In this section, Dr. Mobolaji Williams offers some thoughts on how high-school curricula could be adjusted to better prepare students for college-level science.
This is an interesting question on a few levels. First, preparation for college-level science is certainly the common standard for judging how successfully students have completed their high school curricula. By such a standard, the sensible way to prepare students for such college courses is to make the high school science courses as much like the college science courses as possible. But such a standard assumes that the typical structure of college-level science (and arguably beyond) is a good target to aim for.
Instead, I think most college-level science courses are great at educating a particular kind of scientific worker, and that it’s not apparent that such a worker is the only (or even the best) ideal to aim for. Specifically, a focus on problem-solving education is really great at building technical knowledge in responding to archetypal problem contexts, but such a focus doesn’t allow as much space for problems that exist beyond archetypes or those found through self-driven curiosity. Perhaps this lack is structurally intentional in education. In any case, teachers at all levels should be conscious of the ways common approaches to teaching alternately elevate and undervalue certain ways of doing science, and even if they aim to adjust high-school curricula to better prepare students for college, they should hopefully communicate that such preparation doesn’t exhaust the ways that science can be done.
I say this as someone who was a prototypical “good student” in high school and was quite well prepared for college science. Years from that education, I can see that much of that past work did prepare me for things I do in data science (i.e., my day job) today, but I also see how limiting that preparation was, given a more expanded vision of the role of data science in the world.
