Classroom Changes Give a ‘Feel’ for Math, Science : Education: Minority schools take lead with hands-on techniques to help students grasp abstract concepts.

After decades in which many of the best science and math classes were offered in elite private and suburban schools and catered only to highly motivated children with extraordinary IQs, a new trend is emerging. In a growing number of schools, teachers are experimenting with new approaches and materials, turning average and even below-average students into budding young scientists and mathematicians.

Many of these efforts are under way in California, and most are happening in the very institutions that would seem least likely to produce the best science or math students: public schools that serve poor, disadvantaged minority students.

“Change is happening in some of the most unlikely places simply because so many people in those places are so desperate for change,” said Thomas P. Sachse, director of math and science programs for the California Department of Education.

“What is happening in California is typical of what is happening in the rest of the nation,” said Bill T. Aldridge, executive director of the National Science Teachers Assn. “The only difference is that California is moving more rapidly to make changes, in large part because it has had further to come.”

One place change is occurring is Rosemont Avenue School. Located in Echo Park east of downtown Los Angeles, the school serves a largely poor, immigrant population--Latinos, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and blacks.

The enrollment is huge--nearly 1,400 students. Students are not bused in to Rosemont; they are bused out to ease the overcrowding and help intergrate middle-class schools in faraway suburbs.

“In this neighborhood, people have to deal with poverty, crime, gangs, drugs and who knows what else, including, in our school, 16 different languages,” said Wayne Langham, principal of Rosemont and a 26-year veteran of the Los Angeles public schools.

” . . . What that means when it comes to teaching science,” he said, is that “our teachers don’t have the luxury of being able to stick a textbook in the faces of children and tell them to read about it” as they can--and often do--in schools where children are from affluent homes and well-educated families.

“Here,” Langham said, “we have to show them how to do it.”

In fact, that is precisely the way most education theorists and researchers have come to believe science and math should be taught.

Educators now know, for example, that it is virtually impossible for most children to learn abstract concepts, such as the theory of relativity or the origin of species, until they have had concrete experiences with the world around them.

Yet most U.S. schools persist in teaching math and science in the same way they have always taught it: Instead of allowing youngsters to get a “feel” for math and science early on, schools force students to memorize facts and formulas, and later, if they are lucky, conduct a few experiments, said Pat Dung, director of Target Science, a joint project of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Education Project, a nonprofit community organization seeking to improve public education in the city.

Certainly what goes on at Rosemont, 99th Street School in Watts, Rorimer Avenue School in East Los Angeles and dozens of other schools in California would not look very familiar to middle-class parents, most of whom remember science as occasionally watching staged experiments and forever trying to absorb obscure facts about dinosaurs and the human circulatory system.

At Rosemont, first-graders get their first taste of science by taking bilingual biology.

In Room 1, Estelle Delgado sits on the floor helping students distinguish between objects that are alive and those that are not.

What is the difference between a pig, “el cochino,” and a piggy bank, “el banco cochinito”? “Es vivo? O no es vivo?” the teacher asks.

There are no textbooks to consult, no abstract definitions to memorize. Like little scientists, the children make their own observations, sort through their own experiences and ultimately reach their own conclusions, in their own language.

The pig eats and wiggles and squeals and needs water and air and food, the children observe. “Es vivo!” they exclaim. And the piggy bank? Well, it just sits there. “No es vivo,” they say.

Linda Sweeter’s second-graders in Room 12 at Rorimer Elementary School in La Puente are having a similar experience, but instead of biology, they are beginning to grasp the fundamentals of physics.

In the San Gabriel Valley in one of the many new developments east of downtown Los Angeles, Rorimer is not really an inner-city school. But it shares with many city schools the problems of educating a diverse group of students, many of whom are labeled “educationally disadvantaged”--they live in poverty and come to school with only a limited knowledge of English.

So far, such disadvantages do not seem have hindered the 7-year-olds in Room 12. Using nails, screws and plastic, the second-graders are trying to figure out what magnetism is. Working in pairs as lab partners, they pose hypotheses, collect data and analyze the results.

If they are lucky, when the experiments are complete, the students will be able to draw some conclusions about what magnets are and how they work. Even if they fail, their teacher expects they will have learned something about scientific methodology and a great deal about the excitement and frustration of scientific inquiry.

“The noise level is significantly higher in our schools today than it used to be four years ago,” said Sue Brewer, assistant superintendent for instructional services for the Rowland School District, which oversees Rorimer. “But that’s the way it should be.”

