July 2007 News Briefs on STEM Education

In this Issue:

1.         Asian Equation: Math and Science in China

2.         Higher Pay Urged to Fight Dearth of Math and Science Teachers

3.         A Global Approach to Engineering

4.         Pilot High School is Model for Science, Tech Program

5.      Newly introduced STEM Education Legislation

1. Asian Equation: Math and Science in China (Education Week 6/6)

Although China’s approach to teaching mathematics and science has reaped economic benefits, leaders of the world’s most populous nation believe students can advance further if schools inject some American-style flexibility into their lessons.

2. Higher Pay Urged to Fight Dearth of Math and Science Teachers (Washington Post 6/12)

A report from a national group of business and higher education leaders identifies highly qualified teachers as the key to increasing the number of graduates in science, math, engineering and technology fields. But the group said teaching salaries aren’t competitive enough to attract talented candidates to the field.

3.  A Global Approach to Engineering (Chronicle of Higher Education 6/1)

Recognizing the importance of intercultural skills for engineers working in a global economy, a growing number of engineering schools are encouraging undergrads to spend time overseas gaining experience.

4.  Pilot High School is Model for Science, Tech Program (Cleveland Plain Dealer 6/3)

The educational approach of Ohio’s first pilot STEM high school, called Metro School, has so impressed business and political leaders that lawmakers are considering a proposal to spend $20 million to develop a network of STEM schools.

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 Recently Introduced STEM Legislation

This is a record of recently introduced legislation related to STEM Ed. but does not represent Caucus endorsement of any legislation

S.1719 A bill to amend title 38, United States Code, to provide additional educational assistance under the Montgomery GI Bill to veterans pursuing a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math.
Sponsor: Sen Brown, Sherrod [D-OH] (introduced 6/27/2007)       Cosponsors: (none)
Committees: Senate Veterans' Affairs
Latest Major Action: 6/27/2007 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

The Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education Caucus’ primary mission is to promote all areas of STEM Education including K-12, higher education and workforce issues in Congress.  At its core, the caucus functions to increase the visibility and importance of STEM Education and educate Members of Congress and their staffs on the technical issues and public-policy options surrounding STEM education.  The Caucus serves as an information source and a catalyst for improving STEM education.

If you would like to join the Caucus, please contact Julia Jester (x53831) in Mr. Ehlers’ office or Wendy Adams (x52161) in Mr. Mark Udall’s office.

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Published in Print: June 6, 2007

Asian Equation

Jiexiao Peng, in the ruffled skirt, helps pupils with a math worksheet at the Jinwin No. 1 Primary School in Zhuhai, China. —Sevans/Education Week

Chinese leaders are redesigning the way students are taught math and science so the younger generation will be prepared to help a changing society move forward.

By Sean Cavanagh

Beijing

The voice over the loudspeaker bellows a command across the vast stone courtyard at Beijing Fourth Secondary School, and hundreds of students in blue and white uniforms pivot, high-step, and shout in unison.

Seated in a third-floor conference room, with the sound of his school’s mandatory daily exercises drifting through the window in faint echoes, Li Jianhua exudes serenity and confidence.

As the principal at one of the most elite public schools in China, he’s in a position to do so. Located in a bustling neighborhood north of the Forbidden City, his school attracts many of Beijing’s top students, employs some of its most talented teachers, and carries a reputation for academic superiority and innovation, despite the regimentation on display this spring morning.

Yet when the principal hears suggestions from American officials that Chinese students have skills superior to those of their U.S. counterparts in mathematics and science, he cannot agree.

Chinese students have many strengths, Mr. Li says. They work hard. They master basic concepts and then, at least at his school, march steadily into more difficult ones. They are taught by teachers who know their subjects, and they receive strong support from their parents.

What they lack is harder to quantify. But he has seen it.

“On the surface, Chinese students can get very high scores in math and science. But they don’t really grasp the true meaning of math and science,” Mr. Li says through a translator. “Science and math are analytical tools we use to explore the world. People in China see math and science as a tool to change their destiny, not to explore the world.”

Those views reflect one strand of a discussion playing out among school and government officials in China and the United States, as leaders in both countries explore strategies for revamping their educational systems and, where relevant, draw lessons from each other.

American officials lament their students’ mediocre skills in math and science, and warn that China, with its firm academic emphasis on those subjects and its enormous student population, stands to reap economic rewards from U.S. complacency. Some U.S. officials believe their country needs a more consistent approach to teaching math and science, which could replace the potpourri of approaches used in states and school districts.

