KU News Release

KU team advocates strengthening science education to head off ‘gathering storm’

LAWRENCE — In the United States, 34 percent and 56 percent of doctoral degrees in natural sciences and engineering, respectively, are awarded to foreign-born students. Rather than staying in the U.S., it has become more attractive for many of those students to take their degrees and head home to their countries for work.

A report called “Rising Against the Gathering Storm” says that is just one of many tides that will need stemming in order to keep the United States on the crest of scientific and engineering innovation.

To aid in the cause, two University of Kansas educators spent time with U.S. lawmakers and other educators in Washington, D.C., to find ways to train and educate more U.S. scientists, engineers and their teachers.

Joe Heppert, chair of the chemistry department and director of the KU Center for Science Education, and Janis Lariviere, associate director of the center, say they plan to thank the Kansas Congressional delegation for their support in furthering the suggestions made in the “Gathering Storm” report and subsequent American Competitiveness Initiative. They also hope learn what other universities are doing to remedy the problem.

Heppert and Lariviere say KU already has several initiatives in the works to improve science learning.

The report cites the success of a program that Lariviere helped construct called UTeach. The program, at the University of Texas, starts by inviting freshman natural science majors to consider teaching, she says. UTeach offers short, free teaching courses in the first year to “let them get a taste of teaching,” she says.

“UTeach was able to increase the number of math and science teachers coming out of that program four-fold,” said Lariviere. Five years after graduating, 80 percent of them are still teaching, she adds.

Heppert and Lariviere plan to find out what recruiting and teaching methods are working best for other universities.

In addition, state No Child Left Behind dollars have funded several workshops to help teachers improve their science and math skills and qualifications, he says.

“We try to deliver college-level science in a way that they can take the activities we do, the labs we design, and turnaround and use those with their students,” Heppert says.

Efforts are also under way to coordinate an education research consortium that would pool data from Kansas school districts on teacher and student achievement, resource commitments, policies, etc. The goal is to use the data to help districts and lawmakers figure out how to work toward programs for school improvement.

“I think all of the nation’s research universities need to get more involved in preparing teachers than they have in the past,” said Lariviere. “Historically, that has not been a research universities’ mission. I think many research universities are beginning to think ‘yes, it is.’ ”

At the same time, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts is joining with other bipartisan lawmakers on the “National Competitiveness Investment Act,” part of which aims to improve education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics from grade school through graduate school.

The report says that in Singapore, for example, 67 percent of all undergraduate degrees awarded are in the natural sciences or engineering. In South Korea, France and China that number ranges from 38 percent to 50 percent.

By comparison, 15 percent of undergraduate degrees are in those fields in the United States.

“Not only is that going to benefit their economies in the long-run, but that’s going to make them powerful competitors with us for the future of high-technology enterprises,” said Heppert.

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The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. University Relations is the central public relations office for KU's Lawrence campus.