Math is also a noisy activity at Rorimer.

It is not like the days of mimeographed problems-- 1+1=?, 1+2=?, 1-1=?, 2-1=?-- and tedious formulas-- x+(y+z)=(x+y)+z, V=Ah/3.

In fact, Gail Wakamatsu’s first-graders in Room 10 have yet to meet a mimeograph machine, and they certainly do not know what formulas are.

What they do know are games--tiles and dice and colored beans, which are everywhere for the children to play with. On the walls are graphs the children have made: the number and types of pets they have at home, the color of tennis shoes they wear to school.

Spread across the room at tables and on the floor, they work in groups of twos and threes, estimating, counting, recording, all part of an elaborate effort to appreciate how numbers look and act as they are manipulated.

Down the hall in Room 7, James Motpas’ sixth-graders work on word problems, but they are not the sort that have baffled generations of American school children: In a train holding 200 passengers, two porters begin serving coffee at 9 a.m. from opposite ends of the train at a rate of one cup per 20 seconds. At what time will the two porters meet?

These word problems are more practical--and a good deal more fun. The objective of the M & M Count and Crunch, for example, is to determine the ratio of colors in small packages of M & Ms. Red is the most common color, light brown the least common. Last year, Motpas’ students stumbled across something unexpected as well: Not all small M & M packages have the same number of candies. The most they have found thus far is 27, the least 21.

As fun and exciting as these classes may seem, they are by no means the norm.

“It would be a mistake to say that inner-city schools in this state have solved the problem of science and math education in this country or that they are the only places trying to bring about change,” said Sachse, California’s director of math and science education programs.

Yet many educators now believe the inner city is where change should be happening, not only because ghettos have some of the worst education problems but because it is there that a sizable portion of the next generation’s labor force--members of minority groups--is being educated.

Today, according to national education statistics, 22 of the 25 largest central-city school districts are made up predominantly of minority groups. Of all the states, California has the most. As has often been pointed out, minorities are no longer the minority in this state; they make up 52% of the school enrollment. Even nationwide, minorities--blacks, Latinos, Asians--are fast becoming the majority population, making up 39% of all public school enrollments.

When they begin school, there is little difference between minority children and Anglo children in their knowledge of science and math or their intense curiosity about the biological and physical worlds around them. By third grade, however, many have been turned off and achievement levels have begun to diverge. By junior high, minority children have fallen a year or more behind on standardized achievement tests. By the end of high school, there is a three- or four-year gap.

That is not to say the typical Anglo 17-year-old student is doing at all well in the United States.

The reasons for their difficulties in math and science are clear. Students in this country, with rare exceptions, are simply not taught science and math in the same way as are their counterparts elsewhere.

One of the most important differences between the U.S. system and that used by most other industrialized countries has to do with pacing, according to Mary Budd Row, a professor of science education at the University of Florida. In what are considered classic studies in education, Budd has found that in a typical American classroom, a student is given less than a second to respond to questions. When students are given only two more seconds to mull over a problem, she discovered, they are 600 to 700 times as likely to come up with the right answer.

Other studies here and in Europe have also shown that people of all ages learn the most when their lessons are broken into small units and spaced over time rather than presented in long, concentrated blocks of time. A person--adult or child--who wants to learn to operate a computer, for example, will do better in eight one-hour lessons than in one eight-hour session.

Classes such as Motpas’, Delgado’s, Sweeter’s and Wakamatsu’s try to make use of these findings by stretching lessons over days and weeks and by giving youngsters the opportunity to conduct their own experiments. In the process, these teachers have been making use of what is known as genetic epistemology, perhaps the single most important theory of learning that has emerged in the 20th Century.

Posed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget several decades ago, and since supported by research in education laboratories throughout the world, the theory essentially says that children cannot learn abstract theories (they can only memorize details of the theories) unless those theories are preceded by actual experiences in their own lives.

In other words, science or math must start early, include hands-on experiences and continue over many years.

Without these early experiences, researchers have found, children never really come to believe in science and math. Is it possible, students often ask, that dull black coal is really the same substance as a sparkling diamond? How is it, they wonder, that black could be the absence of any color while white is the combination of all colors?

Because they do not believe what they are told by teachers or what they read, students tend to concoct their own theories about the way the world works. That was dramatically illustrated recently in a video prepared by Harvard University and the Smithsonsian Institution. Called “A Private University,” the video documented the responses of a random group of Harvard seniors who were asked a simple scientific question: What causes the seasons to change?

