Storytelling to close the gender gap?

In Closing the Gender Gap in STEM Fields With Stories, Bethany Johnsen wrote an

Making science classes more “like that” is also the suggestion of a recent Scientific American blog post, To Attract More Girls to STEM, Bring More Storytelling to Science. Its authors, teachers at a STEM-focused high school, argue that the reason for the gender gap in the STEM fields is not a shortage of girls with ability, but the failure of our science curriculum to engage their interest and kindle their passion. The remedy they propose—telling the stories of science—could lend the STEM fields some of the allure traditionally left to the humanities.

While I agree that the shortage of women in STEM fields is not due to a shortage of girls with ability (the dominance of girls at middle school and high school science fairs is clear), I’m not convinced that a story-based approach is going to work. History of science is not science, and stories about scientists are not science. Replacing science instruction in middle and high school with stories and history would leave students less prepared to study and do real science, and more likely to choose a humanities field in college.

Note that there isn’t a gender gap in biology (at least not through grad school—there is still some gender gap in paid jobs), so the problem isn’t with “STEM” as a whole, but more specifically with the math and computation-based STEM fields.  Even among those fields, there are wide disparities, with math itself coming much closer to parity than physics or computer science.  Why?  Is it something about the field, about the way the field is taught, about the culture of the practitioners, or about the culture of the students currently majoring in those fields?

Making the science instruction more interesting is a good goal, but the suggestion of the SciAm blog post “How many engineering teachers include a fiction book like Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano in their syllabi?” seems to me to miss the point.  Replacing science and engineering with fiction reading will not result in more students studying engineering and science—it will result in students studying literature and thinking that they are studying science.

The basic idea—to use a more story-telling approach to teaching STEM—is a good one, but I think that the stories have to be intrinsic to the science and math, like Dan Meyer’s The Three Acts Of A Mathematical Story, not stories about science, which seems to be what both blogs are advocating.

I don’t know how successful approaches like “Storytelling Alice” have been—it is no longer available though the web page claims it was successful:

A study comparing middle school girls’ experiences with learning to program in Storytelling Alice and in a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice) showed that:

• Users of Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice.
• Users of Storytelling Alice were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time to program).
• Despite the focus on making programming more fun, users of Storytelling Alice were just as successful at learning basic programming concepts as users of Generic Alice.

Of course, Alice is not the most fun programming environment for middle schoolers (I think that Scratch beats it hands down), so the storytelling component may just have made it a bit better.  Has anyone ever attempted a Storytelling Scratch class? (I wasn’t able to find any equivalent to Storytelling Alice using Scratch in a very brief web search.)

The newest version of Scratch (2.0) runs as a Flash program in the browser, and has some new media-related features (like being able to interact with the video from the computer’s camera).  My son has played with it a bit, but I’ve not had time to explore the new features.  The Flash-based Scratch means that no installation is necessary to run programs, but that Scratch will not run on iOS devices (like iPads), which could be a limitation at many schools.  I understand that an iPAD app or HTML5 implementation of Scratch is planned, now that Scratch 2.0 has been released.

A better approach than stories about science may be to have more hands-on science and engineering, where students learn the science and engineering in order to accomplish something, not just to pass a course and get into college.  So far, most attempts along those lines have favored stereotypically “boy” goals (robot sports, for example, and video games), and so have not served to shrink the gender gap.

Engineering is liberal education

The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, in a blog post Who Needs A Liberal Education These Days? pointed me to a survey of employers by Hart Research Associates for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success.  That report has several unsurprising observations:

• Nearly all those surveyed (93%) agree, “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.”
• More than nine in ten of those surveyed say it is important that those they hire demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity; intercultural skills; and the capacity for continued new learning.
• More than three in four employers say they want colleges to place more emphasis on helping students develop five key learning outcomes, including: critical thinking, complex problem-solving, written and oral communication, and applied knowledge in real-world settings.
• Employers endorse several educational practices as potentially helpful in preparing college students for workplace success. These include practices that require students to a) conduct research and use evidence-based analysis; b) gain in-depth knowledge in the major and analytic, problem solving, and communication skills; and c) apply their learning in real-world settings.

