Education Week - January 7, 2015 - 7

For Integrating STEM,
Experts Recommend
Teaching Nanoscience
Topic also points students to new careers
By Sarah D. Sparks
Arlington, Va.
As schools look for ways to implement
the Next Generation Science
Standards, some scientists and
educators argue that schools should
start small-really, really small.
The topic they have in mind is nanoscience,
the study of particles in
the range of a billionth of a meter.
To put that in perspective, one
strand of human dna is a little more
than 2.5 nanometers, and there are
about 1 million nanometers in the
period at the end of this sentence.
Nanoscience is a rapidly expanding
part of fields from medicine to
high-tech manufacturing. Federal
and industry experts at a National
Science Foundation meeting last
month believe it could provide a
path to break down some of the
silos separating science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics
classes and link their concepts to
future careers for students.
"We focus a lot on the pure sciences,
the sizes and scales and
models and simulations, but [students']
eyes really get wide and
they really get excited when they
see gold turn red at the nano scale,
or you take them to the lab and
they see carbon nano-fibers being
spun," said Daphne Schmidt, the
coordinator of professional development
at the MathScience Innovation
Center in Richmond, Va.,
one of 40 federally supported Challenger
Learning Centers intended
to provide stem-related professional
development and informal
science learning.
"This is really about expanding
the scale of understanding," she
added. "It's not new; it's just a more
holistic way of teaching science."
Leading the Way
Among states, Virginia is at the
leading edge of the effort to promote
nanoscience education. In its
2010 science-standards revision,
the state added recommendations
for ways to use nanoscience applications
in existing topics. For example,
as part of physics, the revised
standards suggest students learn
to understand how high-powered
equipment such as atomic force microscopes
and scanning tunneling
microscopes are used to determine
nanoscale properties and forces.
"We have to institutionalize nanoscience
and technology into the
curriculum for all K-12 students
throughout the United States," said
James G. Batterson, a retired aerospace
engineer with nasa and a former
teacher in the Newport News,
Va., school district who consulted on
Virginia's new science standards.
"We've seen what happens if you
don't institutionalize it. The wealthy
schools and parents make sure their
students get it, and the students in
poor schools don't."
Yet in most states, nanoscience
is not an explicit part of the curriculum.
The Next-Generation Science
Standards, which have been
adopted by 26 states, don't use the
words "nanoscale" or "nanoscience,"
but the field offers a way to organize
and approach many existing topics,
like properties of atoms or exponential
notation, said Patricia Simmons,
a past president of the Arlington,
Va.-based National Science Teachers
Association, at the nsf meeting.
Integrating STEM
For example, Jonathan Home, the
leader of the Trapped Ion Quantum
Information Group, a team at
the Institute for Quantum Electronics
in Zurich that is building
a computer tinier than an atom,
suggested that high school math
teachers could use nanotechnology
to give a new "spin" to teaching
matrix problems-those with sets
of numbers-in algebra. Electrons'
spin has both magnitude and direction,
and problems using them
might be calculated using two-bytwo
matrices, said Mr. Home, who
was not at the meeting. "I think
students at most schools can multiply
two-by-two matrices-at least
we did at school-so they would
also see the relevance of matrices
to the real world."
Becoming more oriented to processes
and practical applications
can also help schools keep up with
rapid advancements in science,
said Anne Lynn Gillian-Daniel, the
education director for the Materials
Research Science and Engineering
Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Kids are still memorizing
what amino acids look like,"
she said. "Why? I can look that up
on Google in 10 seconds."
Instead, she argued, students
should be learning how to pull together
concepts and techniques
from different branches of science,
and using communication and writing
skills, to complete projects.
Celia I. Merzbacher, the vice president
for innovative partnerships at
the Semiconductor Research Corporation,
in Durham, N.C., agreed.
She surveyed leaders of businesses
hiring in nanoscience industries
and said nanoscience careers call
for more interdisciplinary understanding
of science, technology, engineering,
and math.
"These people are living in a
team environment, working with
others coming from different disciplines,
and they need to have both
the knowledge-and the ability to
continue to learn-to thrive in that
kind of environment."
Many careers associated with
nanotechnology-from an aeronautical
engineer fashioning
1.3-nanometer carbon tubes to
make super-strong materials to a
pharmaceutical researcher designing
cancer treatments smaller than
a single cell-require students to
move smoothly among different
fields, she said.
But such cognitive flexibility can
be difficult to teach. "We don't know
as much about interdisciplinary
learning at any level to be able to
build a workforce for this converging
workplace," said Susan R. Singer, an
nsf division director. "The beauty of
the kind of work we are seeing [in
nanoscience education] is it is very
tightly linking learning and understanding
to specific fields."
It's a challenge, too, to prepare
teachers and provide support for
them to work together across disciplines,
said Ms. Schmidt of the
MathScience Innovation Center.
The center has developed a fellowship
program that trains teachers
with a three-day summer boot camp
on concepts and experiments using
nanoscience, followed by in-person
and online meetings throughout the
year for teachers to discuss how the
experiments played out in the classroom
and share successful practices.
"It's beautiful in a way, because
that's how science works in the real
world, but it's tough coming out of
our silos," Ms. Schmidt said.
The center now has 13 Virginia
schools in a consortium testing
nanoscience instructional materials,
and has trained more than two
dozen middle and high school teachers
in the last three years.
Not 'Just One More List'
The greatest danger, educators
and scientists at the meeting
warned, is that nanoeducation
might become "just one more list" of
concepts for students to memorize
rather than more-practical applications
for students to explore.
"Listing groups of particles in astronomy,
or talking about nanoscience,
might inspire students to be
interested in physics, which is good,"
1/5 Horiz
Students from the Richmond
Technical Center in Richmond, Va.,
build a model that allows them to
compare the effectiveness of nano
particle sunscreens to regular
sunscreens in a workshop on
nanoscience.
Mr. Home said, "but I think there is
very little development of the mind
that goes on if you do this too early"
in the elementary grades.
But Ms. Simmons argued that
even primary-grades students
should learn scientific processes
and get a chance to experiment with
them. "Students will either turn off
to sciences or turn on to sciences
in the upper-elementary level," she
said. "In elementary you ask who's
a scientist and everyone raises their
hands. By middle school you ask the
same question and everyone points
to one kid at the back of the class."
The CURRICULUM MATTERS blog
tracks news and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/
curriculummatters
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Education Week - January 7, 2015

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