With science test scores for most urban students falling below the national average, researchers are delving into cultural explanations.
The statistics for urban minority students look especially bleak when it comes to science performance. Recent results from an analysis by the National Assessment of Educational Progress of urban students' test scores show that science performance fell below the already low national average in 9 of 10 large U.S. cities. In the face of this challenge, researchers are experimenting with ways to build urban students' engagement with science.
Overcoming Ambivalent Attitudes
There's evidence that many minority students are well aware of the importance of science and the deficiencies of their school programs. A recent survey shows that black students—more than white or Hispanic students—believe not being taught enough math and science is a “serious problem” that can affect their future success (Johnson, Arumi, Ott, & Remaley, 2006). The same survey notes that black students are more likely than white students to say that increasing math and science courses would improve their high school education.
By contrast, in their book Science Education and Student Diversity: Synthesis and Research Agenda, researchers Okhee Lee and Aurolyn Luykx point to studies that show gaps between the aspirations of minority students in science and the means they have for fulfilling them. For example, one study of middle school black students showed that although they were achievement oriented and even aspired to science-related careers, the same students were ambivalent about science classes and pursuing science at the high school level.
Why does there seem to be a disconnect between urban minority students and science?
Success Is a Two-Way Street
When science education researcher Kenneth Tobin taught in a crowded inner-city high school in Philadelphia, he quickly realized that his previous experiences teaching science in sedate middle-class settings did little to prepare him for urban students. Tobin was faced with classrooms largely composed of black students from conditions of poverty. His students often talked out of turn, defied his authority, refused to engage in his science lessons, and slept in class.
Tobin initially scrambled to find ways to build relationships with students and increase their interest in science by giving them choices and more hands-on lessons. He soon realized that the disconnect between students and science would not be fixed quickly.
Now an education professor at City University of New York, Tobin and his colleagues have continued their research, with National Science Foundation funding, seeking better ways to teach science to urban students and to train new science teachers. Their various approaches are rooted in the school of critical ethnography, which seeks to expose inequities and find practical solutions to address them. These solutions are outlined in detail in their book, Improving Urban Science Education: New Roles for Teachers, Students, and Researchers.
“When you're dealing with kids that come from conditions of poverty, and kids with an urban youth culture that they bring to the table, it gets denied by the school,” Tobin explains. “It's very difficult for teachers who usually are from some other ethnic background. Teachers have to learn new cultures, and kids have to learn a new culture in order to make classrooms click.”
Much of Tobin's work focuses on building cultural and emotional bridges in the classroom through a process called “cogenerative dialogue,” which are pointed conversations between teachers and students about shared experiences in the classroom.
“The idea is to get kids, who are diverse, in the classroom to sit and talk with their teacher or teachers about what's happening, and to talk about the shared experience, and to figure out ways to improve the classroom, whether by changing the roles, the rules, or the resources that are available to students,” Tobin explains. He says that when kids get involved in cogenerative dialogues, enormous changes take place. Classrooms become less corporate and more communal, and the emotions in the classroom become very positive.
“If teachers engage in cogenerative dialogues, kids are able to change their practices and the way they engage,” Tobin says. “They turn up to school. There are fewer discipline problems. They talk to teachers rather than just go through the motions. Getting more student buy-in leads to better performance on high-stakes tests. It's not the major focus of our work, but we have some evidence of that.”
Cogens in Action
Christopher Emdin recently taught physics and co-taught chemistry at Marie Curie High School for Nursing, Medicine, and Allied Health Professions in the Bronx. Based on a small, specialized school model, Marie Curie opened in 2004 to prepare students in grades 7–12 for college studies in the health professions with a rigorous program in math, science, and interdisciplinary studies. Its enrollment of more than 400 students is a mixture of blacks and Latinos.
Emdin, a researcher and doctoral candidate under Tobin, regularly schedules cogenerative dialogues, or “cogens,” with small groups of students on a weekly basis during lunch time. Emdin's cogens typically assume the following format:
- Videotape the class lesson. The video provides discussion material for students and teacher.
- Invite four or five students to participate in the cogenerative dialogue. Emdin asks for volunteers but seeks to represent all the racial and ethnic groups in the class.
- Set ground rules for talking (e.g., mutual respect, no talking over others, sharing ideas). It may take four to five sessions before students get these rules down, Emdin says.
- Play a videotape of the lesson. Stop, start, rewind, and play the video as appropriate. Students and teachers share their thoughts, observations, insights, and recommendations.
- Focus the discussion. Typically, says Emdin, the conversations develop into an overriding theme, which becomes the focal point of the discussion and recommendations.
- As the session winds down, remind participants that the goal is to agree on one thing before they finish that can improve teaching and learning in their classrooms.
In a physics class, for example, Emdin gave a lesson on drawing free-body diagrams—a schematic of a box with arrows emanating from it to depict the degree and types of forces acting on an object. In the cogenerative dialogue about that lesson, one student shared that she still didn't understand the concept—and the rest joined in agreement.
Emdin acknowledges it was a blow to his ego. “I thought I had done a great job with that lesson.”
To address students' concerns, Emdin provided commentary on the video, explaining to students his teaching intentions and the points he thought he had made. Students said they gained a better understanding of his goals and told Emdin they would prefer to draw the diagrams themselves on the board rather than watch him do it.
In revisiting the lesson in class, Emdin allowed students to create their own free-body diagrams in class presentations. At the same time, he was pleasantly surprised to hear students using science terms—applied force, force of gravity, coefficient of friction—in appropriate ways. “They just got hold of it more” through the cogen, Emdin says.