(I guess they don’t care whether students learn proper punctuation, though, as the colon after “including” is incorrect.)

The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education uses this report as evidence that a “liberal education” is what students need, though it sounds more like what a good engineering school teaches than anything I’ve seen in the humanities.  In fact, the CFHE carefully omitted the major findings that are first in the summary of the report:

• Nearly all employers surveyed (95%) say they give hiring preference to college graduates with skills that will enable them to contribute to innovation in the workplace.
• More than nine in ten agree that “innovation is essential” to their organization’s continued success.

Not all innovation is engineering, nor does engineering education guarantee that the graduates will be innovators, but innovation is at the heart of engineering and of art, but is not so central in the humanities and sciences.

Of course, the definition of “liberal education” used in the report is one that few employers would say no to:

This approach to a college education provides both broad knowledge in a variety of areas of study and knowledge in a specific major or field of interest. It also helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as intellectual and practical skills that span all areas of study, such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.

Again, it sounds to me more like a good engineering school than a liberal-arts degree: particularly the parts about practical skills, analytical and problem-solving skills, and ability to apply knowledge and skills.  The areas that many engineering schools traditionally fall down on are the “sense of social responsibility” and communication skills.

But good engineering schools do include social responsibility and communications skills in the training that they provide. The engineering undergrad curricula that I’ve had a hand in helping design (computer engineering, bioinformatics, and bioengineering at UCSC) have all included both an ethics course and a technical writing course.  Communication is also a major part of engineering senior design projects and senior theses, and there are several social impacts and sustainability courses in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at UCSC.

[Disclaimer: the ethics course was not part of our original design for the computer engineering curriculum, but was added later when the faculty was large enough to staff an engineering ethics course—the other two curricula included a bioethics course from the beginning.]

The report provides a detailed list of “selected learning outcomes”, sorted by how much more of each the employers wanted to see:

• Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills
• The ability to analyze and solve complex problems
• The ability to effectively communicate orally
• The ability to effectively communicate in writing
• The ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings
• The ability to locate, organize, and evaluate information from multiple sources
• The ability to innovate and be creative
• Teamwork skills and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group settings
• The ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions
• Knowledge about science and technology
• The ability to work with numbers and understand statistics
• Proficiency in a language other than English
• Knowledge about global issues and developments and their implications for the future
• Knowledge about the role of the United States in the world
• Knowledge about cultural diversity in America and other countries
• Civic knowledge, civic participation, and community engagement
• Knowledge about democratic institutions and values

The priorities given by this list of learning outcomes seems to match the priorities of an engineering school pretty closely (though most engineering curricula put knowledge about science and technology, innovation, and teamwork higher on the list and oral communication lower), while most liberal arts curricula address the items nearer the bottom of the list.  This is not to say that those topics should be ignored:

While employers may not be clamoring for colleges to increase their emphasis on civic learning or in teaching about global issues, they widely agree that all students should receive civic education and learn about cultures outside the U.S. Fully 82% agree (27% strongly) that every student should take classes that build civic capacity, and learning about societies and cultures outside the United States (78% total agree; 26% strongly) is widely valued for all students. Additionally, four in five agree (32% strongly) that all students should acquire broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, regardless of a student’s chosen field of study.

