By Joel Blumenthal
It took the National Science Foundation (NSF) a while to realize that University at Albany Professor of Biological Sciences Dan Wulff really was on to something, with his proposal to teach high school science teachers how to teach science research techniques. And it took the NSF rejection of his first proposal for Wulff to realize how he could make it even better.
The end result is the single largest current award from the NSF to a UAlbany professor — a $1.3 million, five-year grant made last year that will be used to train 280 high school science teachers in New York, California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and West Virginia how to teach a unique three-year science research course.
Wulff was teaching and serving as dean of what was then UAlbany�s College of Science and Mathematics when he learned about a unique program run by a science teacher at Byram Hills High School in Westchester County.
�I was directing the Upstate New York Science and Humanities Symposium (for high school students), and I noticed that one particular high school, Byram Hills in Armonk, was dominating the competition. I learned that a teacher there, Dr. Robert Pavlica, had developed a whole new way to teach people how to conduct research, and he was willing to share his knowledge with other teachers.�
But without resources to pay for the training and to motivate teachers to attend these sessions, Wulff said, �the best we could have hoped for was to reach about 20 teachers a year and give them each 15 hours of training.� So Wulff submitted a proposal to the NSF�s Directorate for Education and Human Resources, seeking funding to bring the program to more teachers.
His proposal was rejected. �They had some misconceptions about what we were trying to do, but they also had some very good reasons for turning the project down. The most important reason was the cost — they rightly felt that the cost of the program per teacher was way too high. They also wanted us to make the school systems whose teachers were taking the course invest in it — so we added a mechanism whereby the costs would be shared by the participating school systems.�
The NSF official wondered how Wulff and Pavlica would convince college and university professors to participate. Wulff says, �When we told him that the students themselves would call the professors, not us — and he realized that hardly any professor would turn down a high school student who asked him to be his or her mentor — he reared back in his chair, put his hand on his forehead, and realized what was happening.�
The first award, in 1996, was for three years and $409,000 — with Wulff, Pavlica and Leonard Behr, the first high school teacher trained by Pavlica, as co-principal investigators. During those three years, 90 teachers from throughout New York State spent 120 hours (three weeks) in an intensive summer workshop with senior scientists and students, following the process of taking students from a broad topic of interest to a defined research problem.
The summer session was followed up during the academic year by six meetings that focused on solving problems that arose during the implementation of the techniques and networking.
Last year�s $1.3 million award will train science and mathematics teachers in the six states — and by the end of the grant, a third of New York�s 800 public high schools and 30 private schools will have established a science research course.
�If you�ve seen the movie �October Sky,� says Wulff, �that�s what science research is about. Students getting excited about research, and adults helping them. What will be the long-term effect of offering this course? We don�t know, but it has to be positive.�
�We already know,� Wulff says, �that most Westinghouse-Intel Science Award winners from New York are in schools that offer a science research course, and we know that students who take the course and continue their research in college say they are able to perform like first-year graduate students, rather than like undergraduates.�
Back 