Focus; Why Undergraduate College Students Leave the Sciences

In this part of focus, we'll be talking about a trend in higher education that people at colleges and universities have been aware of for a long time, but hadn't understood very well. And that is that roughly speaking about half of the students who go to college intending to study science, math, and engineering, about half of them switch before they graduate. They go into something else. Not only do they go into some other science, they go out of the sciences completely. And as I say, it was something that people in colleges and universities knew happened, but no one really quite understood why it had happened. So this morning, in this part of Focus 580, we'll be talking with a scholar. She is a sociologist who set out to try to get a better understanding of why it is that undergraduates leave the sciences. Her name is Elaine Seymour. She's director of ethnography and evaluation research in the Bureau of Sociological Research at University of Colorado at Boulder. And a number of years ago, she and a colleague undertook a study and involved several universities and talking with literally hundreds of students about their experiences. It did end up being published as a

book length treatment, which is titled Talking About Leaving Why Undergraduate Leave the Sciences. It's published by the West View Press, so it is available if you want to look at it in detail. We'll try and hit some of the high points here this morning in this part of Focus 580, and of course, we'd be happy to take questions from people who are listening. All we ask of scholars is that people are brief so that we can keep the program moving along, but of course, anybody who is interested is welcome to call 333-9455 and also toll-free 800-222-9455. Those are the numbers. Dr. Seymour is here visiting the campus as part of a lecture series, a spring lecture series that is sponsored by the University of Illinois Office of Women in Engineering. And I know one of the things she's particularly interested in is why it is that young women end up leaving the sciences. And one of the things that we know is that this tendency of undergraduates to start in science as math, engineering, and leave is more pronounced with women and minority students. So having said all that, welcome to the show. Thank you very much,

good morning to everyone. And I guess as I understand, it is the case that for a long time, people at colleges and universities knew this was happening. And the big question and that question that interested you is why? Why was it happening? Yes. Well, I think they knew and they didn't know. I think certain people knew the National Science Foundation, many of the foundations like Sloan, Exxon, Mobile, and Sound, who are very concerned about the retention and recruitment to retention of students into the sciences, both undergraduate and graduate, that they have known for a long time. And there have been several commissions to study this. But they had not come to any conclusion by the early 90s, which is when we began to think about doing this work. So some people knew a lot of people didn't. And indeed, it's still news to a lot of people because departments don't necessarily keep very good records of students coming and going. We've got to find often that they

don't know. Well, I think also that if people will think back to their own experience in college or that of their children or people that they know, they will understand that there is a lot of switching takes place. There are a lot of people who go to college intending to study one thing and then for a variety of reasons change their minds and study something else. But if you look though at the rates of switching, it is for people who are in science, math, and engineering, it is much more pronounced than people who go intending to study history or anthropology. And that is also much more the case that someone say who starts out deciding they want to study physics, changes and goes into history. It's much less likely that someone starts out saying I want to be a historian than two years in decides they want to be a physicist. It doesn't happen like that. No, it's very curious really because as you say there is a tradition in the liberal arts and humanities of encouraging young people to try things, particularly things that were not available

to them in high school. And so it's not uncommon and it's not discouraged for people to move from political science to international relations and so on. But curiously despite that tradition the switching is less, it's around a third. And English literature, which must be the despair of parents because they wonder what on earth their kids are going to do with the major in English literature, is the most stable major on campus, almost nobody moves. So the sciences, mathematics and engineering run nationally between 14 and 60 percent switching rate. It's least in engineering curiously. We think that's because engineering goes through quite a selection process before young people actually commit to it. That may explain it. We're not entirely sure why. Let's dismiss something right up front that I'm sure again when we get into this conversation some people will think well they would say well the explanation here is simple. What happens is

that students they have ambitions, they have expectations, they get to university and they find that they're not capable of doing the work. When you take a look at the students and you compare those who switched and those who didn't, on all the measures that you can think of that would give some indication of what the potential the students are, things like test scores and grade point average and everything, you find in fact that they're all the same. So you cannot, you cannot say well it's just because the students can't handle the work. That's not the reason. Yeah. We tried to control for this rather carefully in our study by only selecting students who had a minimum SAT mathematics score or equivalent of 650 or above. So below that level certainly there will be some flunking out going on and I can't comment on that but our concern was with able students who leave and we had talked to faculty on our own campus at CU and their advice was that if we took 650 SAT math as a marker then above that line we should be interviewing students