Some of the other standard educational practices in engineering also are highly supported in the report:

Employers express the greatest confidence in the following practices to help students succeed beyond graduation. Large majorities believe that colleges that set expectations for students to achieve these learning outcomes will do the most to prepare them for success:

• Develop research questions in their field and evidence-based analyses (83% will help a lot/fair amount)
• Complete a project prior to graduation that demonstrates their acquired knowledge and skills (79% will help a lot/fair amount)
• Complete an internship or community-based field project (78% will help a lot/fair amount)
• Develop the skills to conduct research collaboratively (74% will help a lot/fair amount)
• Acquire hands-on or direct experience with the methods of science (69% will help a lot/fair amount)
• Work through ethical issues and debates to form their own judgments about the issues at stake (66% will help a lot/fair amount)

Some other fashionable memes in the education world were not so popular with employers:

• Using new approaches that de-emphasize lectures in the classroom and instead have students listen to lectures online and devote classroom time to dialogue, debate, and problem solving in groups or alone, and with guidance from the instructor (59%)
• Expecting students to learn about the points of view of people in societies other than those of Western Europe or North America (47%)
  
• Expecting students to learn about cultural and ethnic diversity in the context of the United States (44%)
  
• Expecting students to explore challenges facing society, such as environmental sustainability, religious tolerance, or human rights (42%)

Something that we at UCSC have not been preparing students for is creating an electronic portfolio of their accomplishments:

Four in five (83%) employers say an electronic portfolio of student accomplishments would be very (43%) or fairly (40%) useful to them in ensuring applicants have the skills and knowledge to succeed in their company or organization.

Overall, I feel pretty good about the match between what the engineering curricula I’ve helped design teach and what employers are looking for in college graduates.  I think that both oral and written communication skills need to be given more emphasis across the curriculum (too many faculty are unwilling to take the time to provide feedback on written work), and that the bioengineering curriculum needs more design courses, but that the basic goals of the programs I’ve helped create are in good agreement with what employers are looking for.

Santa Cruz County Science Fair 2013

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday judging at the Santa Cruz County Science Fair, which is always fun, but a little tiring.  This year I was the lead judge for the “Energy and Power” category, which had 14 projects in grades 4–5 and 14 in grades 6–8.  There were no high school projects in my category, and they decided to have interviews but not judging for K–3, so I ended up only talking briefly with the K–3 students and did not give them written feedback.  I interviewed 26 or 27 of the students in my category, and provided written feedback for each of them.  That written feedback is the most important part of the fair, and the judges in my category were all very diligent about providing detailed feedback, so most of the kids got 4 or 5 feedback forms.  In some other categories, a lot of the judges left without providing feedback, and a few kids ended up with no feedback forms. (I heard about it from some of the parents, because the administrator had left before the public viewing, and I was clearly identifiable as a judge—I wear a lab coat for judging science fair.)

The “energy and power” category is where all the lemon batteries end up, which makes it a rather sad category for judges.  Every category has a few projects that appear (usually very badly done) year after year. The lemon batteries are almost always terrible projects, with the students following rote directions from the web (in at least two cases this year, incorrectly) and having no understanding what they are doing.  I think that Science Buddies has a lot to answer for! The students seem to think that the power is coming from the fruit (rather than from the dissimilar metals) and that voltage is the same thing as power.

We also got the windmills, solar cells, wave generators, and thermoelectric devices. Those were generally a little bit better done—we actually had a pretty good solar cell project and a pretty good Peltier-device project. Because our fair does not have an engineering category (other than “environmental engineering”), we ended up with a number of the engineering projects as well (hovercrafts, ducted propellers, and the like).

There is a big need to train elementary school teachers (and to a lesser extent middle-school teachers) in science and engineering methods.  And I don’t mean the nonsense they teach about the “scientific method”, which bears almost no resemblance to any process of scientific or engineering work I’ve ever seen.  I mean that they need to know how to measure voltage, current, and resistance, and to be able to show kids how to compute power (it is not the same thing as voltage, nor is it the product of open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current).  Teachers should be able to show students how to build a simple calorimeter and measure energy from chemical reactions (like burning fuel). A lot of the students I interviewed were quite bright, but no one had ever taught them the basics they needed to be able to do their projects.  Nor have they been taught how to use the tools they have. I don’t want to see another student wrapping the loop for measuring AC current around a wire and claiming that they are measuring resistance, nor claims that lemon batteries produced 9 Amps at 1v.