Yet China’s government is, in contrast, seeking to inject more American-style flexibility into its math and science curriculum, by placing less emphasis on exams and more focus on cultivating students’ creative and analytical skills, which school officials believe are lacking. Chinese teachers are being encouraged to move away from lectures, drills, and memorization in class, and to invite more discussion and student-led activity. Schools are adding more elective courses and independent research projects. Textbooks are being rewritten.

Other changes will not come easily. For generations, Chinese education has focused largely on exams, an approach that critics say has encouraged rote learning, not critical thinking. The exam system, however, has obvious staying power: It provides schools and universities with a practical way of selecting students from a vast pool of qualified applicants.

China has an estimated 230 million K-12 students—roughly four times the combined U.S. public and private school population—though only a small fraction of them go on to college.

Chinese officials say they are committed to increasing opportunities for students, especially those from poor, rural areas. The government recently announced plans to stop collecting all tuition and fees for students in rural schools. And still, demand for education is growing. Of the millions of migrants who leave rural areas each year and move into cities in search of work, many are turning to low-cost private schools to educate their children. Families with more money, particularly in urban areas, are clamoring for opportunities to send their children to more selective and expensive private schools offering an academic breadth similar to that of their American counterparts.

Side-by-side comparisons of the two systems are difficult, however. Unlike the United States, China has not participated in either of the two most prominent country-by-country tests of student academic skill, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, and the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

The two countries’ school systems also have grown out of vastly different societies. The United States is a democracy in which federal, state, and local officials all help shape school policy, with a strong tradition of local control. In China, all major education decisions flow from the central government and its ruling Communist Party. The United States is a wealthy nation, where students have myriad opportunities for educational and economic advancement. China is a relatively poor but fast-developing one, where students must fight for limited spaces in schools and universities.

Many features of Chinese education, though, such as parents’ strong involvement in schools and society’s broad respect for math and science, have a centuries-old lineage. China’s exam system, for instance, can be traced to at least the sixth-century Sui Dynasty, when the policy of awarding government positions by family nobility was abolished in favor of a system based on test performance.

When U.S. educators visit China, “nobody takes an anthropologist on their trip,” quipped Daniel W. Gregg, the social studies consultant for the Connecticut education department, who directs an exchange program between his state and China’s rural Shandong province.

“We short-shrift the cultural aspects, along with the challenges their system is facing today,” he said. “But taking into account all of those historical underpinnings is very important to have a meaningful conversation.”

Students have already reached an impressively high rung on the educational ladder when they arrive at Beijing Fourth Secondary School, a collection of tall white buildings separated from the street’s clatter by a security gate and a sea of bicycles.

Inside the school’s walls, images of aca-demic superiority, and above all, student discipline, abound. Classes typically have 50 or 60 students—twice the number of many U.S. classrooms—but with a fraction of the disruption. Students stand individually to address teachers in class, and remain standing until teachers are satisfied with their answers. And every day, students break from those lessons for mandatory exercise, in which they march, stretch, and even relax—through eye exercises—on command.

Almost all the students here want to go to college, and many will aim for elite institutions like Tsinghua University and Peking University. Many of their parents are well educated and hold jobs in finance or government. Other students are the first in their families to have come this far in school, which makes them all the more determined to reach even higher.

The school’s principal, Mr. Li, understands that motivation. He grew up in the remote Xinjiang autonomous region in northwestern China, and his parents had little formal education. He loved math in school, but he had to teach himself much of that subject, mostly by reading textbooks. He persisted, and went to college, then graduate school, before eventually landing a job as a math teacher at this school.

A youngish 40, Mr. Li is dressed in a trim brown jacket and dark jeans, with a look that suggests Silicon Valley entrepreneur more than office-bound administrator. He is used to hosting foreign visitors at the school, and he is proud of its attempts to challenge students in new ways, such as through electives and independent research projects. The principal points out recent projects on display in a school hallway on such topics as artificial-intelligence technology, air quality, and DNA research.

Through those projects, students “can find the application of subjects,” Mr. Li noted, “and the real meaning of study.”

Mr. Li’s belief that Chinese students need to broaden their math and science skills was shaped by visits he made to schools in the United States several years ago. Since the economic and social reforms of the late 1970s, China’s government has encouraged cross-cultural exchanges. One recent beneficiary was Li Linyu, a student at the prestigious Affiliated High School of South China Normal University, in the city of Guangzhou, who emerged with opinions of the strengths—and shortcomings—of American students.

As part of an exchange program, the 18-year-old attended a year of classes at a public high school northwest of Atlanta. In various subjects, especially math, the U.S. students did not have skills equal to those of her Chinese classmates, she recalled. But they had more freedom to take part in optional classes and extracurricular activities. “They can become leaders and grow,” Ms. Li said. And the American students also showed great curiosity, and weren’t afraid to ask questions or give a wrong answer.

