Facts and Concepts Too

The unveiling this week of a draft of the human genome made biology the hottest of sciences, more important than ever to medicine and global economies.

Unfortunately, a national report issued almost simultaneously shows that the nation’s leading high school biology textbooks fail to convey much of that power and excitement. According to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, which prepared the report, the textbooks are crammed with so many facts that they don’t develop any single concept well.

California is never explicitly criticized in the report, but it is the implicit target. With one in nine of all U.S. students, the state is the nation’s largest textbook buyer, and many of the textbooks the association slams were written specifically to help students score well on the fact-based high school exit exams that California began pilot-testing in May.

The association study purports to be a neutral, scientific analysis. In fact, however, the association sponsors textbook-free, hands-on “experiential” science programs in school districts that are directly threatened by the new textbooks. Districts like San Francisco and Pasadena, whose science curricula are based on experiential programs, may reason that by dropping the programs and buying the new textbooks their students will score better on the new exit exams.

Despite its self-interest, the association report makes good points. It should provide a useful reminder to Gov. Gray Davis and other state leaders that the new exams should not be allowed to become merely “gotcha” tools to punish students who fail to memorize long lists of facts.

The assessments would be most effective if they were used in ways that encouraged students to master meaningful concepts. Education leaders in California should also ensure that the results of the state’s new assessments get back to publishers so they can do a better job of explaining the concepts in the first place.

The point the association is trying to get across is that the easiest education agenda to sell to parents--compelling students to memorize uncontroversial and accepted facts, which they regurgitate on tests and then forget--may not be the best education agenda for students.

However, the association’s scathing criticism of current science books is not cause to malign California’s new, fact-based exams. Facts, after all, don’t have to come at the expense of concepts. For example, there’s no reason why California’s first-graders can’t enjoy studying things that the state’s newly adopted biology content standards require them to learn: that plants need light, while animals need food; and that you can infer what animals eat from the shapes of their teeth.

It is true that children start out life with a deep curiosity about the world and then often lose it. A curriculum that bleeds the life out of science by emphasizing memorization could indeed be part of the problem. But the best scientists know that understanding soulful and profound ideas does not have to come at the expense of learning basic facts and concepts.