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| Irma Rahma Suwarma, an expert on Physics and STEM Education. |
Intro
I am
a physics education’s background with interdisciplinary experiences nor connections.
The school (include pondok pesantren) in which I teach, Madrasah
Tasywiquth Thullab Salafiyyah (TBS) Kudus, is giving me opportunity to teach
many branchs, from language of human, language of nature, until language of
God. Many of my collaborations have been with friends come from different area,
i.e. english education, human resource management, and islamic studies.
This condition
naturally makes me an enthusiastic advocate of interdisciplinary education at
the secondary levels. Yet at the same time, I am worried by some features of
what may be coming. These worries have to do with what can happen as we are all
lumped together under the heading of science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM) education. Striking differences between physics and biology
have important implications for STEM.
Undergraduate
education in biology is confronted with the rapid development of the field and
the urge to insert more and more recently discovered facts and ideas into
introductory courses. Physics does not have this problem. Almost all physicists
are happy to teach an introductory course whose structure has not changed much
since 1960, and for which the content was developed before 1930. Indeed physics
courses make only occasional excursions past material developed by 1960 up
through the second year of graduate school. The reason is not just that
physicists are resistant to change, but that the material we view as central
simply has not changed for decades or centuries. Our educational conservatism
has some great advantages. Knowing with certainty the topics physics students
will study at every level has aided the development of physics education
research, which has developed an impressive body of knowledge on instructional
strategies that help students learn the best. But it means that physics will
naturally resist presenting its topics in new interdisciplinary combinations.
The
measured pace at which physics curriculum evolves may finally be sped up by the
emergence of STEM. This acronym seems a benign and catchy way to market
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in pursuit of improving our competitiveness.
As we market STEM, physics and biology even risk coming into opposition, and
physics is already in a weak position, partly due to developments in science
education that emerged from the struggle over intelligent design.
Nature
of Natural Science
The
debate concerning the teaching of evolution influenced the way that secondary
teachers and secondary students understand the nature of science. Creation
science and intelligent design presented themselves as scientific, so dealing
with the attempt to inject them in public schools meant carefully defining
science and explaining it well to the public. The result was not fully
balanced. It reacted to visions of what science was not, particularly the
nonscience angling to enter biology textbooks. Thus, the nature of science
presented to school teachers emphasizes methodological naturalism, the
essential role of empirical evidence, science as social construction, and the
tendency of science to change over time.
Guarding
teachers from intelligent design even evolved into an academic subdiscipline
with specialized vocabulary, such as law and theory. For example,
understanding the fundamental distinctions and relationships between laws and
theories is essential in fully appreciating and evaluating the work of
scientists while gaining fluency in the language of science. I look at examples
from physics, such as Isaac Newton’s laws (fundamental theory of motion), Marie
Curie’s law (an obscure empirical result in magnetism), and the quantum theory
(fundamental theory of matter), and see words mainly attached to results
through historical accident. Passing a vocabulary quiz on law and theory is far
from understanding science.
Given
the struggle to maintain the teaching of evolution in schools, I understand why
science is defined as it is. But from the vantage point of physics, it creates
problems. Once students have received a good secondary education in the nature
of science, they instinctively reject much of what physicists do as
nonscientific.
Integration
of Mathematics the Bitch of the Sciences
Especially
for theoretical physicists, but also for many experimentalists, a great deal of
scientific life is occupied with mathematics. Indeed, theoretical physics, as
well as theoretical chemistry, theoretical biology, parts of mechanical and
chemical engineering, and other fields, becomes indistinguishable from applied
mathematics. Resting in the back of most researchers’ minds is the idea that at
some point their calculations will be compared with experimental work—and most
papers feature in the end some comparison—but the authors’ time is spent almost
exclusively on mathematical calculations and argumentation. Much of theoretical
high-energy physics in the last 50 years has been carried out in advance of the
experiments that may or may not eventually prove it correct. Did the theoretical
work on the Higgs boson only become science once the European Organization for
Nuclear Research found the particle? Will calculations of black hole collisions
only become science if the collisions are someday observed and the calculations
prove correct? I do not think so. These areas of work have been science from
the start, a mode of science focusing on mathematical computations with the
possibility of a future comparison with experiment.
