Experiment Uses Real World as Lab for Science Students in L.A. Schools

For the 10th-graders from North Hollywood High School, the science lesson of the day examined the life of a lake. And here’s what they used to complete their assignment in the Sepulveda Basin in Van Nuys: fishhooks, worms and a spectrophotometer.

They caught a fish in Balboa Lake and hauled it back to class to test for potentially deadly copper levels. That’s where the spectrophotometer came in, an instrument that uses light to reveal the elements of a substance, including the telltale aqua blue of copper.

Just another day in science class: Get your hands dirty, literally, so you can understand the world around you.

“You don’t learn anything from a book,” said sophomore Wendy Guerra, 16, standing on the banks of the lake. “When you actually do it, that’s when you learn. It’s a matter of paying attention.”

For the last two years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been engaged in a national experiment to overhaul science and math education.

Teachers from the high school have been de-emphasizing textbooks and instead drawing their lessons from everyday life while blending traditionally segregated disciplines such as biology, chemistry and physics as part of a reform movement known as “integrated” math and science.

District officials--almost midway through a five-year, $15-million grant from the National Science Foundation--are taking stock of the program, whose methods are far from universally accepted but touted as a possible remedy for chronically low test scores.

About half of 541 L.A. Unified schools have launched such programs as part of the so-called Los Angeles Systemic Initiative reforms, and the rest are expected to join over the next three years.

Students have been dissecting frogs in classrooms for generations. But while traditional exercises might encourage them to focus just on the frog and its anatomy, the new methods are meant to broaden school lessons.

The North Hollywood High students incorporated chemistry and biology into their lakeside visit when they measured the gaseous oxygen levels in the water that, when high enough, can kill marine life by blocking the flow of blood in their capillaries.

In the case of the unlucky fish they caught, the copper in its flesh might indicate contamination in the lake.

“What we do here hopefully gets more students enthused about science,” said teacher David Kukla. “The purpose of this science is to get people informed.”

Like so many purported educational reforms, however, this one has no lack of critics, including teachers.

Skeptics complain that projects alone fail to provide students with the basic comprehensive skills needed to conquer more complicated material. Some teachers have been loathe to abandon conventional methods, they say, while even enthusiasts may lack proper training to cover multiple subjects.

Traditionalists also argue that integrated classwork lacks clear standards for achievement and “dumbs down” lessons for a broad audience, failing to serve the brightest pupils.

“I have no reason to believe that more touchy-feely classes are producing children who are capable of doing academic [work],” said Dan Hart, a math teacher at San Fernando High whose mostly low-income Latino students learn from problem sets in textbooks.

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Advocates argue that hands-on classwork helps students grasp abstract ideas that form the backbone of math and science. Compelling investigations kindle natural curiosity, prompt students to retain more of what they learn and earn better grades, they reason.

In such classes, books, once the staple of the classroom, are largely left to reference status. In their place come experiment “kits” full of test tubes, batteries, plant seeds and other devices meant to stir young minds. Teachers are asked to become guides to exploration rather than lecturers.

“You need to have students engage in real inquiry to have them remember concepts,” said Chris Holle, science coordinator of the district’s reforms. “Unless you use science and math, it won’t become a permanent fixture in your mind.”

The Los Angeles school district--one of 25 districts nationwide that have received National Science Foundation Grants to reform math and science education--has devoted more than $7 million in state funds to train teachers in the new methods. But the reforms have earned mixed reviews on the Board of Education, and it’s uncertain what will become of the program once the district’s grant runs out.

Board President Jeff Horton, who lobbied the National Science Foundation for its grant, credits the integrated methods with attracting more students than ever--particularly minorities--to college-prep math and science.

“It is opening up the doors to advanced math and science study to all of our students, opening the field to students where it hasn’t been accessible before,” Horton said.

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Still, district administrators were unable to provide figures comparing the number of students enrolled in advanced math and science before and after the integrated methods began. “They were also unable to provide information comparing passing rates, and some of Horton’s colleagues expressed concern that the so-called new methods are little more than a passing fad.

Students in the classes have yet to demonstrate their skills on districtwide tests. But that hasn’t stopped reformers from pursuing their agenda with the same zeal that gripped the nation in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite sparked a drive to improve math and science education.

Their efforts received a boost last week, with the release of a study of math and science education that showed American fourth-graders outperforming their counterparts in many countries but falling behind by eighth grade. The reformers cited the results of the Third International Math and Science Study as more evidence of the need for new teaching methods in the classroom.

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Many teachers in L.A. Unified already are embracing so-called integrated methods, which are appearing in classrooms from the Valley to South-Central Los Angeles, from the Westside to the Eastside.

At 54th Street School in South-Central, third-graders are learning how to multiply by drawing pictures of pears in packing crates instead of simply memorizing multiplication tables. Combining two layers of 12, they learn, yields 24 pieces of fruit.

At El Sereno Middle School on Los Angeles’ Eastside, eighth-graders are examining the concept of probability Las Vegas-style by calculating how many times a spinning bobby pin lands on letters of the alphabet stamped on a circular card.

And at Nobel Middle School in Northridge, sixth-graders are using art to investigate geometry.

On a recent morning, the Nobel students used their tools--paper, scissors, tape and colored pencils--to study the surface area of a square.

The idea behind the exercise was to learn that the area remains the same when the shape changes because the square neither grows nor shrinks.

The students cut up their squares into pieces and taped them back together--learning all the while about “rotation of the vertex,” the process of rotating one side of the square to create a new figure.

Then they outlined the strange new shapes on blank paper and created colorful pictures. One looked like a bat with its wings spread wide. Another looked like a batch of leafs. A third appeared like a rhinoceros. A fourth looked like a bird perched on a branch.

The fun was not lost on the students: Art, they said, made the math more enjoyable and more understandable.

“This is better than having to do math problems every day,” said Thomas Mahoney, 12. “It seems interesting. You get to interact with the project you’re doing.”