“They really enjoyed learning, rather than just hearing from the teacher,” she said. “They keep asking why. Everybody seemed to engage in the discussion.”

In China, students like Li Linyu are more likely to study difficult lessons at an earlier age, particularly in math and science, than most of their American counterparts. Officials at China’s top curriculum agency, the People’s Education Press, told Education Week that they believe Chinese primary and secondary math lessons are, on average, about one year ahead of those in America, even taking into consideration that the United States has no mandatory national standards.

China’s math lessons have become less theoretical in recent years and more focused on problem-solving, said Alan Ginsburg, a U.S. Department of Education official who has studied the Chinese system. In early grades, Chinese lessons now include more focus on probabilities—an area in which U.S. students are strong—than they did a few years ago, said Mr. Ginsburg, who is also the co-chairman of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a Singapore-based organization that promotes trade and investment across the region.

Chinese texts are putting less emphasis on proofs and theorems in geometry, and more on practical, physical applications in that subject, he added. They are also folding more real-life examples from science into math textbooks, in contrast to U.S. texts, which, Mr. Ginsburg argued, are bloated and yet devoid of illustrations that reinforce learning.

“We use pictures more for motivation of students,” he said, “not to solve problems.”

In science, Chinese students take six years of integrated courses during elementary school, according to the People’s Education Press. Unlike most U.S. students, they then delve into specific science subjects in middle school: biology during the U.S. equivalent of 7th grade, biology and physics during 8th grade, and physics and chemistry during 9th grade, the PEP says. Students who go on to high school take a mix of compulsory and optional science classes.

Established by the Chinese leader Mao Zedong in 1950, the PEP publishes textbooks for the nation’s schools across all subjects. Those texts are generally thinner, with fewer exercises and less redundancy than U.S. texts, in the view of PEP officials. On the other hand, U.S. books in some subjects, such as science, have a stronger narrative flow that better integrates vocabulary and concepts into lessons, say agency officials, who are trying to improve their texts’ storytelling.

Chinese teachers are also trained differently from their U.S. counterparts in leading students through academic material. At China’s top teacher education programs, known as normal universities, aspiring math and science teachers typically take 20 courses in their subjects to gain certification. In the United States, by contrast, most high school math and science teachers take only 10 to 14 subject courses—and fewer if they teach at earlier grade levels, experts say.

The quality of teaching, however, varies enormously across China. Many teacher programs require far less coursework than normal universities; rural schools and those with few resources often rely on such programs’ graduates. In some areas, schools are forced to hire teachers without any credentials or experience whatsoever.

Vol. 26, Issue 39, Pages 22-26

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http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i39/39a03301.htm

From the issue dated June 1, 2007

A Global Approach to Engineering

Universities push their future engineers to study abroad, with limited success

By SCOTT CARLSON

Worcester, Mass.

Before she arrived in Namibia, Tarra Epstein had her trip planned out as precisely as a line plotted on a grid. She and three other engineering students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute had come to the South African country to help set up alternative-energy programs for poor villages, and Ms. Epstein had written up a daily schedule and plan of action for herself and her colleagues.

In time, all of that went out the window.

They arrived to find that they would have to cobble together some of their projects from scraps and that there was little in the way of an office or laboratory, and even less passing for a computer or Internet connection.

"By the end of the trip, I loosened up a lot," Ms. Epstein says. "Here we are on a truck, headed to a village where we don't know if they are expecting us or not. The four of us end up sleeping in a two-person tent in the middle of a cow field. It puts things into perspective. You're not in the lab. You're doing real work."

Within WPI's global-studies program for engineers, an experience like this is considered a grand success. The point of that program, and of many like it at colleges across the country, is to pull undergraduate engineers out of familiar campus environments and make them engage other cultures — in China, India, Thailand, Germany, Mexico, and other countries.

It is training for a profession that is becoming increasingly global. American manufacturing has largely moved overseas. Those manufacturing sites are also the homes of future customers. American companies forecast immense growth for their products in modernizing countries like India and China, and engineers need to understand those cultures before designing products for them, say supporters of international-engineering programs.

ABET, which accredits college engineering programs, has made a "broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context" part of its criteria.

Moreover, most American engineers will need better intercultural skills, as they will increasingly work with engineers from other countries. A recent study at Duke University showed that India and China are graduating large and growing numbers of students with engineering and technological degrees, outpacing U.S. growth. "The American engineer is going to be a minority on design teams in the future," says E. Daniel Hirleman, director of a global-engineering program at Purdue University.

