Introduction: *

Teachers should recognize that for many students, the learning of mathematics and science involves feelings of severe anxiety and fear of failure. No doubt this results partly from what is taught and the way it is taught, and partly from attitudes picked up incidentally very early in schooling from parents and teachers who are themselves ill at ease with science and mathematics. Far from dismissing math and science anxiety as groundless, though, teachers should assure students that they understand the problem and will work with them to overcome it. Teachers can take such measures as the following:

Build on Success

Teachers should make sure that students have some sense of success in learning science and mathematics, and they should deemphasize getting all the right answers as being the main criterion of success. After all, science itself, as Alfred North Whitehead said, is never quite right. Understanding anything is never absolute, and it takes many forms. Accordingly, teachers should strive to make all students—particularly the less-confident ones—aware of their progress and should encourage them to continue studying.

Provide Abundant Experience in Using Tools

Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear may result primarily from the lack of opportunity many of them have to become familiar with tools in safe circumstances. Girls in particular suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools. Starting in the earliest grades, all students should gradually gain familiarity with tools and the proper use of tools. By the time they finish school, all students should have had supervised experience with common hand tools, soldering irons, electrical meters, drafting tools, optical and sound equipment, calculators, and computers.

Support the Roles of Girls and Minorities in Science

Because the scientific and engineering professions have been predominantly male and white, female and minority students could easily get the impression that these fields are beyond them or are otherwise unsuited to them. This debilitating perception—all too often reinforced by the environment outside the school—will persist unless teachers actively work to turn it around. Teachers should select learning materials that illustrate the contributions of women and minorities, bring in role models, and make it clear to female and minority students that they are expected to study the same subjects at the same level as everyone else and to perform as well.

Emphasize Group Learning

A group approach has motivational value apart from the need to use team learning (as noted earlier) to promote an understanding of how science and engineering work. Overemphasis on competition among students for high grades distorts what ought to be the prime motive for studying science: to find things out. Competition among students in the science classroom may also result in many of them developing a dislike of science and losing their confidence in their ability to learn science. Group approaches, the norm in science, have many advantages in education; for instance, they help youngsters see that everyone can contribute to the attainment of common goals and that progress does not depend on everyone's having the same abilities.

Science Teaching Should Extend Beyond the School

Children learn from their parents, siblings, other relatives, peers, and adult authority figures, as well as from teachers. They learn from movies, television, radio, records, trade books and magazines, and home computers, and from going to museums and zoos, parties, club meetings, rock concerts, and sports events, as well as from schoolbooks and the school environment in general. Science teachers should exploit the rich resources of the larger community and involve parents and other concerned adults in useful ways. It is also important for teachers to recognize that some of what their students learn informally is wrong, incomplete, poorly understood, or misunderstood, but that formal education can help students to restructure that knowledge and acquire new knowledge.

Teaching Should Take Its Time

In learning science, students need time for exploring, for making observations, for taking wrong turns, for testing ideas, for doing things over again; time for building things, calibrating instruments, collecting things, constructing physical and mathematical models for testing ideas; time for learning whatever mathematics, technology, and science they may need to deal with the questions at hand; time for asking around, reading, and arguing; time for wrestling with unfamiliar and counterintuitive ideas and for coming to see the advantage in thinking in a different way. Moreover, any topic in science, mathematics, or technology that is taught only in a single lesson or unit is unlikely to leave a trace by the end of schooling. To take hold and mature, concepts must not just be presented to students from time to time but must be offered to them periodically in different contexts and at increasing levels of sophistication.

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* This article is based on a book called: " Science for All Americans" ( Chapter 13) Reviewed April8, 2007