Review
Hugh B. Haskell
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

FAST (Foundational Approach to Science Teaching - University of Hawaii) Materials
This is an older review, but of materials still being used as indicated through requests of teachers.

The FAST program is a complete set of curricular materials designed for middle or junior high schools. It includes a textbook (not intended to be permanently issued to the students, but used only in class), a workbook, and laboratory and teacher supplementary materials. In order to be able to purchase a classroom set of the materials and use them in the classroom, teachers must complete a 2-3 week summer program taught by an instructor certified by the FAST program. Presumably, this guarantees that only qualified teachers will be able to use the materials with students.

The program is comprehensive, covering all the principal disciplines over the 3-4 year course of the program. While each of the three levels has material drawn from physics, chemistry, biology and earth and space sciences, each level also has an emphasis - FAST I, physical science; FAST II, life science; and FAST III, environmental science. An effort has been made to provide an "integrated" approach, in that the segments each contain material drawn from several related disciplines and, within limits, each unit attempts to build on the previous unit. The program emphasizes "hands on" activities heavily and makes extensive use of graphing skills.

I had the opportunity not just to read the text materials but to attend part of a FAST training workshop and then spend three years working with teachers who were using the program, at least for part of their science teaching (Since state and local curricular guidelines were in conflict, it was impossible for the teachers to use FAST exclusively and still meet the criteria of both curricula). Thus, I was able to see, in at least one case, how well the expressed philosophy of the program as envisioned by its authors worked out in practice. While I will have specific criticisms of the program below, I must say here that some of the problems with the program were due to deficiencies in the classroom and not inherently with the program-primarily the fact that class sizes were far too large for a single teacher to effectively supervise the efforts of all the students, especially during the laboratory activities. This fact inevitably meant that one or more (usually several) groups would get into serious trouble in carrying out their experiment but the teacher was unable to get to them to provide the necessary help during the time available.

The philosophical goals of the program are admirable - to expose the students to science in a way that at least approximates the way "real" science is carried out. That the execution falls considerably short of that goal could perhaps be predicted by a glance at the impressive list of authors, including professors of physics, chemistry, biology and several other learned disciplines - but no 6th-, 7th- or 8th-grade teachers. As a result, the program seriously overestimates the intellectual or neurological capabilities of their target group in some cases and underestimates them in others.

Since I had the privilege of working with the teachers both during their FAST training and for an extended period of time in their classrooms, my comments will include a discussion of the text but will be interspersed with excerpts from the notes I took at the training sessions and during my classroom observations. While the teachers were somewhat nervous at my presence initially, I believe that I was able to gain their trust before too long by refraining from criticizing their methods and always deferring to their techniques of classroom management. This wasn't difficult since I am not trained in intermediate grade education, and made it clear from the outset that I was in their class with their permission only and that my mission was solely to help them improve their content knowledge, which, for the most part, they were quite willing to acknowledge was lacking - of 17 teachers involved in the program, only 3 had a science degree (biology) and 4 a science education degree.

An example of where I think the program goes seriously wrong is the early section on density and buoyancy in FAST I. About 16 lessons are devoted to the subject of density and its relation to buoyancy, each a small one-step experiment designed to gently carry the students to the concept, starting with volume measurement, then proceeding to an empirical investigation of buoyancy which led to the idea of density and ending with measuring the density of gases. Along the way the density section is introduced by a quantitative measurement of the volume of air in a Cartesian diver when it is floating, neutrally buoyant and sunk. The skill and level of understanding required for this experiment was well beyond that of the teachers being trained, so it isn't surprising that most of the teachers thought that they would just skip this part of the FAST program in their own classes. Late in the workshop, the density of gases was investigated. As the last item in this sequence, it is a useful pursuit, and it is needed for them to understand some of the ideas of meteorology and atmospheric physics later, as well as understanding balloons, which become important later in the meteorology unit. One of the things I did not see mentioned was the necessity of comparing volumes of gases at both constant temperature and constant pressure. While the experiments did control pressure, the point of its necessity was not made, nor was temperature control mentioned at all. Some of the experiments involved rather sudden volume changes, quick enough that the changes in the gas occurred nearly adiabatically, and thus there were almost certainly temperature changes that would have introduced errors into the data.

The overall goal of the density/buoyancy unit seems too abstract to keep students' interest. It is difficult for them to see the relevance of any given element. Can they relate to long term goals like this, especially when they are poorly spelled out in the beginning? Short-term goals need to be more concrete and should involve them in developing the lab skills (careful observation, accurate measuring, correctly recording results, etc.) that they will need later. The idea of having them work in groups is good, but groups do not happen automatically, and everybody does not have the same function in each group. Care must be taken to ensure that all functions of the group are valued equally. Not everybody has lots of ideas or is good at inventing hypotheses, apparatus, or experimental methods. These skills can be learned if group actions do not discourage their participation. It is also important that groups be arranged so that the girls and minority children do not get pushed aside by the more aggressive white boys. Sensitivity training is important for teachers and the white boys on this subject.