Things I learned when I was 8–10 years old should be within reach of their teachers. I think that a few hours of professional development that involved them actually doing some measurements and learning the basics of some of the science and engineering projects would improve the quality of their students projects a lot. Every elementary school teacher should know how to use a hand saw, a drill, wire strippers, and a soldering iron, and they should be teaching the kids how to use them also.  (Yes, I can see the safety problems if you try to do it in a large class—but the safety problems in PE classes are far larger, but we haven’t thrown out all sports in schools because of it.)

Even just telling the teachers some basic ideas might help.  Some of the things I see repeatedly:

• Know what you are measuring (voltage is not power).
• Measure the right thing to answer the underlying question.
• Measure inputs as well as outputs (counting colonies tells you how many culturable bacteria or fungi were in your initial sample, which is useless if you don’t know how big the sample was).
• Don’t culture unknown micro-organisms (except in a lab with proper protection and sterilization equipment).
• Read (and cite) some material from the web. High school students should be going well beyond Wikipedia in their literature searches, but even a short Wikipedia seach would be a big step up for most of the middle school and elementary school students.  If Wikipedia is too difficult for an elementary school student (as it may well be), see if there is anything useful on Simple English Wikipedia.
• Good science fair projects take time, often with many false starts. There are way too many 1-week projects at the county science fair.
• Mentorship is good, but doing the work for the kid is not—especially not the interpretation of the results. This point is aimed more at the over-involved parents than the teachers—but judges have to be very careful, as there are some highly motivated kids doing things that look like adult work, but really are just the student.  (I remember an incident about a decade ago, of a kid in another category who was severely down graded by the judges in who thought they were judging a parental project, but I talked with the kid for 15 minutes later on and I was convinced that the work really was his alone.  I was angry at the judges for not being more careful in their judgements, but there was nothing I could do about it.)

It’s great to see the enthusiasm and talent of the K–3 group (which has been growing so rapidly that the hall that is rented for the Science Fair is no longer big enough), but that enthusiasm and talent seems to dissipate rapidly around middle school—there are still a lot good middle-school projects, but there are also a number of kids just going through the motions and only a few are continuing to do science fair once they are not required to.  I see more evidence of parental over-involvement at middle school than at elementary school (though that may be due to the selection processes at the different feeder schools, rather than inherent in the age groups).  I didn’t see any evidence of over-involvement in my category this year—if anything, I saw the opposite, with students not getting critical guidance so that they could do a really meaningful project.

One very sad part of the county science fair is how few high school students participate.  There are no school-level fairs in our county at the high school level, and little or no encouragement of individual projects.  This year I think we had 23 projects from high school students, out of a population of about 7500 high school students—about 0.3%.    According to the statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the various STEM categories add up to about 6% of the workforce (not counting healthcare, which would double the number, and not counting several related occupations, like high-school science teachers, scientific sales, science and engineering managers, …).  So even with very conservative counting, we’re short by a factor of 20 in this county.  I’d be satisfied if even 1–2% of the high school students were entering science fair, but we’re nowhere close to that number, and the participation at the high-school level is shrinking, not growing, each year.

The problem is not strictly a local one—most places see a drop in participation from middle school to high school, but I don’t think many are as extreme as here.  There are some places in the US where high school science fair is big—what have they done differently?

Lots of organizations have seen the problem of high school students losing interest in science fair, and they have put up cash prizes and other incentives for high school students, but (in this county anyway), no one is taking the bait.  We need to find a way to get high-school students excited about doing science or engineering projects, and I don’t know what would stimulate that excitement.

Many (most?) of the good projects in middle school and high school came from home-schooled kids or kids getting a lot of after-school education from mentors or parents.  This may be related to the point that good science fair projects take time and require passion on the part of the students, and the local schools (public, private, and charter) don’t provide a good environment for projects that take time nor for students to show passion—way too much busywork and time wasted preparing for standardized tests.

