Making Science Sizzle : Education: Years of preparation on several fronts has come together successfully in a science classroom at Ramona High, a reminder that true education reform comes slowly after much hard work.

There wasn’t a student in the science class at Ramona High School this summer who didn’t enjoy doing his or her own lab experiments, communicating with UC San Diego undergraduates through a computer network and spending a week at the university campus talking to stellar professors.

“I think when you do science yourself, you ask more questions and get more motivated for yourself,” student Elizabeth Barajas said of the just-completed four-week experience.

She and her soon-to-be ninth-grade peers are now primed for a two-year experimental course beginning next month, in which they will be taught biology and chemistry in tandem and will be encouraged as much as possible to find out for themselves how to apply scientific concepts.

“It can be hard at times if you are not motivated,” said Melissa Ponder, an incoming 10th-grader who completed the first year of the course in June.

Lisa Thurston chimed in, “Yeah, but we know now that science can be hard and fun at the same time.”

What the 30 new students entering the program don’t know, however, is the complexity of the years of planning that culminated in the enjoyment they took out of their summer class--another illustration that educational reforms come only slowly and after much preparation.

A 1982 state law offering money for schools wanting to prepare more women and minorities for college; a desire by Ramona administrators to improve their science curriculum; an effort by UCSD professors to buttress their teacher-preparation program and provide mentors to high-school students--all those strands of educational reform now come together in a science classroom at Ramona.

“It’s not easy to make science student-oriented,” Ramona biology teacher Rick Degelsmith said. He, along with colleague John Phelps in chemistry, has been writing lesson plans to integrate the subjects, as well as thinking of ways to run labs in a way that students learn to think for themselves and not simply regurgitate answers they believe their teachers expect.

The two teachers, along with Ramona projects administrator Carol Kennenbaum, helped the high school two years ago become one of 49 schools statewide that are funded with up to $250,000 each under the Specialized Secondary Program coordinated by the state Department of Education.

Ramona High is also among 100 schools statewide taking part in another effort to revamp secondary school science, primarily through subject integration.

All of these efforts, and more, are part of a major nationwide push to prepare more nonwhites and women for science careers.

Studies by the National Science Teachers Assn. show that college enrollment in science is at an all-time low, that student disenchantment with science takes hold by the eighth grade, and that less than 12% of all scientists and engineers are women--and even fewer Latino or black--despite data that the overwhelming number of new workers entering the work force by the year 2000 will be black, Latino and female.

Another complementary reform--the nationwide Project 2061 of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science--is working with six districts around the country--including San Diego Unified--to rewrite kindergarten-through-12th-grade science curriculum over a three-year period to increase student interest.

The programs are too new for educators to know whether they will bear fruit half a dozen years from now, or whether the efforts will end up as just another spasm in the long and frustrating effort by the educational system to turn itself around.

But those involved in the experiments, including the Ramona teachers, are enthusiastic.

“The idea is to make science more attractive to those students who don’t ordinarily take science,” said Phelps, who added that he is now writing better lesson plans because he has to think about how chemistry and biology so often interact, as well as how to motivate students “to want to discover things about science themselves.”

Said Degelsmith: “The perception of Ramona is not of a school with a (strong) science program” where significant numbers of students take three or more years of science and envision careers in related fields. The district has 6,000 students in K-12, 16% of them Latino.

Degelsmith went to Ramona four years ago after receiving his credential in the secondary science teachers preparation program at UCSD, where about 20 students each year complete a rigorous two years of training, with an emphasis on working with multiethnic classes and using hands-on instructional techniques such as having students work together on projects.

Ramona’s familiarity with UCSD’s program--two or three university students do a year of student teaching annually at Ramona’s junior or senior high schools--led the district to ask UCSD to join in the three-year pilot program.

UCSD professors quickly said yes.

“Our goal as well is to teach science in the best possible way,” said Daryl Stermon, a lecturer in the secondary science teacher education program. “And we think we we can help show that high school science can be taught as an extended, multi-year class, instead of seeing chemistry and biology and physics always as three separate classes.”

