Stemming the Science Shortfall at College 11 Who will do science? That depends on who is included in the talent pool. The old rules do not work in the new reality. It's time for a different game plan that brings new players in off the bench."-Shirley M. Malcom 1 Everybody says it in one way or another: we need to teach more students more science. To a policy-oriented social scientist, this means we have to identify the able students who are choosing not to pursue science; find out why they are put off by science and attracted to other occupations; and, if necessary, change the recruitment, reward, and opportunity structures to match their temperaments and needs. This may involve providing not just more access, but more individual attention and support; not just more tutoring, but more meaningful and appealing introductory courses; not just more scholarships, but substantial loan forgiveness for those who decide to stay in science, and more and better job-ladders for terminal B.A.s; in short, substantive guarantees of welcome and success. But "recruitment," "rewards," and "opportunity structures" are not the usual stuff of educational reform. So it should not be too surprising that science educators are promoting, rather, a massive restructuring of the nation's elementary and secondary science curriculum and the training or retraining of virtually everyone who teaches science from kindergarten through twelfth grade. 2 I will argue here that, however necessary this restructuring may be, localism and the extreme diversity of the nation's 16,000 school districts will make precollege curricular change difficult to implement and much longer than anticipated to achieve. While such reform will chip away at science illiteracy and pave the way eventually for new 1 Shirley M. Malcom, is head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. This final paragraph is taken from her Essay, "Who will do science in the next century?" Scientific American, Feb. 1990, p. 112 2 Among these are: Project 2061 of the AAAS, a new curriculum for the elementary grades that will be appropriate when Halley's comet comes around again; the National Science Teachers' Association's Scope, Sequence, and Coordination of Secondary School Science; NSF' s $14 million support for seven projects to develop new curricular materials for elementary school science. For a comprehensive review of the more than 300 major policy studies on mathematics and science education in the U.
Sheila Tobias and Carol Weissbrod argue that remedies for "math anxiety" need to be evaluated and new techniques devised that are more closely linked to theories of learning. They maintain that proper techniques can be effective in reversing female under-achievement in mathematics and that further research will indicate comparable techniques to prevent math avoidance. Research relating mathematical achievement to gender is reviewed.
As reported in Overcoming Math Anxiety 1978, 1980, in 600 interviews with college-age and older returning students, Tobias found three significant variables in her subjects' inability to do college-level mathematics: fear of mathematics, the conviction that mathematics is a white male domain, and the conviction that one is either good in mathematics or in language arts but never both. The students' absence of coping skills in dealing with mathematics classes and with their own anxieties appeared to be the main barrier to their attempting mathematics one more time. Subsequently, Tobias focused her research on entering college students. Her second book, Succeed With Math: Every Student's Guide to Conquering Math Anxiety 1987, was commissioned by The College Board. What follows is a selection of excerpts from that book, reconfigured for the use of counselors and advisors.
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