Welcome to you all and to some of my
colleagues from the Learning Center well
you know people often ask me and I often
see things in the news that asked
questions about what's wrong with
American science education and here's a
few headlines that say that such as US
teams trail their peers around the world
why can't us students compete with the
rest of the world and so on you may have
had questions about science education
too but I'd like to get you to turn
those questions around tonight and see
that will turn them on their heads
before I get going any further I really
want to thank Lindsay Barone who really
helped me put this talk together and did
a huge amount of the work if you ask U.S.
adults and scientists in the American
Association of Science you know how they
feel the U.S. ranks in scientific
achievements then about half of the
public says we're the best in the world
in scientific achievements and
ninety-two percent of the scientist so
they feel pretty good about themselves
but Americans feel pretty good about
American science too more as I said more
than half think were the best in the
world and about more than a half also
feel that we're the best in medical
treatment and among the AAAS
scientists sixty-four percent so the
point of it is is we feel pretty good as
Americans and as people of science about
the kind of work we do in science but if
you ask that same question about how
Americans feel about K through 12
science, technology, engineering and math
education so called STEM they don't feel
so good only twenty-nine percent of
Americans think we're number one in the
world in science and technology
education and only sixteen percent of
the scientist so clearly there's a
perception that we're doing something
wrong both in the media and among the
public and even
among scientists well so the question is
how do we know know that we're not doing
so well in science education what kind
of things would we measure to answer
that question and who do we talk about
when we do these sorts of studies and
that's what I want to spend the first
part of the talk with you about we're
going to at least mention three studies
two of them are by the trends in
international mathematics and science
study and their studies that are done at
the fourth and the eighth grade levels
you know there's various things and it
tells you some of the kinds of questions
the number of questions they ask about
life science, physical science, earth
science about the types of questions
they ask students it's it's a test
that's meant to see how what students
know about science and a little bit
about science thinking what you'll
notice is that not all the kids in the
United States take it but just from
these eight or ten states here and then
around the world a total of about 4,000
students participate but from these
countries around the world it's been
done for a while most people think it's
a pretty good study but the thing I want
you to know is that that whole idea that
we're not doing well in science
education as far as i can tell comes
from this test and for the next test I'm
going to show you there's really no
other ways that we compare kids in
science around the world so that you
know this is it and so here's the
ranking of all the countries who did the
fourth grade tests and the eighth grade
tests you can't really read it but what
you need to know is that in the fourth
grade the United States ranked seven out
of 50 countries really not so bad and in
the eighth grade we drop a little bit to
10th out of 42 countries so you could
say the 25th percentile roughly so
that's the way we stack up and these
tests have been done for a number of
years
but that's the way we stack up in the
fourth in the eighth grade really not
not badly now there's another ho
assessment that is done for 15 year old
kids which would be high school about
middle high school kids it also has
about 4,000 kids per country again not
all of the US is represented just three
states and then all of these countries
around the world and in this study the
so-called PISA study because the program
for international student assessment
again it's this list of countries and
here's what seems to really bother
people a lot which is were 28 out of 65
countries in that ranking so if you take
those three tests together at the fourth
the eighth and the edit age 15 we go
from position number 7 to number 10 to
28 so as far as I can tell
those are three data points that people
use to say that we're not doing very
well in science education I think most
people focus on this 15 year old data
the data set from 15 year old students
well I'd like to us to think of it about
these tests tests are never perfect and
especially international ones or
standardized sorts of tests always have
problems so I'd like to just go through
them a little bit and deconvolute the
store scores a little bit and tell you
why first off those scores don't
necessarily bother me a lot but then
we'll go on and turn them on their heads
so again here's a summary of the U.S.