Each of the students had a well-reasoned, well-articulated response, but 21 of the 23 responses were wrong. Many of the students thought the change in seasons had something to do with irregularities in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. In fact, changes in seasons are caused by the absolute regularity of the Earth’s axis, which means that during any given part of the year, half of the Earth faces the sun at an oblique angle (winter in one hemisphere) while the other half faces the sun more directly (summer in the other hemisphere).

As the video’s narrator says, “Many of these students will graduate from college with the same scientific miscomprehensions they had when they entered grade school.”

While new teaching methods may go a long way toward solving the worst of these problems, the more hands-on, experimental approaches are at the same time causing a whole new set of problems.

Finding textbooks is one of the most daunting tasks. Books need to be stimulating, practical and easy to follow--all at the same time. Yet making changes in books takes time and money and involves substantial risks.

Given that it takes somewhere between three and four years and as much as $30 million to develop a single text, publishers do not want to bring out new materials “unless they are sure schools are going to buy them, and most schools don’t know that they want until they see it,” explained Jerry Theise, a former publisher who oversees experimental publishing ventures at the National Science Foundation.

Finding the right teachers also is a costly and complicated problem.

The California Department of Education has been running summer retraining institutes, which cost about $2,000 per teacher per summer, and, many educators contend, take at least two to three summers to bring about significant change in teaching approaches.

As of now, there are not enough science and math teachers to go around and the problem is expected to get worse. By the end of the decade, California alone will need about 10,000 new mathematics and science teachers--twice what it is likely to get, unless something dramatic happens.

One obvious solution is to recruit scientists and mathematicians from private industry.

In the early 1970s, Frank Collea, a former college physics professor working in the central administration of the California State University system, did just that. Over a period of several years, he managed to recruit 200 people from private industry--one of them Jaime Escalante, the fiery Bolivian-born mathematics teacher who has for the past decade and a half been successfully coaching poor, inner-city students at Garfield High School in the Advanced Placement calculus exam. (Escalante was the subject of a book by Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews, “Escalante: The Best Teacher in the World,” and his life was featured in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”)

“That was 18 years ago,” Collea said. “And I’m still getting calls from principals asking me if we have any more of those teachers.”

This fall, Collea is again knocking on the doors of industry for help in getting more math and science teachers in the classroom. This time, the Cal State system is working in cooperation with Rockwell International Corp. in a pilot project designed to get recently retired engineers into high-school classrooms.

At best, however, that will be only a drop in the bucket.

Even if teachers can be recruited and books funded, there is the problem of assessing what students have learned from a modern, experimental curriculum.

As teachers at Rorimer have discovered, traditional standardized tests simply do not measure what students do and do not know. Since the science curriculum began to change there, students started scoring less well on state science exams. Brewer of the district office and Victory C. Fisher, Rorimer principal, have remained undaunted, however. The tests, they say, simply have not caught up with changes in the curriculum.

Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, agrees.

“Eventually they will,” Honig said. “We are already working on new assessments, entirely new approaches to testing.”

Simply by asking students to spend more time studying science and math, the state, has seen a substantially overall improvement in test scores in recent years, although the scores still are not as high as they should be, Honig said.

“We have to teach more science and math, which we are beginning to do, but that is only half the equation,” Honig said. “What we now have to do is teach it right. . . . That’s what schools in the Rowland District and others like it are beginning to show us.”

“The students themselves are proving we are succeeding,” Fisher said. “A year after the new science curriculum was implemented here, we polled the children at the end of the year. Seventy-five percent said (science) was their favorite subject.”

WHIZ KIDS: Specialty schools for top math and science students are opening their doors a bit wider. A30

A TRIP THROUGH THE EDUCATIONAL PIPELINE It begins in 1977 as a pool of 4 million high school sophomores across the U.S. Of those, 750,000 have a curriculum interest in science and engineering issues. But as these students travel through the educational system, fewer and fewer remain involved. Of the original 4 million, just 9,700 will attain a Ph.D. in science-related fields, according to a projection for 1992. High School sophomores: 4 million Sophomores with NS&E; interest: 750,000 Seniors with NS&E; interests: 590,000 College freshmen with NS&E; intentions: 340,000 Baccalaureate degrees in NS&E;: 206,000 Master’s degrees in NS&E;: 46,000 Ph.D.s in NS&E;: 9,700 Source: National Science Foundation