Childhood math and science classes aren't a particularly exciting memory for most people. While memorizing requisite rules and concepts without having hands-on experience has provided an adequate elementary education for some students, a new research initiative at Tufts is examining whether there is a better way for kids to learn about math and science.
The initiative is a collaborative effort between the Tufts Center for Engineering Education Outreach (CEEO), the Tufts Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise (PACE) and the Boston College Urban Sciences Research and Learning Group. The team will be testing whether kids can assimilate more information about math and science through hands-on engineering activities by bringing a new, engineering-based curriculum into classrooms.
"Is there a more effective way than textbooks?" PACE deputy director Linda Jarvin asked.
Kristen Bethke, an education graduate student with an engineering background, was one of the main developers of the research initiative. "We started to hypothesize that the engineering design program could really be a great way to teach math and science," Bethke said.
The idea for the project occurred after Bethke began doing work with CEEO. At the same time, a call for grant proposals was issued by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF was looking for new ideas, and Bethke began working on her first grant proposal to try to get funding to conduct the research.
At the time, Bethke didn't expect her proposal to actually be selected. "It was quite a surprise," Bethke said. "I thought it would just be a good way to get my feet wet. I feel really lucky and fortunate."
Professor Chris Rogers, last year's director of CEEO who is currently on sabbatical in Switzerland, emphasized how difficult it is to get funding from organizations like the NSF. "To get [funding] the first time you write a proposal is very impressive," Rogers said. Jarvin concurred, saying, "It's quite an extraordinary achievement."
The initiative is attempting to determine whether alternate, engineering-based ways of teaching math and science can be equally or more beneficial than traditional methods. The three groups involved were able to come together thanks to their overlapping areas of expertise, which coincided with the needs of the project.
Tufts CEEO, a group that works to bring engineering into elementary and high school classrooms, will be helping to develop the initiative's classroom engineering curriculum. CEEO's "big goal is to get engineering in all the grades," Rogers said.
PACE, a group that was originally based at Yale and moved to Tufts along with its director, Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, will be focusing on assessing how well the new engineering curriculum is being implemented as well as how much the students are learning from the curriculum. "Is [the initiative] helping the students learn ... is the ultimate question," Jarvin said.
Boston College's Urban Sciences Research and Learning Group will focus on helping to train teachers who will bring the curriculum into Boston-area schools.
As a part of the initiative's engineering-based curriculum activities, students will get to work with a Robo Lab robot. One particular robot used in the exercises is a simple car with a trailer designed to hold different objects attached to it which can be programmed to travel at different velocities for different amounts of time. "In this unit, we're thinking about what changes you can make to the car or trailer to see how it affects velocity," Bethke said.
Students send the robot off unencumbered and then add objects to the trailer and see what changes occur. "A student can measure how far it traveled in that amount of time," Bethke said, "and then you add some weight and see how far it goes again."
The initiative's plans to develop the curriculum in the spring, train teachers over the summer and begin implementing the curriculum after that, repeating the entire process three times. Though teachers are still being recruited, 20 teachers are expected to be trained in each cycle. One thousand students will be taught the engineering curriculum, and 200 students will make up the control group.
Although there are high hopes for the project, there is a long way to go. If the research results seem to support the hypothesis, much work would remain before widespread implementation. "I imagine [the step following the completion of research] would be to answer more questions that come up during research and then disseminate it," Bethke said.
"If something works small-scale with limited design, you see if it works on a larger scale," Jarvin added. Additional testing would involve seeing if the curriculum would yield the same results given a larger sample, but other questions would also have to be answered. Some avenues to explore include seeing if the program could be expanded to include more grades or cover a wider variety of educational concepts.
Although the project is complex, Jarvin emphasized that it's important to keep sight of the purpose of the research. "The ultimate goal is to find an effective way of teaching math and science," she said.