positions on the three tests fourth
grade, eighth grade and at age 15 and
here's two of the top scoring country's
Singapore which you can see ranks in the
one two or three positioned on all three
of these tests and the highest ranking
of the European countries with is which
is Finland which also scores very highly
so we're going to in the next few
minutes compared the United States
versus these two countries now you can
say why might that not be comparing
apples to apples
in these countries and one thing that
might come to mind is the size of these
countries so this is Singapore and it's
about the size it's a fourth the size of
Rhode Island it's about eight miles by
twenty miles it's about half the size of
Long Island or actually about a fifth
the size of Long Island it's pretty small
this is Finland I never knew how big it
is but it's pretty much the size of
Montana so those number of U.S. states
are being compared against these rather
small countries now let's also look at
the gross domestic product per capita in
other words basically how much money has
made per person in the country I don't
know if you knew it but Singapore ranks
very high in the world and ranks well
ahead of the United States overall
Singapore also ranks ahead in the per
capita gross domestic product of all of
the states in blue that are included in
these three three studies that I showed
you and you can see that Finland you
know ranks down there about the same as
Florida or Alabama so there you might
see something about Singapore which is
they've got a lot of money to spend a
lot of different things now if you look
at the per-pupil spending Finland as a
percentage of the gross domestic product
all the work of the country Finland
comes out ahead with the highest
percentage of spending per pupil the
U.S. is in the middle and Singapore is
the lowest but remember Singapore's got
a very high gross domestic product and
if you sort of adjust for it then in
fact the spending per pupil in real
dollars is actually more than the United
States so the point I want to give you
here is that these countries spend more
per pupil of their gross domestic
domestic product on education than the
US which might be surprising to you now
let's take a look at the makeup of these
countries
this is the ethnic makeup of Finland all
the states involved in the study and
where's Singapore their and these
denote the blue is the minority ethnic
group and then smaller sub populations
are here or ethnic minorities and if
you look at this what you'll see is that
Finland has a really homogeneous society
as you'll know if you've ever been
anywhere in Scandinavia very low
percentage of ethnic minorities
Singapore it has about twenty-five
percent ethnic minorities which are
mainly Indian and Malay and you'll see
that the US as a whole has about
thirty-seven percent ethnic minorities
and then you can look at the different
states that are in the Tims and the PISA
study so the point I want to make here
is that the U.S. population is way more
heterogeneous way more diverse than
either of the other two populations in
the Tim study what difference does that
make let's just take a quick look at
that in Singapore it's known that the
male a population is behind in academic
achievement behind the other two
population groups which are ethnic
Chinese and Indian Finland doesn't have
much in the way of ethnic groups but the
one that is lagging behind the other of
the Roma gypsies and in the United
States there's an achievement gap in
school and also in science between
whites and Asians and black Hispanics
and Native Americans and this shows up
in in the scores of the PISA study
that one that's taken at the age of 15
these are the U.S. numbers for 2012 and
what you'll see is that the average
score for whites and Asians are above
500 or more and the scores for blacks
and Hispanics are in the 400s so the
point of it is is that our scores in the
United States are skewed by these
relatively large numbers of ethnic
minorities who we know
struggle in science and it's a it's a
nationwide problem that many people are
trying to work on and so here we can
then put that in to perspective it's a
tenth of a percent of this known
struggling minority in Finland that is
affecting their scores there's about
thirteen percent of the Malay minority
that depresses the scores in Singapore
and in the US the two biggest groups are
Hispanics and blacks who we know lag
behind in science achievement so let's
take a look at another thing that the
scores say or don't say and that's the
context the educational context that
these tests take place within its really
pretty interesting and what's the
philosophy of testing in these countries
first off these are the number of school
districts in each of the states that
participate in the Tims and the PISA
studies and you'll see that there's a
lot of individual school districts
within California and the other states
it's well over 2,000 in Finland there's
three hundred and seventeen states or
actually their education authorities and
in Singapore there's one now what that's
telling you is in a place like Singapore
or or Finland there's less local control
and more control by the central
government especially in Singapore and
you could imagine that eccentric lot
centralized education authority would be
a lot better at doing things like
standardized tests and preparing kids
for tests than in a very disparate sort
of school systems like we have here in
all of the United States that
participate in the studies now if you
want to take a look at what the
Singapore school system looks like and I
spent quite a lot of time in Singapore
some years ago so I saw this firsthand I
don't expect you to memorize this chart
but here's the kids in primary school at
the end of the sixth grade there's an