who on the face of it should be able to manage perfectly well and who would show an appropriate level of preparation. To our surprise when we sample the students as you indicate we sampled a more or less even number of people who left or heard recently left and people who stayed, we found no difference between them at all in the issue of prior preparation. Quite a number of them, over 40 percent of them both the switches and the non-switchers said they had difficulties of making an adjustment when they came to university because the preparation they'd had in high school hadn't served them well enough and some of those we interviewed as seniors who were staying bemoan those considerably but there was no distinction between them and this was one of the biggest surprises of the study that in many markers there really wasn't anything to choose between those who left and those who stayed. We found exactly the same problems, we found 23

different factors which arose out of the interviews which contributed to switching and only four of those were suggested by us the rest arose precisely from the interviews themselves they were generated by the by the interviews and the same issues were therefore for both sets of students. That's what's fascinating about this and we can get in talk about some of these things in greater detail but overall if you look at the students who switched out and you ask them about their experiences and then tell you about their frustrations and their doubts and their difficulties and then you ask the students who stayed and they tell you about their frustrations and their doubts and their difficulties it's virtually the same. So obviously what's going on there must be something that's really much more subtle and difficult to determine because everyone will tell you they have some doubts about their ability and they have some you know maybe they got into it

and they say well it wasn't what I thought it was going to be or they say well you know the the fact of the matter is that some of these teachers I have they're they're just not very good teachers and they will tell you things like that but what you find is that they all they all will tell you the same thing those who stayed and those who left. Yeah yeah numerically the difference between them is that the average number of reported difficulties that the switches and non-switches have the same difficulties is higher for the switches and I mean this this doesn't help a lot but it helps a little to know it was about eight and a half problems for the switches and about five or six problems for the non-switches again the same. So the switches had reported more of the same problems but that really doesn't quite cut it. There are some things which explain why people hung in. One very important one was the intervention of faculty. There were very many fork in the road stories. The student would tell us something like I was in despair I was having

this all that difficulty things were piling up I was getting into a mess I didn't know how to turn and I happened to meet Professor Sone so in the corridor and I said can I talk to you or he or she said what's the matter you're looking to perhaps come talk to me and those interventions were actually very critical they often made the difference between somebody throwing in the towel and not we heard dozens and dozens and dozens of those stories. The attitudes of parents also mattered enormously because kids would go home for the vacation Christmas or whatever and talk to them and how the parents handled those vents really made a big difference and there was a particular difference for women there that for sons fathers and mothers tended to say now you've just got to Stefan your spine and toughen this out and just put up with it and keep going. For daughters

they were somewhat more likely to say we love you dear we don't want to see you suffering if you want to go into political science we won't we won't stop you so that was a critical intervention in fact some of the women said that's not what I wanted my mother to say I wanted to say just to let me vent just to let me say what was on my mind but being encouraging and supporting I didn't actually want to say it's okay to leave. Our guest in this part of focus let me introduce Elaine Seymour she's a sociologist by training she works in the Bureau of Sociological Research at University Colorado Boulder and has been there since 1989 and we're talking about a study that she and a colleague were involved in looking at why it is that undergraduates so many undergraduates who go to college intending to major in either science math or engineering why so many of them leave not not leave college but switch to other majors and if you're interested by the way again reading it about this it's it's explored in great detail in the book talking about

leaving why undergraduates leave the sciences the Westview Pass is the publisher I'm sure you can find it in the bookstore or in the library and of course questions are welcome here on the show 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 222 9 4 5 5 I wondered to what extent the highly competitive nature about these some of these programs is a factor and I think that some students complain about that they think that maybe it's a little bit unreasonable and in fact complain that there is in in the minds of some professors this idea that right at the beginning you put the screws to the students just as much as you possibly can because you actually want to watch some people out that there's this it's almost amounts to hazing in the beginning and that there are some students who are just really who may indeed be perfectly able to to do the work they're smart that that's that's not the issue but something about this this initial business just turns them really off and they say you

know I don't like that kind of atmosphere I don't like that kind of attitude I'm going to go and study something else this is a problem I think it's a felt moral imperative by faculty in academia it's not just in the sciences but it's particularly in hard sciences and engineering that there are some diamonds out there and the job of the faculty is to find them that not everybody can do science and so there across the country you find that the wastage rate is consistently around about the third to a quarter in the first class or so and that proportion stays the same regardless of the quality of the students they're getting in it doesn't matter whether it's Stanford Harvard or your local state university the proportion is the same because the imperative is the same so the kids call it the weed out classes and and that's there is

