the evolving mind

Is it possible that a breadth of learning could be a bad thing? It seems the answer might be “yes.” A new study comparing high school science curricula and the students’ later achievement found that the students who had spent a significant amount of time (one month+) going into a single topic in depth during high school outperformed those who did not.

Of course, a study like this is tough to control for the many other variables that might be involved. Maybe the better science teachers taught the depth courses and it was the better teachers and not necessarily the depth that helped. Some controls, however, were employed, which gives me greater confidence in the finding.

The researchers carefully controlled for differences in student backgrounds.

An important implication one can draw from this preliminary finding immediately came to mind. And, how do you like that, the article also raised it:

The study also points out that standardized testing, which seeks to measure overall knowledge in an entire discipline, may not capture a student’s high level of mastery in a few key science topics. Teachers who “teach to the test” may not be optimizing their students’ chance of success in college science courses, Tai noted.

As a science educator myself, an insight drawn from my own experience has guided me from the get-go. In college I was required to learn an incredible amount of information to pass the tests. And the vast majority of that information was forgotten within a few short years. Furthermore, many of a relevant ideas and facts are relevant no more.

If a student has no plans to go into a specific field, why get bogged down with more and more content? Why not provide students with an understanding of the essentials in a field while helping them acquire the cognitive skills that will allow them to better excel whatever the topic they later dive into? If going into depth helps builds those skills, why teach for a test alone when the test will one day be outdated?

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