extremely high stakes test and that's
going to set your course
for a lot of your life if you're really
school smart you're actually put in this
group called the Express and what that
means is you're slated to go to
university from the sixth grade on and
you've got a pretty clear path as long
as you don't mess up now if you're not
one of the Express students you're going
to work away through this system first
off this sixth grade test is going to
determine which of these sub tracks you're
put on and my understanding from people
I met and talked to in Singapore over a
number of years is that once you get on
one of these tracks it's pretty
difficult to change horses in the middle
of the stream so to speak you wind your
way through these tracks and then
there's another big test here at the end
of 10th grade which is then going to
determine finally whether you go into
some kind of vocational job a sort of a
vocational technical education or a four
or if you make it back up here with the
express people to the full on academic
preparation those are extremely high
stakes tests and they're there for one
reason it's like when in the sorting hat
it's going to determine which house you
go to live in and it's going to sort out
your life pretty much for the rest of
your life so these tests are literally
for sorting kids onto academic and
vocational tracks and I think they're
going to come in here here's when the
first Tims test takes place I guess
they're probably pretty happy there but
these other two tests take just after
this really difficult test to determine
secondary education and just before this
test that's going to determine your
adult life for good so these kids are
very good at taking tests they know the
stakes of tests and it's ingrained in
their society and and administered by
one Ministry of Education and remember
Singapore is basically the size and the
population of Chicago if the Rhode
Island didn't hit you
now Finland is really a lot more
like us which is they have compulsory
education up through high school and
then there's a leaving exam a national
leaving exam at the end of the 12th
grade and then that's going to help
determine where your college placement
it's pretty much like an SAT but
it's administered by the government so I
would say they're more on the order of
our kind of education system than not
like Singapore and what's our education
system like well we had this thing
called No Child Left Behind which was
not refunded by Congress in the last
session which was loved by some people
but hated by a lot of people educators
called it No Child Left untested but the
purpose of No Child Left Behind and the
thing that has now succeeded it which is
every student succeeds which I didn't
even know I confess are not for sorting
kids like in Singapore they're meant to
diagnose the school system and the
teachers and to make improvements
especially in struggling school
districts now yes they do give you some
idea of how your kids doing versus other
kids but there's no stakes for the kids
it doesn't really determine anything in
most school districts about what kind of
classes you take or where you would be
mandatorily placed they're still freedom
for the students to move around pretty
much in spite of whatever score they
might get on the kinds of tests
they take and no child left behind our
tests also focus mainly on English and
Math which is which are thought to be
the subjects for general literacy and
general helping you move ahead in the
school system so what I want to say here
is if you compare yourself especially to
Singapore these school systems and the
purpose of testing in those systems are
diametrically opposed one is to sort
kids out into academic and vocational
screens streams and the other is
basically to diagnose the school system
and the teachers and to see where they
can do better in helping student
achievement
and of course we have plenty of places
in the U.S. that just opted out of all
of this because they feel their school
districts are doing fine without having
the federal government meddle in their
local control of the school district
that happened quite here quite a lot
here on Long Island and also in
Connecticut okay well here's my
beginning to ask you a bunch of a bunch
of other questions okay we've dealt with
what's wrong with American science
education hopefully you see why I'm have
some questions about that but here's the
first of the questions that put this
totally on its end which is if our
school system is so bad why does
everybody want to come here for college
and if you think I'm kidding here you go
these are doctorates in the United
States in 1984 1994 2004 and 2014 and
the blue here are US citizens and the
yellow parts here are people who are
here on visas or some kind of permit and
this is all Ph.D.s and the second bar is
science Ph.D.s so take a look at either
one but let's look at science you'll see
that 30 years ago about twenty four
percent of the science doctorates were
to foreigners and now that number is
thirty-eight percent for all around Ph.D.s
it hasn't gone up quite it's gone up a
bit too from sixteen percent to
twenty-nine percent but the point of it
is people like to come here for
University and the people who like to
come here the most are actually from
some of the countries that do the best
on the Tims and the PISA studies
those international science assessments
so what you'll see overwhelmingly over
the last ten years people getting
doctorates in the US the foreign
citizenship they're overwhelmingly from
China and another top country is Taiwan
and I'll have you note that in the PISA
study the city of Shanghai rated number
one so some of those students are some
of these students next year
so I don't know what that means but it
means there's something about the U.S.