Descaffolding

Grant Wiggins, in his post Autonomy and the need to back off by design as teachers, talks about the need for teachers to withdraw scaffolding so that students can learn to do stuff on their own:

Everywhere I go I see way too much scaffolded and prompted teaching – through twelfth grade. By high school, Socratic Seminar, Problem Based Learning, and independent research ought to be the norm not the exception: you have no hope for success in college or the workplace without such independence. Yet, practically no district curricula are written to signal, explicitly and by design, the need for increased student decision-making and independence in using their growing repertoire as courses and years unfold. Rather, the work just gets harder but is still highly directed. Endless worksheets, prompts, reminders, and ongoing feedback keep co-opting the development of student autonomy.

Unfortunately, the problem does not stop at 12th grade.  A few years ago, I had a particularly weak group of programmers in my senior bioinformatics class, and I was talking with them about their prior education.  It turned out that most of them had never designed a program before—they had coded, but always within a scaffold provided by the instructor, and they had no idea how do divide a problem into sub-problems, which I see as the very essence of engineering and of programming.  Now, if these students had only had the first Java programming class, I would have been sympathetic, but they had had this level of scaffolding all the way through an upper-division class called “Advanced Programming”.  (They’d also had the same teacher for all their programming courses—a good instructor, but one who scaffolds too much, and so a better teacher for the lower-level courses.)

I complained to a member of the computer-science department who cares deeply about teaching, and he promised to speak with the instructor.  Things were better in subsequent years, but this year I was again hearing from the seniors that all their programming courses involved writing code inside scaffolds provided by the faculty.  The gradual withdrawal of support doesn’t seem to have sunk in as an essential part of the pedagogy of the department (or of that particular instructor, at least).

In my circuits course, I’ve been trying to get the students to do things on their own, without having to be led every step of the way.  I’m making some progress on some aspects of the problem (they are no longer asking “is this right?” all the time in lab, but are taking to heart the “try it and see!” answer I nearly always give them), but progress is slow—I still see no evidence of them reading the assigned material before coming to class, or finding lab partners before the day of the lab, or even doing the prelab design assignments without my explicitly telling them to do so.

I do scaffold the lab assignments, with gradually increasing design complexity and autonomy over the quarter.  (Though I’m thinking of re-ordering some labs next year, so that they get more scaffolding on using gnuplot to model and fit data—that hit them too hard in the electrode lab this year.)

I keep expecting them to want to take things into their own hands and come up with things they want to try, but they all seem to approach labs as ritual exercises in performing pre-determined protocols—the legacy of badly designed physics, chemistry, and molecular bio labs. I need to kick them out of this “ritual magic” view of laboratory work.  Having them do designs before coming to lab to build and test them should help (it certainly did with the audio amp lab)—I’ll have to see if I can work that into the earlier labs more.  That might be easier when I split some of the labs, so that measuring a component is done in one lab, then designing with it before the next.

I am worried that some this year will not be able to do the more detailed design of the last three labs (the class-D power amp, the instrumentation amp for strain-gauge pressure sensors, and the EKG amplifier), even if they understand all the concepts needed and can design each block that goes into the final design.

I’ve started to notice that they are afraid to commit to an answer to an exercise or a design problem even when they do, in fact, know how to do the problem.  If they bring that extreme hesitancy to the final labs, where they have to make several design decisions, they’ll shut down before they get the design done.  They have enough resources (op amps, instrumentation amps, resistors, capacitors, PC board space, …) that they don’t need to come up with anything close to an “optimal” design.  There are lots of “good enough” designs that will do just fine for this course.  I think I need to do some more scaffolding of system-level design (like the block diagram for the audio amp), but I need to withdraw that scaffolding before the EKG lab.

I’m hoping that this week’s tinkering lab will encourage more open-ended exploration of a design space for them, and get them over their fear of not knowing the “right” answer. There is no “right” answer for the tinkering lab.  I did explore the space a little to make sure that there were some easy-to-find designs that were interesting—I don’t want them flailing in a design space that is too difficult to explore.  I also provided scaffolding in the form of systematic exercises in modifying the oscillator (like looking at the effect of adding resistors or capacitors between any pair of nodes—it helps that the initial circuit has only 4 nodes). But I’m not going to try to direct the students to any particular design—I really hope they come up with different designs from each pair of lab partners, and that someone comes up with some wildly different ideas that I did not even explore.