This
mode of science can be carried out at many levels, not just by candidates for
the Nobel Prize. For example, given a prism made of wood and careful
measurements of its weight and dimensions, one can compute the location of the
water line when one floats it in a bucket. The act of carrying out these
computations is a legitimate part of science, one that also uses secondary
mathematics. My experience leads me to the undesired conclusion that lots of
students do not like it. Some science students do not like being pressed to
make use of mathematics. And many mathematics students dislike being pressed to
employ ideas as a tool that they were content to know just because they were
pretty.
Tyranny
of Hypotheses
Most
theories in physics do not test hypotheses in a natural way. Instead, they
involve measuring values, or more commonly, measuring functions. For example, if
you searching the entire literature of condensed matter, the largest subfield
of physics, you will rarely find the word “hypothesis,” and you will almost
never find the machinery of hypothesis testing—t tests, p values,
and the like. In much of condensed matter physics, gathering data is cheap once
an experiment is operational at all, so the response to random error is to take
enough measurements to drive uncertainty down to desired levels. The scientific
problems have to do with systematic error, identifying effects that explain
functional relations.
Hypotheses
are useful when a complex, noisy system is exposed to a small number of
distinct treatments, and one wants to characterize their effects without
knowing in detail how they work. Hypotheses become irrelevant when a system
amenable to detailed mechanistic analysis is exposed to a continuous infinity
of treatments.
As an
example of a very simple case in which one can see these two modes of science
in action, consider constructing an experiment with a light bulb and a light
intensity sensor. A biological approach to this system might be to say “My
hypothesis is that when the bulb is farther away the light will be dimmer.”
This idea would lead to an experiment in which a light bulb is placed at two
different locations and intensity is measured multiple times. A low-quality
version of the experiment would simply ask which case led to higher mean light
intensity, while a higher-quality version would add a t test for
significance. Extensions of the experiment could ask whether yellow lights are
brighter than green lights.
I
have seen biologists nod contentedly at such a description of student-directed
scientific progress, but physicists start to squirm. There is no point in
checking whether the more distant light bulbs appear dimmer. It is obvious. In
fact, with a little simple geometry, and using the concept of conservation of
energy, the student should be able to predict the precise mathematical form of
the functional dependence of light intensity upon distance to the sensor. For
heaven’s sake, do that, put some error bars on the measurement, and compare it
with the expected power law.
It
has often seemed to me that the difference in the approach to problems of
physicists and biologists is great enough that, when given a battery and a
bulb, a biologist will design a biology experiment and, when given a frog, a
physicist will design a physics experiment. Do you still remember Luigi Galvani
(then Carlo Matteucci) nor the dispute between Galvani and Alessandro Volta
over the nature of electricity?
In
the battle for the hearts of secondary school students, biologists win, and the
victory is lasting. Many times, while I help college students construct what
seems to me a perfectly good physics experiment, I see them turn and say almost
in anguish, “But I don’t know what my hypothesis is!” Students arrive in
college with the strong intuition that science requires a hypothesis, an
experiment, and minimal mathematics. Other ways of spending time are not
science.
This
singular view of the nature of science is creating several problems that lead
back to STEM. Hidden within the “S” of science are wildly different modes of
thought and action, all of them important. Despite the superficial glamor of physics,
its mental processes are unfamiliar to most of the public and scarcely
recognized as science at all. This may be part of the reason that physics
enrollments are now at low enough levels that public universities may be
increasingly unable to support undergraduate physics programs. Few entering
undergraduates can imagine what they could learn in physics that would be of
any use. The response to this situation is that physicists will have to be more
deliberate in teaching and explaining important features of their discipline,
just as biologists have long had to do.
There
is even a threat, although more remote, to mathematics instruction at the
secondary level. Deprived of contexts such as physics, mathematics at the level
of algebra and above threatens to degenerate into a game. The public may not
put up with the high stakes attached to this game forever.
Outro
We
have to approach STEM more as an benefit than a threat. However, prevention of threat
takes priority over the attraction of benefit (). The benefit is to identify a
common core of scientific practices that integrate science, mathematics,
engineering, and technology, nor make this core a goal for every educated
citizen. Physics has a contribution to make that is separate from the
inviolable list of topics from the introductory physics course. The way that
physicists use mathematics in combination with experiment to construct causal
models of the world should be part of the common core.
But
the difficulties in moving toward this goal should not be ignored. We—the educators,
scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who will be asked to help implement
the new standards—do not ourselves always possess the full set of skills that
STEM education will ask of our students. We must struggle to prepare our own
undergraduates, as well as current and future secondary teachers, to understand
a curriculum broader than what we know. It is a struggle worth undertaking.