education system somewhere that people
like now maybe they wouldn't come here
for high school but in fact there's a
big movement among Chinese students to
go to school districts in California
especially but people like to come here
for a college education okay let's shift
away from the testing now I've showed
you these data that show that the US
doesn't do so well in achievement
science achievement at the pre-college
level and the question is does that
really matter does that really say
anything about how we're doing in
science remember the first slide I
showed you is that everybody really
feels pretty good about what we're doing
in science and medicine but do the
scores on these international
assessments have anything to do with
that and the answer is I don't think so
here's Nobel prizes over the last
hundred and fifteen years and what
you'll see is in medicine chemistry and
physics about half of all the Nobel
prizes awarded in that period of time
went to people who were affiliated with
U.S. institutions so half of all the Nobel
prizes how about patents these are
patents awarded all the blue ones are
from the US and all the Bruins are
foreign ones and here in 2014 that
number is a little less than fifty
percent so about half of all the Nobel
prizes awarded two people working in
U.S. institutions about half of the
patents to U.S. nationals how about
citations in some of the major
scientific journals in the world and
those of you from science know that
these are very important general science
journals here medical journals here and
another general science and what you'll
see is the U.S. authors who published in
these journals range from about thirty
percent oh sorry from sixteen percent to
forty-eight percent depending on
the journal if you look at the citations
in other words how many times a paper is
cited or mentioned by another person and
then you map them on sort of a web so if
you imagine a telephone web or web of
all the people who are interacting with
you on Facebook and some people have a
lot of connections and some people don't
have any well this is sort of a
connection map of citations of
scientific articles around the world
with the country sized according to a
citations at what you'll see is the
citations in the U.S. are about equal to
all of the citations of Europe and about
twice the citations of Asia so it
doesn't appear that however we perform
on these international assessments at
pre-college science education they don't
seem to be affecting us much in our
performance of science at least by those
several ways I showed you so let's now
shift to the end of the talk and let's
talk about what's right about science
education well it's local and it's
phenomenological and let me tell you
what I mean by that there's 13,000
school authorities in the United States
and Long Island is a great example of
local control because here on Long
Island virtually every school district
in Nassau and Suffolk County is about
one or maybe two high schools several
middle or junior high schools and
several elementary schools and you
control them now yes the New York State
we have a New York State curriculum yes
there's certain things that come from No
Child Left Behind from the federal
government but your local school boards
have the authority to set curriculum in
each one of those districts and that's
the case to some greater or lesser
extent and mostly greater in all of
these 13,000 school districts in the
United States now some people would say
that local control and the lack of
central authority means that we do
things over and over again and quote
recreate the wheel
but I'm actually of the mind that that's
probably one of the things that's
special about American education which
is every school district has the ability
to innovate or not move ahead or not and
the best school districts of the United
States in fact innovate and move ahead
and of course some suffer because they
can and some of that of course is
monetary so I think this is actually a
good thing the local control of school
systems and the local control also of
course of the university system how
about a local example Syosset High
School it's a modest-sized school
district by most means it's sort of even
modest by Long Island size about 2,000
students high number of kids attending
college and the thing I want you to
realize is that they have about 25
different courses that are offered at
Syosset High School that you could take
and you're free to take virtually any of
them so long as you meet some minimum
other requirements of the Regents
curriculum and if you actually look at a
chart of the things you don't need to
look at this very much these are a
couple different tracks in that kids can
take but what I want you to see here is
that as a student progresses from eighth
grade through 12th grade their choices
in science increase so in other words as
a kid goes through science they have
some basic things that they have to take
and then you know for those kids
interested in a science there's an awful
lot of things available I can tell you
at my high school ward Melville it's
probably twice the number of science
courses but this is 25 just in a
relatively small school school district
like Syosset well compare that with the
same sort of chart from Singapore and I
actually wrote to some of my friends in
Singapore and got their charts these are
real ones and what's interesting is that
at the 7th and 8th grade they have a
little bit of choice and that choice
actually gives less and less as they go
through the school system
and if you compare these you see these
kids being increasingly channeled with
very little choice as they get more and
more mature and here in the United
States you have kids as they become more
mature having more choices I think that
actually is telling you something about
the philosophy of the school systems now