Students' interest in science increased because they had more control in the class, Emdin states. “When a suggestion they make in a cogen gets implemented in class,” students feel more socially involved, which “has proven to almost always equate to extra effort in or interest in the subject.”
A Win-Win Formula
As Emdin reviews class videotapes, he can zero in on teaching practices in the classroom that generate learning and others that generate positive responses from students. This helps create and reinforce positive emotions in class.
During a physics class discussion about distance versus displacement, Emdin brought up a recent student race around a local reservoir. The contest winner happened to be in the classroom and was proud of his time on the four-mile race.
“I told Carlos, ‘Yeah, maybe you won—but you still had zero displacement,’” Emdin recalls. Eyebrows raised, the class noise level went down, and the student clenched his jaw. The exchange could easily have become negative, Emdin admits, especially as the student raised his voice against Emdin's seeming challenge. As a counter measure, Emdin lowered the register of his own voice to diffuse the building tension.
“I could have read it as negative tension—but I read it as positive,” because it heightened student interest in the science, Emdin explains. As students thought a bit longer about the difference between displacement and distance—the race was a circuit—“the ahas and smiles came, and the body language eased,” he says.
The experience was formative for Emdin's own teaching, he says, because it taught him how to build classroom excitement and hold tension in the balance. “Through that experience, I learned to let students process the information first.”
Subway Physics Lessons
Cogens also encourage students to share their ideas and observations in class and to recognize that they are taken seriously. For example, during a discussion on Newton's laws of motion, one student brought up the subway train at nearby Kingsbridge station. Many students take the subway to school, and it stops so abruptly at that station that passengers often lose their balance and fall over. Students talked about the applied force needed to stop the train, but their further questions and insights made them realize that the platform of this subway station was shorter than others on the line. They conjectured that the driver must apply greater force over a shorter distance to align the train so that all the cars fit the platform.
“This all came out of cogenerative dialogues,” says Emdin.
Cogens are not merely limited to science curriculum; they also address issues such as New York's state assessments and the Regents Exams. Talking about the test, however, is different from teaching to the test, Emdin points out. “The process of testing or preparing for a test becomes a topic that students discuss rather than an end that they move toward. From day one they design ways they can be successful in the class and on the test. This includes the development of test-taking techniques in addition to discussing the content.”
Even if students use informal street talk to discuss their dissection of a frog, for example, research indicates they can acquire the necessary scientific terms and learn to move back and forth between the two languages.
“Students develop understandings and, furthermore, know which type of knowledge is appropriate through discussions in cogens about the differences,” Emdin emphasizes. The best feeling of all, he adds, is when kids themselves request a cogen because they feel a lesson has not gone well or that they aren't learning the subject matter.
Cultural Disconnects
Some science and diversity researchers view modern Western science as the dominant cultural mode. They believe that students from groups marginalized because of race, culture, language, or socioeconomic status may not resonate with science for a variety of complex reasons. For students to understand and succeed in science, researchers point to teachers, who can help make the norms of science more explicit. Through modeling and taking an initially directive approach that “unpacks” the nature of science, teachers can help students “who come from backgrounds in which questioning and inquiry are not encouraged,” to learn to explore, take the initiative, and assume the responsibility for their own learning (Lee & Luykx, 2006, p. 90).
Although the same has to be done for all students—even those in white, affluent, suburban schools—researchers say that bridging such cultural gaps with “nonmainstream” groups can be more problematic.
In Miami, for example, Lee's work with Haitian immigrants shows that many students, who speak English at school and French-based Haitian Creole at home, must also negotiate between two different cultural expectations about school instruction. The dissonance can sometimes interfere with teachers' perceptions of students' science performance, as well as students' and parents' understandings of what ought to be happening in the classroom.
In the Haitian-American community, Lee says, there's a “unanimous response” about how students should behave at school. This is formed, in part, by the highly didactic, teacher-centered school system in Haiti: respect the teachers, don't talk back, be quiet, do what teachers tell you, and recite back. “They are proud of the Haitian school system,” she adds. Haitians, in turn, think American schools, by contrast, are unruly and undisciplined, with too many students talking back to teachers.
“When kids come to science and teachers ask, ‘Do you have any questions?’—students don't have questions. Teachers think students don't care, that they are not participating, or that they don't understand,” says Lee. “The kids think they are doing OK, but then are told the opposite.”
Lee points out research that shows students from diverse backgrounds “deploy sense-making practices—deep questions, vigorous argumentation, situated guesswork, embedded imagining, multiple perspectives, and innovative uses of everyday words to construct new meanings—that serve as intellectual resources in science learning.” Research shows that Haitian children who are quiet and respectful in the classroom will, in a “culturally familiar environment,” hold animated arguments about science “in a way that is integral to Haitian culture” and that meshes with scientific practice, Lee states.
To bridge cultural and language gaps and build understanding in science, a good teacher will ask about science backgrounds when dealing with students from other countries, cultures, or language groups. “Then she will observe the students, try to accommodate them, and make them more comfortable,” Lee says.
While encouraging students to use open ways of questioning and talking with the teacher in the classroom, the teacher should also remind students that such methods may not be appropriate at home with parents or other adults in their families.
“If teachers have an understanding of the norms and practices of science, teachers will be able to make bridges that the students need,” Lee says. “A good teacher is sensitive to both the academic and emotional needs of students.”
