Communications of the ACM
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (it's Just So Darn Hard)
Antonio Vincentelli-Solanilla, a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is fitted for a motion capture suit to create a data library on human motion.
Credit: Gretchen Ertl / The New York Times
Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts overseas. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade under a microscope.
It turns out that middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls "the math-science death march." Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college. "We're losing an alarming proportion of our nation's science talent once the students get to college," says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter.
From The New York Times
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