Teaching for Tomorrow: Science Literacy in The Classroom

Abstract

Looking towards the future, what STEM skills will be most important for students? Going beyond memorization and recitation of scientific facts, how do we get students to fully engage in science and engineering design practices (as defined in the Next Generation Science Standards) and to improve their science literacy? The answers to these questions are at the heart of the “Learning by Making” (LbyM) experience. LbyM is an innovative, integrated year-long curriculum that includes skill building units that teach coding and how to build simple electronic circuits. Using a simple browser-based interface, LbyM students are able to easily write code, control LED lights and acquire and analyze sensor data within the overarching theme of energy and matter. Rather than being siloed in pre-engineering courses, these important STEM skills are developed within the context of a physical science class. By engaging in phenomena-based explorations, LbyM develops students’ self-efficacy, and ability to work in teams to gather environmental data relevant to their communities and critical to the future of our planet.

Keywords::

• Curriculum and instruction
• STEM-C
• web app
• coding
• TurtleLogo
• 9th grade STEM
• NGSS

Imagine yourself as a ninth grader sitting at a table with three of your peers in rural California. At your desk is a computer connected to an electronics board with LED lights and temperature sensors. Your goal is to control the lights based on temperature readings. You've tried to get an LED light to turn on when the temperature gets too cold by debugging the code, and you have also checked all the electrical connections on your circuit board using a digital multimeter. You've checked your code twice, but when you compare your circuitry to a nearby student's board, you notice differences in the wiring.

Because you have been working with these same classmates all year, it is easy to ask them for help in debugging your board. This is the ideal scenario for students engaging in the integrated CSTEM (Coding, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) physical sciences course, Learning by Making (LbyM). Since 2013, the development of this year-long curriculum has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education through the Investing in Innovation (i3) and Education Innovation and Research (EIR) programs.

Curriculum background

LbyM is an integrated STEM course that aligns mathematical skill-building with computational thinking and applies them to real-world problems-and solutions. The course involves 80% hands-on, teacher-supervised lab activities, and 20% skill-building instructional time. Throughout the course, students develop and use models, plan and conduct investigations and experiments, collect, analyze and interpret data, and construct explanations to demonstrate their understanding of the overarching themes of energy and matter. LbyM utilizes a customized open-source web app (https://app.lbym.org/) for both software and hardware-based lessons. The app enables students to undertake personally relevant investigations in physical science, using the programming language Logo, to read sensors and obtain and analyze data.

LbyM has been specifically designed to implement Next Generation Science Standards in the ninth-grade high school classroom. Physical science disciplinary core ideas are integrated with crosscutting concepts, presented within the framework of science and engineering design practices. The lab activities provide connections to real-world phenomena that introduce the storyline for each unit. Instead of focusing on content knowledge, the curriculum was developed to teach students the skills to build their own collective knowledge and efficacy. We have also chosen to concentrate on cooperation between classmates as an important pathway towards improving our students’ scientific literacy.

Designing a curriculum that teaches science literacy is vitally important work that can come with challenges, particularly in a post-pandemic classroom. Cooperation and teamwork were interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and our students are still feeling the impacts in their classrooms today. Before 2016, there were as many accepted definitions of science literacy as there were websites that suggested definitions. Over the course of six months in 2016, the Committee on Science Literacy and Public Perception of Science studied each strand of information related to scientific literacy and considered the ways in which science can help everyone in an increasingly interconnected global community know (and be confident about what they know) about the world and/or nature.

In addition to hammering out a reliable definition of science literacy, this committee recognized that its duty included considering a rapidly changing world, and rapidly changing fields of science as well. The summary of the committee's work, Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences was published by the National Academies in 2016. In the introduction, Catherine Snow writes about the way that the definition of science literacy has “expanded and shifted over time in order to accommodate changing ideas about science” (Snow et al., 2016). Since that time, thinking about scientific literacy has shifted away from conceptions of science literacy within an individual, and has instead moved to considerations of foundational science literacy as a community or social endeavor.

Within this expanded context there are many ways to think about foundational science literacy. As teachers, we have traditionally sought to impart to our students what is referred to as content knowledge, or knowledge of basic scientific facts, concepts, and vocabulary. In the past, this has been the primary avenue for teaching science. However, as Dr. Snow writes, “Science enables people to both engage in the constitution of new knowledge as well as use information to achieve desired ends. Access to science-whether using knowledge or creating it-necessitates some level of familiarity with the enterprise and practice of science” (Snow et al., 2016). Building familiarity with modem scientific (and engineering) practices is at the very heart of Learning by Making.

Figure 1 Roseland University Prep High School students with instructor Crystal Rohde.

At seven high-need schools in California, our curriculum is being taught to most, if not all, ninth graders. Six of these seven schools are rural, and the students in these classes represent frequently under-resourced communities. Students are not taught to view science as a bank from which to withdraw knowledge. Instead, students develop the ability to command and control simplified versions of the types of technological systems they will be using in the future. Developing hands-on and minds-on scientific and engineering practices is particularly important in these underserved rural communities. By opening the door to scientific literacy and the experience of communicating it within classroom communities, we are beginning to give our students these tools. When that lightbulb goes on in their head and a student understands that their coding and circuitry led to a lightbulb turning on in real life, science is no longer simply “magic,” as Neil deGrasse Tyson (2022) describes it. Science is within their reach, and they are more than capable of utilizing it.