what does this all mean because remember
the only way that I ever was able to
compare the students that we see here on
Long Island and international students
were these three tests that I started
out talking to you about but I actually
had a way to test some kids in a more
direct way and we've been doing that now
for two years it's not a lot of kids and
as you know you know low numbers
sometimes can be misleading but we've
had students coming to the DNA Learning
Center from Beijing 166 high school I
should have had some photos in here for
you but it's a high school in central
Beijing it's in the old part of Beijing
it's about a half a mile from the
Forbidden City about a half a mile from
Tiananmen Square most of the students
that go there their parents are public
servants doing something in the Chinese
national government or in the Beijing
city government so it's quite a good
school and it was designated as a
special school of biology now I wouldn't
want to say that it's anywhere near as
say Stuyvesant High School in New York
City or the Bronx High School of Science
or Brooklyn Technical High School in New
York I don't think it's in that league
but it's trying to be the designated
biology high school in Beijing which is
a city of you know you tell me 15
million people or so well the students
who come here when they come here we
give them a general test of literacy
items about genetics because that's what
we're interested in we didn't make up
these questions so in other words these
questions are not biased by things that
I might think are important or what we
have the learning center we took them
from a set of validated questions
developed by the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and the
questions that are used by quite a lot
of people who might be interested in
looking at genetic literacy like I could
give the test to you and it'd be a
pretty good one the tests are in Chinese
so there's not a language issue as far
as we know and those kids from Beijing
166 very good urban up-to-date
cosmopolitan school when we give them
this test their average score on this
test is fifty-five percent don't worry
about 55 don't think of it like a
failing grade but just it's just a
percent they get fifty five percent of
the questions right and they're high
school kids and they're coming to take
one of the DNA Learning Center's courses
the Long Island kids coming to take that
same course score twenty five percentage
points higher on those tests and this
has held up over several years because I
wasn't sure if this effect when I first
saw it I actually couldn't believe it
but it's held up over a number of years
and this is actually pooled data so what
does this say to me it says to me that's
great all of the standardized test
testing that's done in Asia in different
parts of the world but at least in our
corner of the world which is genetics
these kids from very good high school in
Beijing are not as well prepared as the
kids here on Long Island now the reasons
why they're not as well prepared in
genetics some of them have to do with
the fact that kids here on Long Island
could come to the DNA Learning Center
before this time but a lot of it has to
do with that ability of those kids to
progressively choose more and more
science courses as they can at syosset
and also of having more opportunities of
visiting science science oriented
museums, science centers and show is
about science on TV so it's a whole
syndrome of things available to those
kids on Long Island that we're comparing
that makes their science world really
much more rich than for those students
in Beijing and it shows up here but it
doesn't show up on the Tim's or the
PISA studies
well the last thing I want to talk about
is my idea that am not my idea but the
idea that education is phenomenological
meaning that the real education occurs
at the point and that interaction
between a student and the teacher but
also phenomenological meaning that in a
system of local control the local school
board and the local people can say these
things are relatively more important to
us in shaping the experience of students
than these things that you might say to
us from Washington D.C. or Beijing
phenomenology focuses on an individual's
first-hand experiences rather than the
abstract experience of others and I've
got to tell you all of the standardized
tests they deal entirely with abstract
experience now about 15 years ago there
was an educator by the name of Howard
Gardner who came up with the idea of
multiple intelligences which basically
he said that people have eight different
ways of learning some of them are
kinesthetic like when you touch things
and moves things around some of them are
logical some of them are linguistic and
there's a whole list of eight different
what he called intelligences and his
point was this if we all had exactly the
same kind of mind and there was only one
kind of intelligence then we could teach
everybody the same thing in the same way
and assess them in the same way and that
would be fair but once we realize that
people have very different kinds of
minds different strengths some people
are good at thinking spatially some in
thinking language others are very
logical other people need to be hands-on
and explore actively and try things out
then education which treats everybody
the same way is actually the most unfair
education because it picks out one kind
of mind which I call the professor mind
somebody who is very linguistic and
logical and says if you think like that
great if you don't think like that
there's no room to train you
standardized test
only tap the professor mind absolutely
in a hundred percent maybe a little bit
of the linguistic mind so if you have a
country that strives to do very very
very very well on standardized tests and
Singapore is one you can't possibly do