But, because of Ramona’s rural location, about 35 miles northeast of the La Jolla university, the teachers needed some way other than frequent field trips to link the two areas.

“You don’t find school districts that are smaller or removed from metropolitan areas having the most high-tech subjects or those being taught” in the most creative way, Stermon said.

“So we came up with the idea of linking UCSD students to the students by computer” for tutoring, Phelps said, “as well as a one-week summer camp right at the start so that students will hook up with UCSD students right off the bat.”

The camp is used especially as an enticement for students who need more than a cursory sales pitch from a school counselor to consider the multi-year science curriculum.

“We’ve got to work harder on recruitment,” said Joe Smith, a former science teacher at Ramona’s Olive Peirce Junior High and 1989 San Diego County teacher of the year, who now lectures in the UCSD program.

Smith was founder and longtime adviser to La Familia, an academic support group for migrant students in the Ramona district.

“We’re trying to get more Latinos,” he said, although the program has attracted a good number of females. Degelsmith and Phelps would like counselors to make a stronger sales effort to eighth-graders considering the program, such as stressing the chance to do their own labs and to use computers and other high-tech equipment daily.

Smith said he was “a little disappointed at the UCSD camp in that most of the presenters were white males, since we need lots of role models for these kids,” speaking of minorities and famales.

Nevertheless, the camp experience does remain with students long after the week is over, Stermon said.

“I still have students from the first year (in 1990) who talk to me about the superconductivity experiments they did at the camp,” Stermon said. In addition, the students in the first year made extensive use of the computer links with UCSD student teachers for advice on science projects, for help in solving problems and, at times, for a sympathetic ear about their teen-age concerns.

“I think it’s a great experience,” said UCSD’s April Cramer-Maskiewicz, one of the teacher-program students who served as counselors during the weeklong stay last month by the Ramona contingent.

“We weren’t teachers per se to them, but we weren’t fellow students either, so we could talk to them at a level they really could relate to.”

More than one student confessed to her and other counselors that “they have had teachers who they thought didn’t really enjoy teaching to them,” Cramer-Maskiewicz said, vowing not to fall into that category herself.

“But what they saw in the labs here was that, for example, dissecting bugs has meaning, that you can take the information and apply it in the future. . . . And we made sure that boys and girls equally jumped in and did things.”

Added colleague Rose Armour: “The students benefit enormously from seeing science applied, right at the beginning of this whole program, where scientists show an experiment and talk about analyzing every answer they get, as opposed to thinking that there is always just a right answer or a wrong answer.”

Lynne Shevinsky, who had a doctorate in immunology and 15 years’ experience as a researcher before she began the teacher credential program, spent her first year as a student teacher at Olive Peirce.

“We have the time so that students can talk with us (by computer) about what it takes to be a doctor or what it’s like to study for a science class,” she said. “The school counselors are so busy that they have maybe five minutes to advise a student on course planning--and what happens if a student is not verbal, but might really do well in science if properly encouraged?”

Her own experience in research also supports the idea that science should be taught in a more integrated way.

“I believe this very strongly,” Shevinksy said. “It doesn’t make sense any other way. Just look at how much of biology and chemistry directly relates to each other.”

Shevinksy praised chemistry teacher Phelps for applying the hands-on, lab-oriented curriculum to all of his classes, not just the experimental course.

“He may lecture to the students for five minutes, but then they pick up an experiment packet and go off and explore in the lab,” she said. “The students are always busy, always doing something.”

Although anecdotal evidence from the Ramona and other programs around the state indicates student enthusiasm, the long-range benefits are still to be demonstrated systematically, said Margaret Gaston, program officer for the state Department of Education.

“We hear that more kids are staying in school, are taking more science courses, are going to college,” Gaston said. “But over time we don’t know yet whether this will prove a good strategy, for businesses having a better-prepared work force, for higher entry rates into colleges and universities.”

Gaston does see hope for teachers in the program to spin off ideas to their colleagues as well as improve their own students’ achievement.

“And one of the great things about the UCSD-Ramona partnership is that, when the two groups get together, they come to the table as practitioners, and rather than talk about (bureaucratic details) or concerns, they are focused on children and what can be done for them.”