I plan to have the students coming out of the circuits course capable of doing some useful electronics design and of writing readable design reports—goals that are much harder to meet than the “pass a test on some circuits concepts” goal of the EE 101 course.  I’ll be pushing the students pretty hard in the class, because I know that they can do it, even if they are still not convinced of it.

I think that these students have been short-changed in the past by teachers who had low expectations of them. Because the bioengineering students take so many intro courses in so many different sciences, they’ve had little time for the advanced courses that might have stretched them—I’m having to do a lot of stretching them all at once, which is not comfortable for them or for me.

I wish we could have a year to develop the engineering practices at a saner pace, but 10 weeks of circuits is all they get, so I’m trying to make the most of it.

Becoming engineers

In The Art of Becoming Yourself, Chad Hanson discussed the hard-to-measure cultural value of a university education.  I was particularly struck by his statement:

Educators spend a good deal of energy testing critical-thinking ability and, frankly, are frustrated with the results. One reason we have difficulty producing critical thinking is that we separate thinking from thinkers. We treat critical thinking as if it were a free-floating ability when, in fact, it is a function of oneself or one’s identity. Critical thinking is a way of positioning oneself toward a problem. For critical thinking to take place, students must first come to think of themselves as people who are willing to take a critical stance in relation to an issue.

This resonated with me because I’m trying to teach the bioengineering students in my circuits courses to “think like engineers“, but I had not thought of the problem in quite the way that Dr. Hanson put it.  My goal is not to have students “take a critical stance”, but to be able to solve problems that they have never seen before.

I’m really trying to make the students see themselves as engineers, rather than as students—to have them think of themselves as people who can look at a problem and decompose it into solvable subproblems, as people who are willing to explore possibilities without knowing that there is a correct answer in the back of the book, and as people who can design solutions.

I want them to think “let me look on the data sheet” and “let me measure that and see”, rather than asking “is this right?”

I want them to look at a breadboard that isn’t working, and start by checking each wire to see if it is consistent with the schematic, rather than just calling the TA or me over for help  (80% of the debugging I’ve done for students is pointing out that their wiring doesn’t match their schematic).

I want them to draw their own schematics, checking to make sure they know what each wire and component is for, not just copying and pasting someone else’s. I want them to check their schematics to be sure they haven’t shorted power and ground, and that every input and output is appropriately wired, not left dangling.

I want them to do quick sanity checks on every calculation or design decision, asking “is that consistent with what we know already?” and “are the units right?”

They’re all capable of doing these things, when told to, but they have not yet changed themselves to the point where they tell themselves these things without being nudged.

If they forget in a year how to compute the corner frequency of an RC filter, I’ll be only mildly disappointed—if they need it, they can look it up or rederive it in a few minutes.  But if they forget that they can rederive  formulas from a few simple principles, rather than having to memorize or look up solutions to every possible problem, I will have failed.  If they forget or don’t learn how to decompose problems into subproblems, or how to write a design report that can be understood by people who’ve not read any prior problem statement, then I will have failed.  If they forget to look at datasheets or to do consistency checks on their own work and that of their colleagues, I will have failed.

Dr. Hanson quotes Alexander Astin:

In his classic What Matters in College?, he concludes, “The student’s peer group is the single most potent source of influence on growth and development during the undergraduate years.” As educators, we assume that students enroll in our classes for the sake of the learning outcomes listed on our syllabi. The truth is that learning outcomes are actually a small part of the endeavor. The postsecondary ritual is a large and life-changing experience.

That suggests to me that it will take the students helping each other to make the change to thinking like engineers.  I can give them exercises and labs in which engineering thinking is valuable, and I can give them questions to ask themselves, but it may take the students asking each other these questions for the change in their ways of thinking to become part of who they are.