By Faith Peppers
University of
Georgia

With Georgia public schools struggling to meet the global demand
for science education, the University of Georgia has secured a
$1.4 million National Science Foundation grant to create “The
Science Behind Our Food” for classroom teachers.

“Much has been written in recent years about the status of
science teaching in U.S. public schools,” said David Knauft,
associate dean for instruction for the UGA College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “That’s the basis for
this program.”

Results from the 2000 National Survey of Science and Mathematics
Education showed that when asked about their qualifications to
teach plant biology, only 46 percent of teachers reported they
were very well qualified. Even fewer reported being very well
qualified to teach environmental and resource issues.

“When asked about recent course work in the sciences, only 22
percent of middle school teachers and 37 percent of high school
teachers reported having taken a course in the previous three
years,” Knauft said.

TSBOF goal

“Our goal in ‘The Science Behind Our Food’ is to address these
findings directly through a collaborative effort of the CAES and
UGA’s College of Education,” Knauft said. “The project will
provide resources and training for middle and high school science
teachers to provide inquiry-based instruction for their
students.”

The researchers also hope to:

• Establish partnerships that link public school science
  teachers and NSF graduate teaching fellows (GTFs) to improve
  science teaching.
• Create a community where teachers serve as expert resources
  to GTFs and UGA faculty on instruction-related issues.
• Use the community to identify science concepts that students
  find hard to grasp or inaccessible.
• Bring science-related resources centered on these concepts to
  public schools in forms easy for teachers to use. These would
  include student-run experiments, Weekend Discovery kits that
  students take home, research facility tours, ask-a-scientist
  questions-and-answers through videoconferencing, up-to-date news
  items and other related activities customized to the needs of
  individual teachers.
• Provide a Web-based linkage to experts, activities,
  curriculum alignment, lessons and reference information.

State-of-the-art support

“This program gives teachers access to state-of-the art
information and resources,” said Steve Oliver, associate
professor of science education and one of four co-principal
investigators. “Teachers need up-to-date information. And if you
haven’t had a biology course recently, things have changed.
There’s no way anybody can keep up with biology.”

Oliver said the program also aims to change what people think of
the CAES. “A lot of people think of a plow,” Oliver said. “But
state-of-the-art science being done in the CAES is just as
high-level … as what’s being done anyplace.

“They have people sequencing the genome of the peanut. They’ve
got the first cloned cow (from a carcass),” he said. “We’ve got a
high level of research in a lot of those areas going on. So we
want to change people’s opinion about that.”

Starts with fellows

The program will be started through GTFs’ work with public school
science teachers as liaisons, technologists, resource providers
and co-teachers. A startup summer institute, with teachers, GTFs
and UGA faculty members, will develop programs to assess the
science learning objectives that are hardest for students to
master or for teachers to get across with available resources.

Teachers and GTFs will create real-world demonstrations and
experiments to provide teachers more knowledge and students
real-world activities related to the hard-to-learn concepts.

The activities will draw on research in nutrition, biochemistry,
genetics, engineering, biology, physiology and other disciplines
within the CAES.

“We also want to inform people about the science that’s involved
in food,” Oliver said. “We titled this ‘The Science Behind Our
Food’ because we can use food-related examples to teach
biology.”

“It’s an important educational issue,” he said. “Kids don’t know
where meat comes from. A lot of school children have no idea of
the link between the cows and hamburgers. That’s a link we need
to make. People need to know that.”