right by all of the rest of the
intelligences and however scattered and
however repetitive or redundant the
school systems are in the United States
at least many of them are striving to
help kids learn in those other ways
that's not to say that in Singapore the
you know they don't do that at all but
I'm just saying the heavy bent on these
high-stakes tests for funneling and
tracking kids where they go in education
are mainly tapping into one kind of mind
and they produce students and I know a
lot of Singaporean students very capable
students and a very large number of very
capable students but the Singaporeans
will tell you themselves that that kind
of education blunts the highly creative
people that are sort of at out of the
middle and this is the reports that you
also get in science of Singaporean and
some Asian students which is and even
some European students at that kind of
regimented education it is not that good
for create for creativity so the final
passage I want to explore with you is
okay well based upon what people who are
interested in science education in the
United States what are they thinking
about these days let me just tell you a
little bit in the last 10 years there's
been these five studies they're pretty
much like most studies which is to get a
big or a small group of people in a room
there's supposed to be experts and they
thrash around what's important and
what's not important and then they come
up with some kind of a consensus in
these documents these documents all say
the same thing, you don't
need to read them I'll tell you what
they all say which is how do you reform
science education these happen to focus
on undergraduate education because
remember even though everybody wants to
come to our undergraduate universities
they actually probably do a worse job at
science education than the pre-college
element which seems to be so bad that's
what I'm here to tell you because that
professorial sort of learning is even
more entrenched in the collegian system
than it is in the pre-college system in
other words there's more focus on that
sort of one type of intelligence in the
university in some cases than at you
then at the pre-college level so what do
all these documents say you should try
to get kids to think conceptually at a
higher level and to think about how
science really works the practice of
science rather than memory of memorizing
stuff like facts and terms now everybody
knows that but but that's key if you
have to actually believe that you can't
just say that stuff and then give people
a lot of standardized tests it's
antithetical you need to adopt ways that
kids can ask questions inquire and work
from themselves outward like I said in
that phenomenological way they have to
be student-centered and kids especially
I have to be able to ask their own
questions we find that's extremely
important you can't ask the questions
for the kids you need to help them work
between disciplines and biology is a
great example of a science that has a
lot of different things going on it it
has math, it has computers, it has
chemistry, and as a little bit of physics
and that has biology has a lot of stuff
so that's a good example of
interdisciplinary study and you have to
work collaboratively the idea that a
science scientists goes into some lab by
themselves does gray stuff and comes out
and then discovers stuff that does happen
sometimes but today if you'd read papers
in journals there's long long lists of
scientists on one paper sometimes some
the list is so long that they can't even
put it at the front of the article they
have to put it like as a footnote so
people are working collaboratively
especially on things that involve computers
and big sets of data and so forth
research experience that kids can have let
them do these science practices try stuff
over again it doesn't work and have to
try it again that's reiteration and they
have to discuss their results they have
to be like scientists they have to be
like when scientists come into this room
and argue that hey I did these
experiments I think they're valid and
this is what I think they say and you
can say to me I tried some similar ones
I don't think you're interpreting the
right that them right so let's go back
and try them again that's what happens
in this room but kids have to learn that
as a part of science not to sit there
and figure out what answer they give on
a standardized test and the sort of holy
grail in undergraduate biology education
right at this moment is to take these
ideas and to develop experiments that
you can scale up because traditionally a
few kids have been invited into the labs
of professors when they were say juniors
or seniors I was and you can work on
some project and that would be helpful
but it tended to be later in your school
career like when you were junior and
senior and it was only a few kids but
now what we're trying to figure out is
how can we scale up a research
experience experience maybe not as
intense and maybe not as mentored
exactly by one professor that one-on-one
but how can we scale up something that's
very close to research that could
involve a whole class of kids at the
same time and that's called course-based
research experiences and it literally is
the holy grail every competent striving
university in the United States is
implementing them and implementing them
early because all of the data say you
need to get these experiences in for
kids when they're freshmen and
sophomores if you don't capture them
then they walk out
so one of those studies there this ugly
one here was by the president's councils
of advisers in science and technology
they call it PCAST and what they said I
don't know exactly why they said this
but they said we need a million new
workers in science technology
engineering and math over the next
decade and they said if you can increase
