cience is really funny, observed a boy in Liane Carahasen's fourth-grade class at Hillandale Elementary School in Durham. He giggled at the "oops" moment when he accidentally tore the adding-machine tape he was to scroll out for the experiments. With considerable laughing and excited chatter, he and his fellow students were spreading out a dozen or so tapes across the floor of the school cafeteria. Their stated scientific objective: to predict how far rubber-band-powered toy cars would travel along the tape with a given number of winds of the rubber band.

MUSIC for Science

Another boy decided that science could usefully be observed from many perspectives, even upside down. He allowed the rubber-band-powered car to zip backward between his feet, bending over for a topsy-turvy view of its rapid departure.

Science can also surprise, as discovered by those who miswound the rubber bands and were startled to see their cars whiz away in the wrong direction.

And, perhaps most important, science can inspire big dreams. Just ask the girl who announced confidently amid the creative cacophony that she plans to go to Duke and study "trees and flowers and those things up in the sky that are, y'know, like computers." (Later, she decided they were satellites.)

While to an outsider it might seem that confusion reigned in that cafeteria, to Carahasen the experiments were a successful exercise in a hands-on approach to discovery known as "inquiry-based learning." Her training in applying the technique enabled her to roam the room--observing, asking questions, making suggestions, and gently guiding the learning process. An alumna of Duke's Teachers and Scientists Collaborating (TASC) training program, Carahasen, like hundreds of other teachers across North Carolina, has learned to use this inquiry-based approach to involve children, not only in science, but also in the scientific process itself.

Led by Gary Ybarra, an associate professor of the practice of electrical and computer engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, and Dave Smith, program director, TASC is a good example of the ways in which Duke's faculty and staff members (and, in some cases, students) are increasingly lending their time and expertise to meet the challenges of K-12 science education. Their involvement stems from the recognition that American schoolchildren are not receiving the kind of creative teaching in science, technology, and mathematics that inspires students to enter those fields, much less to excel in them. The result of this educational neglect, they say, is a nation at intellectual and economic risk.

The latest comparative international analysis by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ranks the U.S. nineteenth in mathematics and eighteenth in science among nations. The U.S. ranks just below Latvia in math and below Bulgaria in science--not a particularly respectable niche for a country that considers itself a scientific and technological superpower.

And the latest internal report card also gave the American school system low marks in science and math teaching. As part of "Looking Inside the Classroom: A Study of K-12 Mathematics and Science Education in the United States," published in May 2003, experts observed a representative sample of 364 science and math lessons in kindergarten through twelfth grades across the country. They also interviewed the teachers to understand the teaching philosophy behind those lessons and the source materials used. The authors concluded that, "Overall, 59 percent of mathematics/science lessons are judged to be low in quality, 27 percent medium in quality, and only 15 percent high in quality." As a result, said the study, "the nation is very far from the ideal of providing high-quality mathematics and science education for all students."

For Ybarra and other Duke faculty members, a key to improving science and math education is developing materials that engage students and training teachers to use them. "Children have a natural affinity for plants and animals, and they also have a natural curiosity," Ybarra says. "If this curiosity is sparked, encouraged, and nurtured in a nonthreatening way, the children develop confidence and independent thinking. That's what we're trying to promote, and, at the same time, increase their appreciation for an understanding of scientific principles." In addition to rubber-band racecars, TASC provides kits that allow children to experience the life cycle of butterflies, the mysteries of dirt, the invisible magic of magnetism, and the physics of roller coasters.

Besides breaking through to students to pique their interest in science, the program has "broken the logjam for the school districts that have joined the partnership," says Smith, TASC's director. "North Carolina has been trying to reform its science education for years," he says, through a program called Infrastructure for Science Education. "And most of the school systems are eager to go forward, but reach an impasse when they have to come up with the money to buy the kits, the time to train the teachers, and the mechanism to refurbish and distribute those kits. We gave them the solutions to all three problems."

Another Duke faculty member offers another solution--one that got its creative spark from the students themselves. Eight years ago, as part of her sabbatical activities, Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, tried out the idea of teaching science through pharmacology in Myra Halpin's chemistry class at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. "I told the students that, when I was in high school, we learned about oxidation as the reaction that caused rust. Then I told them, 'Today, I'm going to tell you about how methamphetamine kills neurons. And it's all an oxidation reaction.' They were glued, just glued. And when the bell rang, they didn't get up. They kept asking questions. And Myra said to me, 'Shelly, I think this is going to work. I've been doing this for twenty-seven years, and I have never had them not get up when the bell rang.' "