Boston-area elementary school students experience hands-on science in a Harvard University lab, a visit made possible through an HHMI-sponsored outreach program.

Three HHMI-supported programs and a major report from the National Research Council present a better way to teach science—by doing science—in grades K–8.

Candice Marshall, a first-grade teacher in the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, or MCPS, considered herself a good science teacher, but she was also aware of her limits. "I was doing a lot of telling instead of letting students find out for themselves, and I never thought of science as a process," she recalls. "I was missing the big picture."

That all changed after she participated in the MCPS Elementary Student Inquiry Project, an intensive two-week summer program that trains teachers first to think and act like scientists, and second to use methods that encourage students to do the same. "We learned what science really is by collecting and organizing data and making predictions," she says. "That is, I got to do science, as opposed to following a science lesson plan."

The program radically changed Marshall’s perspective. The realization that the quality of her teaching had changed as well came during the 2005 Student Inquiry Conference, when students presented their science experiments. Her first-graders confidently fielded questions from fourth- and fifth-graders, explaining what happened to the flowers they immersed in hot or cold water or the ping-pong balls they floated in salt water. "This [competence level] was beyond my wildest expectations," Marshall says.

Photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office

	PAGE 1 OF 2	Continue