the number of kids who stay in a science
track in other words they come in as
freshmen and say hey I want to be a
scientist if you can increase by ten
percent the number of kids that actually
stay and graduate with a degree in
science or technology if you could
increase that number by ten percent that
would give you 750 thousand kids over
ten years in other words 75,000 
kids per year that's called
retention when kids actually stay in the
field of study that they said they were
going to do and that's about the only
thing that you can really measure in
undergraduate education so one thing you
might get from this talk and I hope you
do which is there's relatively few
things that you can really measure very
well in education that's why we take
these really poor and uninformative
studies between countries because it's
very difficult to measure these things
but one thing you can measure is the kid
that comes in and says I'm majoring in
biology when they're freshmen and you
can see when they get out of the
University four or five years later they
don't count them if the kids that you
know take some seven years to get a
degree but four or five years are they
still a biology major or at least till a
science major or they switch over to
economics or business it's very easy to
measure and here's what I wanted the
last part of this one part is the
University of Texas at Austin has one of
the oldest course based research
programs not very old it's only about
seven or eight years old 800 students
per year they're gearing up to have the
possibility that any freshman in all of
the University of Texas at Austin could
have a research experience with a
professor in the first year and what do
they find they find that kids who go
have that freshman research experience
twelve percent greater retention in the
sciences than kids who don't have it and
they're all matched for economics for
socio economics for race they're matched
perfectly because this was it was a
re-study so what does that say if a
kid has a research experience in their
freshman or sophomore year you do
exactly what this President's Council
asked us to do which is get at least ten
percent more retention of kids in
science and then imagine if you take
that research experience back to the
high school you might have another ten
percent so that could give you twenty
percent more kids interested in science
just by having research experiences once
in once in high school and once when
they're in college and I'm happy to say
that the New York State legislature is
on the ball they mandated that every
student who graduates from the CUNY to
the University of New York or the SUNY
system State University of New York
every student has to have an
experiential science learning element to
their graduation as a requirement and
they list some of the things that could
be service learning activities,
internships and the part that I really
like undergraduate projects and the very
last thing I want to leave you with is
just a couple of examples of things that
we do at the DNA Learning Center that's
in line with what these consensus
studies have said because we've been
interested in experiential discovery
learning kind of learning where kids ask
questions whether they're their own
questions or guided by the teacher we're
really we've been interested in this for
a long time so here's just a couple of
the things we've done over the last 20
years I didn't go back any further than
that but so in 1995 we did the first
experiment anywhere in the world where
kids could get some DNA out of some
cheek cells it's simple and easy and
doesn't hurt and I could look at a bit
of their DNA and use that to compare
their DNA with people from around
world and that's meaning that means
diversity how are we diverse genetically and
we've been doing that experiment since
1995 and it's one that's done you know
all around the country and to some
extent around the world next we came
along and did an experiment in 1997
which was the first experiment anywhere
that I'm aware of that allowed students
to look at a bit of their own DNA
sequence the ATCGs that
make up our genetic code and again they
look at that bit of sequence it goes
into a database and then they can
compare their DNA with their friends which
is interesting but also compare their DNA
with people from around the world
including ancient specimens like Ötzi
the Iceman who's replica is at the DNA
Learning Center or Neanderthals who are
our cousins and we mix it up with a long
time ago so that's fun and just to give
you an idea of what you can do if you do
something like this and stick with it
and you know are fastidious as we try to
be over a hundred thousand students have
their DNA in our database and this was
long before you could do FamilyTreeDNA
or 23andMe or the Genographic project we
were doing a similar sort of thing for
free here at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory and 1.6 million people have
gone on to that website and analyzed
their own DNA or somebody else's DNA
then we came along and worked with these
little tiny worms called C elegans and
this was a set of experiments that are
very good for the college level which
can let students sort of knock out a
gene make it stop working for a while
and then try to study what effect that
has on the worm and it turns out that
this worm, it's a teeny thing but it has most of
the same genes as us so you could for
example think about a gene that's
involved in cancer or one that might
be involved in a disease that's in your
family say and a student could look that
gene up find the similar gene in this
worm and knock it out and see what does
it do to the worm it may do something
it may do nothing so this is the kind
of projects that the kids can start with
their own question like you know I have
chronic fatigue syndrome in my family do