There is a lot of hyperbole in the introductory pages about how the FAST program creates little scientists. In some of the experiments, the results are very sensitive to the quality of the measurements to be made so that it is possible to draw wrong conclusions from them. This is would be OK if this was "real" science, in the sense that future experiments will correct the errors. But in the educational setting the emphasis is on a growth of sophistication with further experiments: If erroneous conclusions repeatedly lead to incorrect predictions, the students will have a hard time concluding that science has any predictive value at all and lose interest.

The descriptive literature emphasizes the open-ended nature of science, which is quite correct, but I wonder if students at this level are really ready to deal with lots of open-ended questions? My guess is that most adults are not. It is certain that no politicians are. Scientists tend to be people with a high tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty. These are not common personality traits. I sense here some of the same kind of hubris that people who are in the theater display when they assume that because they enjoy role-playing, everybody must (how else do you explain all the plays and TV shows and movies about ordinary people who get involved in some kind of role-playing). The FAST originators are scientists who have this tolerance of ambiguity and assume that everybody has it and all we need to do is tap it. Maybe it is true that young children have it, and all we need to do in science classes is exploit it, but I suspect the contrary is true - young people have little tolerance of ambiguity and it must be carefully nurtured if they are to maintain an interest in science long enough to decide to become one or to appreciate how science works if they don't actually become one. Perhaps this aspect of science should be more carefully controlled in the early grades to give more students the opportunity to develop tolerance of ambiguity as they mature, or at least to learn to tolerate this personality quirk among scientists. This dichotomy in the population may play a role in the historical tension between science and the rest of society.

In spite of the stated emphasis on reporting observation, the students are often encouraged to present their observations in terms of some abstract concept, such as explaining increased pressure in terms of the atoms going faster, or being closer together, or something along those lines. Some extensive sections, especially in the earth and space sciences sections simply give the current thinking on several topics without ever getting into how those things are known or that some of them are sources of controversy among scientists. These quickly degenerate into traditional fact presentations that do not further the stated aims of the program.

The teacher materials do not include any information about subject content. Either it is assumed that they already know it, or that they do not need to know anything more than they are going to have the students learn. While this may be an acceptable situation for the professional teachers of education, I know of no teacher who is comfortable teaching a class in which they know no more than what they are trying to teach. This would be bad enough, but most of the teacher reference material relating to class conduct is not terribly informative, although it uses all the current jargon regarding the topics presented - group dynamics, facilitating discussion, etc.

One of the silliest things I observed with the FAST program was its repeated asking of the students to create a hypothesis to examine in their experiment and to predict a result when the students had absolutely no prior knowledge of the phenomenon under investigation, rather than giving them a few preliminary activities involving just observation to give them a feel for what was happening so that they could hope to ask an intelligent question or make a reasonable prediction. Their "predictions" were frequently wild guesses and the smartest students quickly learned not to make a prediction until after they had made their measurements.

The authors frequently use language in a strange way. Two examples:

•Attenuate is used to mean reduce or decrease. My understanding of this word is more restricted, in the sense of reduction by some loss mechanism, as in "a wave is attenuated as it passes through an absorbing medium." This seems to be an example of using a fancy word when there is a better and simpler word available.

*Density point" is used to pick the point off a linear graph where the value of the vertical coordinate is numerically equal to the slope of the line. I question the avoidance of the word slope at this point. This is one of those times when the word (slope) as it is used in science means almost the same thing as it does in everyday language, so it seems advantageous to use it. It also gets started on the more abstract concept of "X per unit Y" that Arons has spent so many years writing about. It seems to me that once a straight line is drawn, it won't be too hard to take several intervals on the horizontal axis and divide them into the corresponding intervals on the vertical axis and define that quotient as the slope - rise over run.

There is a strong emphasis on graphing in the program. As with other aspects of the program this is admirable in intent but somewhat less in execution. During the training sessions 1 observed several egregious examples of graphing techniques that make it clear to me why students arrive in my 11th and 12th grade classes with some very strange ideas about what constitutes a graph. On several occasions, data from several groups was pulled together to create a "class graph." Unfortunately, insufficient attention had been paid to what the groups were actually doing and it turned out that not all of them had done the same thing, and so the class graph ended up mixing incompatible elements into a thoroughly confusing mélange. In another case, the data collected was related hyperbolically and yet a straight line fit was forced on the data and the results then made no sense to the class. These are clear examples of the trouble one gets into when one's knowledge is only just what needs to be taught.

It would appear that the learned professors who lent their names to this project did not spend much time reviewing the product that they evidently delegated to some one else to prepare - who I will not speculate.