Wednesday, April 15, 1998 | 10 a.m.
About 15,000 science teachers will swarm Las Vegas this week to tackle the issue of how to spark student interest in science.
Among the hottest topics this year at the national Science Teachers Association convention: implementing national standards and using technology in the classroom.
"The issue is: 'How do we get teacher development to keep them on the cutting edge?,"' association executive director Gerry Wheeler said. "Most of these teachers graduated before the Internet was popular."
The convention, the nation's largest gathering of science teachers every year, is slated for Thursday through Sunday at the Las Vegas Convention Center and several hotels.
In one of the key addresses this year, departing U.S. Secretary of Energy Federico Pena will speak about what's on the national agenda for science education.
Among the other convention highlights:
Several said they were looking for new ways to capture student interest in a subject that can seem abstract and dull to today's teens.
"The biggest challenge we face is student apathy," Chaparral High School science department chairman Rex Goodell said, adding about a third of his students ignore his lessons.
"When a student has given up, and their parents have basically given up on them, how do you make them care?" Goodell asked. "I've been teaching for 30 years and I still haven't figured out what to do."
Several local science educators agreed that science classes have to be driven with hands-on experiments, not book learning.
At Chaparral, students have "block" schedules that put them in three classes that each last longer than 100 minutes every day. Science teachers say they have to scramble to keep students interested for that long.
"You have to have more than one activity planned, that's for sure," Chaparral earth sciences teacher Adam Christ said.
The convention was scheduled to come one day early to one county school today, when science textbook author and nationally recognized science teacher Michael Spezio stopped by to share an innovative science lesson at H.P. Fitzgerald Elementary School.
Fitzgerald was labeled one of the county's 13 "inadequate" schools according to new state standards. The school had among the lowest science scores in the district on the nationally standardized TerraNova test, ranking in just the 11th percentile.
"Many of our students don't get out of their neighborhood, they never go to Lake Mead or Mt. Charleston," principal Leary Adams said. "The only science they see is around their house and they don't know how to pick up on that."
Association director Wheeler said the nation's science teachers face a number of problems beyond teaching at-risk students, including redundancy in classroom material from grade to grade.
He also said science textbooks in the United States are getting fatter and fatter with more material. Books in countries with high-achieving science students like Japan and Germany concentrate on far fewer topics, Wheeler said.
Wheeler said the textbook problem was one reason why older students nationwide don't stack up to students in other countries.
"Children in fourth grade in the United States do very well in science, I think it's second only to Korea," Wheeler said. "By eighth grade they are toward the middle of the pack and by the 12th grade it's the end pack."
The convention also will feature more than 450 companies and organizations that will have exhibits of science education materials. Among the exhibits: how to use food effectively in teaching science and a portable planetarium teachers can step inside to view the solar system.
The 53,000-member association, founded in 1944, is the world's largest professional organization dedicated to teaching science.
archive