we know anything about those genes and
if
I knock out one of those genes in this
worm you know does it look tired well
that sounds funny but that's a pretty
good question actually this is a super
fun experiment that actually was first
done here at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in the 1930s where they
determined whether you can taste some
certain bitter things and all of you
have probably done this experiment where
you take a little piece of paper and you put
it in your mouth and some people go oh
god it's so bitter and some people say I
can't taste it will it's determined by
gene that ability to taste that and now
we let kids look at that gene determine
what their gene looks at like and then
predict whether or not they can taste
the bitter taste well that's exactly
what you do if you have certain kinds of
cancers and they take a look at your
genes and say they say well judging by
the look of your genes this specific
treatment would be best for you and this
one would be virtually useless that's
called precision or personalized
medicine in this experiment lets
kids understand that another thing that
we've done is to go into cyber
infrastructure which means the computer
stuff the big computers and the
trackways and the internet that allow
people to analyze things in biology and
we've been working on a big hundred
million dollar project to do education
part of the education for a hundred
million dollar project to help
scientists and teachers learn computer
resources like super fast computers and
computers in the clouds and things like
that and the last two things that we've
done which are super fun is DNA
barcoding which we started a few years
ago which let kids go out into the
environment or out into the grocery
stores find something that's alive or
once was alive my favorite is bird's
nest use the bird's nest soup and you
can actually buy that bird nest and say
is that really a bird nest is that
really made by a bird it's just like
some stuff because who would know but
you can actually extract the DNA out of
that bird nest and show
that there's DNA in that
bird nest that comes from the proper
swift in Asia that makes that nest and
build it with its saliva and in making
it deposit some of its DNA there but you
can also go out into Cold Spring Harbor
as we're doing and survey all the small
organisms that might be difficult for
you to figure out what they are but by
the DNA barcode you can tell pretty
easily what they are are they the same
species that there were there a hundred
years ago when Charles Davenport first
came here and had people study in the
environment well the answers we're
finding out that some of those things
are gone and some of them have been
replaced by other organisms and where
did most of those organisms come from
they came in under the bottom on the
bottoms of boats from Europe and other
places and the final thing that we've
just started a couple years ago this is
a very ambitious project probably really
and truly I think the most ambitious
large-scale education project you'll
find anywhere which is a project
that helps faculty at smaller colleges
and universities have an organism that
they're interested in and then through
this project and through the funding
that we have we allow them to get a
whole set of DNA information on that
organism when I say a whole set of DNA
information I mean a picture of all of
the genes that are working inside of
that organism under one condition or
another and it's literally billions and
billions tens of billions of DNA letters
worth of information that then have to
be analyzed using high-performance
computers of the sort I mentioned
to you before so you can see that i'm
not down on U.S. science education I
actually think we're headed in the right
kinds of directions I'm happy that
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the
DNA Learning Center have been involved
in that effort to try to move it along
and I thought I'd leave you with just
something totally different
which is another question which is 
we've got this great science education
system that's getting better all the
time we've got this great research
system that does half of the Nobel
Prizes, half of citations, half of the
patents in the world so how do you keep
that going and so the question I wanted
to put to you is what do you think it
takes to become an independent
researcher meaning what do you have to
do to get there and the answer is 42
years so the average age of someone
who's getting their first grant that's
called an R01 that's an independent
investigator grant it's the sign that
you've made it as a researcher the
average age of the granting of those is
now 42 years old now imagine a career
that you might choose where you're going
to of course go to university you're of course
going to have to do something rather
some kind of apprenticeship or graduate
school or this or that but imagine going
through that until you're 42 years old
to say yeah I'm finally in my career and
that's the reason why that is so is
because despite the fact that we love
our science and we love our medicine
here in the United States and we're
pretty we think we're pretty good at
funding it there's still not enough
money to go around for the best people
to do the best work so you have to sort
of get in that queue and wait until you're
42 years of age and as a consequence
we're losing many many American
researchers and who are we losing it to
those foreigners who come in and would
love to go to college here so anyway I
don't know what all of that means but to
me it's an interesting story and I hope
you think about some of those questions
I also think that when you see questions
in the media about science or education
that you maybe take some time to look at
the answers behind those questions so
thank you all for coming and have a
great night.
