No, you can’t learn physics just by reading about it.
That’s probably true of other science fields as well. Like biology. But I’ll come back to that.
What set me off on this (well, just a little really) was reading Emily Hanford’s New York Times op-ed on reading instruction. Ms. Hanford is a journalist for American Public Media who started reporting on reading education in 2017. She won the inaugural public service award from the Education Writers Association in 2019, and a recent Time magazine report gave her credit for coining the phrase “the science of reading”.
I enjoyed reading her Times op-ed, but the second sentence of the piece stuck in my craw: “If you can read, you can learn anything.”
Well no, you can’t. If only Ms. Hanford were right, my job as a college physics professor would be a lot easier.
I’m going to assume that my readers know better, that learning physics with understanding requires experiences with hands-on experiments and engaged problem-solving.
Instead of spending keystrokes on that, I’m going to share a few tidbits about why it matters that people understand that reading isn’t enough to learn physics, or even more broadly science.
Here’s one: If people believe that reading is all that is necessary to learn science (with perhaps a bit of math thrown in for good measure), then they will not worry about neglecting science in the K-12 schools. Unfortunately, the Reading Is All That Matters cult seems to have a significant number of adherents among school leaders and policy-makers. As a result, the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education found that students in grades K-3 spent an average of just 18 minutes per day on science, compared to 89 minutes for English language arts and 57 minutes for math (from an article in Edutopia).
With the widespread post-pandemic concern about “lost learning”, science instruction may be degraded further. When researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California surveyed school district officials in 2021 about their priorities for post-pandemic instruction, they learned that “only 27 percent of the districts we surveyed made science a high priority in their recovery plans, whereas more than 80 percent prioritized math/ELA”. California started early on implementing the Next Generation Science Standards, but the pandemic may sideline that effort for a very long time.
The idea that knowing how to read is all that is necessary to learn science leads to some odd pathologies. Back in 2012, I was invited to serve on a panel of community members that reviewed several of Florida’s standardized tests, including the 8th grade science exam and the high school biology end-of-course exam. I was a member of the committee that wrote the state’s science standards in 2007-2008, so I suppose it was logical to invite me. I remember being pretty impressed with the physics questions on the 8th grade exam. But the biology exam was a different beast altogether. An engineer sitting next to me summarized my own feelings when he said, “I don’t need to know any biology at all to pass this test. I just have to know how to read.” All of the science content knowledge required to pass the exam was included in brief readings in the exam. At the end of each brief reading, there were several multiple-choice questions referring to the content in that particular reading – and nothing else. It was a reading exam, not a science exam. That was the high school-level science exam given by the state to meet the federal government’s accountability requirement.
I assume that Florida’s biology end-of-course exam hasn’t changed much since then.
By focusing high school science accountability requirements on biology, Florida’s education policymakers have caused (at least in part) the K-12 system’s neglect of other science subjects like chemistry and physics. The rate at which Florida’s public high school students take chemistry is significantly below the national rate, and the rate at which those students take physics is less than half the national rate.
And perhaps that biology focus happened because it’s much harder to write a reading-test-masquerading-as-a-science-test for chemistry and physics than it is for biology.
So Ms. Hanford, if by some crazy twist of fate you happen to read this, I want you to know that what you say about the all-sufficiency of reading for learning is doing damage to the education of students in my state, and probably in others. But I mostly enjoyed your piece.
Bridge to Tomorrow 