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. 

"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.

"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."

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."

(Faith Peppers is a news editor for the University of Georgia 
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)