a student’s mind about what they want to do. If we want more scientists, we will need more students willing to become scientists, and not out of some sense of obligation but out of a desire to do something amazing and a passion for making a significant impact on the world.
The solution to the problem is to engage high school students outside of the classroom and create programming to develop their love of science outside of just their desire to do well on a test. There has to be a way to show students that science is not about memorization of facts and then putting your knowledge on display for one teacher, it is about learning, absorbing information, creating connections, testing hypotheses and then displaying your knowledge for the entire world to see. If we can show students that version of science then maybe we can make them see that they can do science for the rest of their lives and make meaningful contributions to problems of global significance.