TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.068

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 65

Lessons from On High


Project STAR takes aim at some popular misconceptions


    "Don't put the earth upside down," warns Mark Petricone as
his 13 students struggle with coat hangers and pliers. "And
remember, folks, the earth isn't really in the middle of the
universe. This is an incorrect scale model, but astronomers have
been using it for a couple of thousand years."

    The goal for the juniors and seniors at Watertown High in
Watertown, Mass., is to mount a thimble-size metal earth on a
coat hanger in the middle of a melon-size clear-plastic sphere
that is supposed to be the universe. The students then use Magic
Markers to trace onto the universe a computer-drawn map of a few
hundred of the brightest stars in the night sky. They draw a
line around the sphere to represent the ecliptic, or path of the
sun through the constellations, and then they are ready for some
gnarly astronomy.

    Like the universe, Petricone's classroom is a study in
controlled chaos. "Are the Pleiades part of Taurus?" Franco
Mastantuono asks no one in particular. Classmate Lisa David
explains the difference between a crescent and a gibbous moon
-- a waxing gibbous, at that. Barry Lyons solves the mystery of
the moon's phases for a visitor by drawing an impromptu
diagram. "What was the moon last night?" Petricone bellows. "A
waxing crescent," Karyn Woodbury shoots back as she assembles
her celestial sphere. "What about tonight?" Petricone pushes.
"A first quarter," pipes another voice.

    This is classic instruction for Project STAR (Science
Teaching Through Its Astronomical Roots), a program taught in
18 schools in 13 states. STAR is based on the premise that
books are abysmal tools for learning science. "It's impossible
to understand an astronomy diagram without using three
dimensions at proper scale," says Irwin Shapiro, the
irrepressible director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the man who dreamed up
STAR six years ago. "High school science textbooks are
impossible. They are dense with concepts and jargon. No one
understands what's going on." Adds Kenneth Mirvis, who writes
STAR course materials: "This is not a curriculum of vocabulary
but of concepts." And, explains Shapiro, "facts are easy;
concepts are hard."

    In his years at Harvard and M.I.T., Shapiro has been struck
by the difficulty even well-educated adults have with basic
scientific concepts. Last year he and some colleagues produced
a half-hour film titled A Private Universe in which half a
dozen Harvard seniors were asked on graduation day to explain
why there are seasons. All blithely described how the earth is
closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. Wrong.
The seasons result from the tilt of the earth's axis relative
to its orbit. When the sun is highest in the sky, we have
summer. In fact, the earth is closest to the sun in January.

    Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money
from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to
correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not
merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to
use astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and
science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of
physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a
certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose
astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry
and physics," says Shapiro, "and the sky is always there."

    Teachers involved in the program, which aims ultimately to
reach half a million students, spend about a month at the
astrophysics center learning the fundamentals of the STAR
approach. They are taught that the road to enlightenment lies
in the third dimension. "To convert from three dimensions to
two and back to three again leads to special reasoning
ability," says project director Philip Sadler.

    Consequently, STAR students use a variety of props. With
3-D models of the universe, they can visualize just how the
light of the sun on the moon produces different moon phases.
They make their own telescopes from cardboard, paper-towel
cylinders and plastic lenses. (The result is a telescope more
powerful than the one first used by Galileo.) They record in
journals the movement of the moon and sun and chart the arrivals
and departures of the constellations.

    The classes, which are separate from the ordinary high
school science curriculum, tend to attract curious students and
science buffs. Still, it is often an uphill battle to disabuse
kids of fallacies that have become ingrained even by age 17.
"You want to defend your old misconceptions, but you can't,"
says Matthew Liebman, a STAR student at Massachusetts'
Framingham North High School. Despite the difficulties,
preliminary studies by Shapiro's team suggest that STAR students
have a better grasp of basic scientific concepts and mathematics
than students in ordinary courses. "We're definitely making
headway and in directions we hadn't expected," says Sadler, who
is continually searching for fresh teaching methods.

    For students, the gains can be rich. Some of Sadler's
initial findings reveal that STAR  students do about 30% better
than ordinary students in absorbing concepts and learn about
twice as much math as their regular counterparts. "I used to
look up at the night sky and say, `Yeah, so what?' " recalls
Aphrodite Kapetanakos, a Watertown junior. "Now I show my
friends a constellation and say, `Check it out!' All they know
is the Big Dipper."