Employers, most important, are hunting for graduates with international experience. Mr. Hirleman says that students who have participated in his program are in "ultrahigh demand" after they graduate, and that some land supervisory jobs.

But so far, American colleges have made few inroads in the global-engineering market. John Wall, a vice president at Cummins Inc., a major manufacturer of diesel engines that supports the international-engineering program at Purdue University, says he would like to hire more students with international experience. He says, however, that there just are not enough coming out of American colleges.

"Engineering is a social exercise, and being able to relate across cultural boundaries is getting very important," Mr. Wall says. In illustrating cross-cultural communication, he cites an example from his own experience working with engineers at offices in Asia: When asked to do an impossible task, Asian engineers will never say no, as an American might. "What you'll hear is, 'We'll try.' You have to be sensitive to that, how they will qualify it."

Constraints of Structure

Globalization affects not only engineers, of course. Many colleges are struggling to raise participation in study abroad across every field. Nationally the percentage of students who spend time abroad hovers around one percent. But engineering programs face particular challenges in encouraging students to go overseas.

Undergraduate engineering programs are generally extremely rigorous and very rigid, and students have to follow a strict sequence of courses to get a degree within four years. Engineering students — who, those in the field say, often come from working-class backgrounds — usually do not have the luxury of taking a semester off for a foreign excursion.

Last fall the Institute for the International Education of Students, a nonprofit study-abroad provider, announced that it was creating new programs tailored to engineering students and others with extremely structured majors. But Michael Steinberg, the institute's executive vice president for academic programs, says the programs have had trouble getting off the ground, in part because of the heavy course loads of engineering students.

Jane F. Fines, who directs study-abroad programs for the engineering school at the University of Maryland at College Park, says that course load is less of a problem than poor marketing. Engineering students do not go overseas because foreign study has not traditionally been a focus for the field.

Whatever the reason, engineering students travel abroad in disproportionately small numbers. They make up 5.2 percent of all undergraduates, but account for less than 3 percent of students who go abroad. Students in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, by contrast, are over

represented in those programs. They make up nearly 44 percent of all students who go overseas, even though they account for only 22 percent of undergraduates.

Many engineering deans aspire to push their numbers up. Lester A. Gerhardt, dean of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is setting up partnerships with universities around the world. He would like to send overseas 25 percent of the class of 2010, or almost 200 students. Eventually, he says, all engineering students at RPI will study abroad.

He has some work ahead of him. Today only about a dozen engineering students at RPI study abroad in the Global Engineering Education Exchange, offered through the Institute of International Education. The program, which Mr. Gerhardt helped set up, serves about 300 students from 30 American and 70 international universities.

A Limited Audience

Others are skeptical that engineering schools will ever send overseas a critical mass of students. "It is impossible, literally, for every engineering student to go abroad for one semester in their career," says Pradeep Khosla, dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Most of the study-abroad programs in engineering are based on reciprocal arrangements with overseas universities, Mr. Khosla says, and American higher education could not absorb the number of students necessary to make these arrangements work. "If we sent 75,000 students abroad, are they going to send 75,000 students here, too? That ain't gonna happen."

Mr. Khosla would rather scale up international experiences by going online. Carnegie Mellon pairs teams of undergraduates with students in Brazil, Israel, and Turkey, and they collaborate on projects through videoconferencing, e-mail, and other Internet tools.

But Mr. Khosla's is a minority viewpoint. Most observers say the only way to truly learn about a culture is to be immersed in it. The styles of global-engineering programs found at various colleges varies widely. But three engineering programs, at Purdue, the University of Rhode Island, and Worcester Polytechnic, have emerged as models of approaches to internationalizing engineering.

At the University of Rhode Island, the focus is on language. "There are those who say that English is the global language, but I see that as a handicap for Americans," says John M. Grandin, executive director of the international-engineering program, who is a professor of German. "Those who do not learn a language do not get exposure to a culture in any kind of depth."

He says he and an engineering dean started the program two decades ago, when Mr. Grandin saw that globalization was inevitable. Naturally, Mr. Grandin formed the university's first partnership with a German institution, the Technical University of Braunschweig, but the program has expanded to France, Mexico, Spain, and, most recently, China.

From freshman year on, students study a language along with their engineering requirements. In their fourth year, students travel to one of the four countries to study language and engineering at universities that have formed partnerships with Rhode Island, such as the University of Cantabria, in Spain, or Monterrey Tech, in Mexico. After their studies, they spend six months working at a company in one of thoses countries. Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, and the chemical company BASF have been among the companies training students in Germany.