Figure 2 Roseland University Prep High School student with instructor Crystal Rohde.

Figure 3 Screenshot of the LbyM web app showing the beginning of a simulation from Unit 1: Sea Turtle Life Cycle.

Figure 4 Roseland University Prep High School students.

Units

The Learning by Making curriculum begins with three skill-building units that teach the fundamentals of coding (Unit 1: Sea Turtle Life Cycle), how to build and test simple electronic circuits (Unit 2: Going with the Electron Flow) and the use of light and temperature sensors to control simple experiments (Unit 3: Doing Science with Sensors). In the spring semester, students engage in more individualized experimentation using additional types of sensors through units such as Water & Soil, Light & Energy and Microbial Fuel Cells. The web app (https://app.lbym.org/) is a freely available, open-source environment that runs on any computer with a Google-supported browser such as Chrome. The hardware platform is also open source, including components that are commercially available and relatively inexpensive. Since May 2015, the curriculum has been approved annually by the state of California's High School Articulation program as a physical/earth & space science course that meets the standards for college readiness. Evaluations of LbyMhave shown that students who engage in the curriculum improve both their science and their mathematics performances compared to a matched cohort of students who did not receive the intervention (Li et al., 2018).

Figure 5 Screenshot of the LbyM web app showing the second phase of a simulation from Unit 1: Sea Turtle Life Cycle.

Along with the hands-on experimentation skills, many introductory lessons are accompanied by short readings that convey things that our instructional material cannot—this is where we teach students about the politics, popular culture, and the history of scientific learning and development. We give our students brief glimpses into the history of science and technology while helping them to develop the skills with which to investigate further if they are interested. We also try to highlight the scientific contributions of a diverse group of people, many of whom are not (yet) well-known. We seek to keep our students engaged and curious by asking them to develop their own scientific and testable questions, and to discuss their findings and interpretations with inquiry and to nurture, more than anything, the curiosity present in the classroom.

We aim to nurture scientific literacy long after the school year is over and the standardized test has been graded. Our true goal is not to educate the future generations of research scientists. Instead, we seek to teach foundational knowledge to a much larger group of learners in hopes that they will, when making decisions that would benefit from being scientifically literate, make informed decisions for their lives, their families, and their futures. New careers will open in fields that may not even currently exist, yet critically depend on a scientific and technically literate public. As Andrew Zucker noted, we work to “teach students that science is for everyone” (Zucker, 2021). The term science literacy bridges the divide between the humanities and STEM, and so too should we in our efforts to ensure that every student has the opportunity they deserve.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Hellman

Hannah Hellman (ORCID: 0000-0003-4419-1489) graduated from Sonoma State University’s English M.A. program in 2023. Her thesis, titled “Breaking the Binary,” examines Virginia Woolf’s experiences with and questions regarding gender roles and norms in fiction and biography, as well as Vita Sackville-West’s feelings of gender dysphoria throughout her life and as they are expressed in the 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. When she is not working as a Communications Specialist and Editor for the NASA partner organization EdEon at Sonoma State University, Hannah can be found writing critically about her favorite books or playing video games.

Laura Peticolas

Dr. Laura Peticolas (ORCID: 0000-0002-4438-3504) is the Associate Director of EdEon STEM Learning at Sonoma State University (SSU), where she manages multiple grant-funded science education initiatives. Over the past five years, Dr. Peticolas has been involved in developing Coding, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSTEM) learning materials for teens, undergraduates, and the public with funding from NASA, NSF and the US Department of Education. EdEon STEM Learning excels at K-12 teacher training, curriculum development, and the development of interactive web activities for students that teach math and science. Dr. Peticolas leads the professional learning events and community for teachers teaching EdEon’s year-long integrated ninth grade CSTEM curriculum, branded as Learning by Making (LbyM). LbyM is currently funded by the Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research program. Prior to working at Sonoma State University, Dr. Peticolas was a Senior Fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), a research laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). She led the education efforts at SSL for 9 years, after eight years of researching what causes aurora on Earth and Mars and supporting rural teachers using magnetometers to teach space science in high school science courses.

Lynn Cominsky

Professor Lynn Cominsky (ORCID: 0000-0003-2073-1065) is an award-winning physicist who grew up in the snows of Buffalo, NY. When she discovered she could get paid for studying black holes, she went to graduate school in physics at MIT. After receiving her PhD in 1981, she moved to California, where she has been on the faculty at Sonoma State University for over 35 years, chairing the Department of Physics and Astronomy for 15 years until 2019. Cominsky is an author on over 225 research papers in refereed journals, and the Principal or Co-Investigator on over $35 million of grants to SSU. Her individual awards include the 2016 Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the 2016 Wang Family Excellence Award from the California State University and the 2017 Frank J. Malina Education Medal from the International Astronautical Federation. Cominsky is the director and founder of SSU’s EdEon STEM Learning, which is involved in programs that build rocket payloads and CubeSats as well as developing and testing STEM curricula and other educational materials for NASA, NSF and the US Department of Education. Cominsky leads Learning by Making (LbyM), which began in 2013 with a grant from ED’s Investing in Innovation program.