Over the years, Rhode Island has sent about 250 students abroad through the program, and now 20 percent of engineering students take part in the program, Mr. Grandin says. To manage the extra workload and time overseas, Rhode Island students do what might be unthinkable to other engineering students: They take an extra year to finish their degree.

At Purdue's global-engineering program, Mr. Hirleman did everything he could to avoid adding an extra year. He found that cost and graduation time were two barriers to getting more students to sign up for overseas programs. So his program plays down the role of language (each student takes 12 credit hours, but fluency is not necessarily a goal) and limits the number of partner universities, to ease the scheduling and transfer of courses.

More than 90 percent of Purdue's engineering undergraduates get well-paying summer jobs with corporations before they graduate. Some make as much as $3,000 a month. Students in the exchange program in a place like China might make as little as $10 a day. So Mr. Hirleman found corporate sponsors like Cummins, John Deere, Siemens, and General Motors to supplement student pay — they cover about $250,000 for more than 20 students every year, and might recruit the students after they graduate. (When Mr. Hirleman met with Mr. Wall, of Cummins, he barely got his pitch out before Mr. Wall interrupted him: "I'm in," he said.)

Another barrier to students joining the program was the threat of losing a sense of community, Mr. Hirleman says. So Purdue's program is based on international design teams — Purdue students are matched up with those in Germany, China, India, and Mexico, and they work on projects and take classes in the United States for a semester, then go overseas for a semester during their junior year. To help nurture a sense of community, they are introduced as freshmen.

About 10 percent of Purdue's engineering students participate in the program, and Mr. Hirleman says he wants to raise that number to 20 percent. "There are so many things going on for students, so many opportunities, and so many barriers, that I am happy to be at 10 percent," he says. "It'll be tough to get to 20."

Some of the enduring lessons of the overseas experience come from foreign students, he says. In Asia, Purdue students will encounter highly competitive Indian and Chinese peers who had to be among the very top students at their schools to get into universities, and who are thrilled to make $10 a day. German students surprised some of the Americans when they put environmental issues as a top concern of their projects. "American students are concerned with cost and performance, not sustainability," Mr. Hirleman says.

Risk-Averse Students

Sustainability is one of the main themes of Worcester Polytechnic's program, which sends about half of each graduating class overseas to more than a dozen locations. Worcester Polytechnic is able to attract so many students to the program because the trips are a short seven weeks and terms at WPI are on a modified quarter system, designed to accommodate the trips and other projects.

Female students are disproportionately attracted to the global-engineering program. Thirty-five percent of participants are women, although they make up only a quarter of WPI's student body. Among programs set in developing countries, almost half of the participating students are women.

Still, says Richard F. Vaz, dean of the global-studies program, many factors keep "risk averse" engineering students in Worcester: participation in sports, a double major, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or tight finances. Students also have to cover travel costs, which vary.

Many of WPI's global-studies locations are in poorer nations such as Namibia, Thailand, and Morocco, where students work with nongovernmental organizations on projects that don't necessarily have an intense engineering focus. In Ifrane, Morocco, for example, students might help artisan woodcarvers market their wares on the Internet. In Bangkok, they might develop a computer-literacy program for refugees. Faculty members organize the trips and supervise the students, but local organizations come up with ideas for the projects.

The point is to teach students how to "solve problems in the real world with messy constraints," Mr. Vaz says.

"Students do a lot of research before they leave, and they come up with a plan," Mr. Vaz says. "Then they get there, and the plan disintegrates before their eyes, as they find that there are all these political and logistical hurdles that they couldn't have learned about until they arrived on site."

In Namibia, which is experiencing energy shortages and deforestation, Ms. Epstein and Steven Feroli traveled from village to village, educating people about energy-saving technologies. They found that success was a matter of politics — finding a young villager who spoke English, explaining the technology to him, and then getting him to persuade one of the village elders to try the technology.

Mr. Feroli, whose voice can be as commanding as his linebacker build, discovered that he could not push high-efficiency woodstoves onto villagers using loud, high-pressure tactics, American style. Instead, he found that he garnered interest by cooking dinner alongside the villagers and waiting for them to become curious and ask questions.

"One of the biggest things our group learned is that it's not about going in and telling people what to do," he said. "It's about explaining the options and letting people figure it out on their own."

Mr. Feroli returned from Africa with a new awareness about energy and sustainability. As he drove away from Boston's gleaming airport, he couldn't help but notice all the wasted energy around him. He made his family buy compact-fluorescent light bulbs. He gets excited when talking about solar energy.

That kind of epiphany is not uncommon after students return, Mr. Vaz says. "This is an eye-opener," he says, "and for some students, it's not what they expected engineering to be."

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Volume 53, Issue 39, Page A33