quite a bit of reality to this the gist of weed out is that you teach too much you teach it too fast it's like as one kid said to me drinking from a fire hose and there's no time to absorb the material and there is a lot of competition there's curve grading which encourages competition between students so they never know what the quality of their work is by the grade they've got students tend to come in with fairly high confidence particularly women and a number of studies before ours had shown that the the confidence of able women coming into the sciences evaporates very quickly although we did they didn't quite understand why it also happens for young men too they've been stars in their high school and they suddenly experience this gap between the often very interesting and interactive kind of teaching and learning that they experienced at high school and the good grades also that they got and the kind of pushing students away that that is part

of the teaching style of universities and I think the pushing away is to do with toughening people up a tradition of expecting students to rise the challenge to prove themselves to show that they are morally worth the teacher's time and by junior year those who survive have a very different experience of faculty it's a much more interactive and nurturing environment by that stage so they're looking for people who can stand up to them and stand up to this treatment and it vitally affects the way the teaching is done by lecturing very large lecture classes that may or may not be well supported by recitations TAs who are not trained at all and have limited notions of how to work with the small group to which they're entrusted and that experience is very problematic for young men and for young women but for different reasons for young men the weeding out certainly

works they understand the embedded messages in it that you either rise the challenge or you're out of here young women have no clue what it means but they know that it's an unpleasant experience and they can't understand why they can't get the the teacher to take any notice of them because they've been used to a much more interactive socratic dialogue with their teachers and they start to wonder if they wanted if they belong so it has gender effects that entirely unintended by the faculty I have some collars here and I will get right to them just very quickly I would like to raise this question the concern here about this high rate of switching is that we may be losing people who would turn out to be a very good scientist and would go on and make important contributions to all of those fields we do know that some switching is probably normal and that's always going to happen so I guess the question would be what would be an appropriate level of switching a level that would really that would descend below the level of concern

where you'd say well that's just kind of normal yeah I don't know I think that if you took the students at this level of ability all of those students could survive this experience and thrive so I would be concerned about any level of switching that was losing substantial numbers of students with these high entry level performance scores traditionally the science and engineering departments have got the cream of the high schools there's no question that for years they've always had the students of the very highest quality that doesn't mean to say how quality students don't go into other things too but they've had the high proportions so I think that there should be concern wherever they're losing large numbers of high quality students we have several colleagues here let's start right in and the first is in champagne and online one hello hi yes I'm very interested in your top guy who has been undergrad in science and I actually

survived that and did some graduate work and then and then leaving after that for I wonder if the same reasons other people leave but I'm curious one thing that I thought about over the years that the love of science that kind of can bring somebody into a major I wonder if that ends up being kind of different than the practice of science you know when you can go in and you enjoy reading and doing the work but when it comes down to actually being a scientist a lot of that is lost in looking for grants and spending a lot of time in the library and doing kind of mundane statistical type research that isn't necessarily what got you into it in the first place and I wonder if that accounts for someone switching that's something that I've found and another question that I have and I'll just hang up and listen is I wonder if people who start off at smaller colleges maybe in a community college end up doing a little better because I went all the way through it a very large university ended up later teaching a little bit at a community college and found

the classes to seem much smaller and funnier and I'm curious as to have changed the starting off in a community college increases success at all. Let me answer the call. Hello good morning to you thank you for your questions let me answer the first the last question first yes the answer is yes very often people who start in community college and also young people who start in liberal arts colleges and in particular for young women in all women's colleges report much more nurturing and productive learning experiences than people in universities however having said that we did our study in institutions of seven different kinds and they included once more private university and liberal arts college and we found although the trend was less pronounced it was

still there so of course faculty are human beings who have been trained in this system themselves their survivors of it they are they have come through this baptism of fire and they will take their their teaching habits and their attitudes with them wherever they happen to go but you're right that the I would certainly advise any young person if they can to do some of their early classes in the community college because they will very often get a much more immersive and interactive above all experience now let me go back to the original questions and David's going to have to remind me help me out David. Well okay it sounded to me like as she was asking this question that you know when you're in high school and you're studying science and you're interested in it you're pretty much in it for the love of the subject when you get to university level it's going to be very different and it could just be that some students would get into it and they would see the reality of it as a discipline that you would study on the college level maybe you'd have to

spend a lot of time in lab doing stuff you're not interested in there is of course the fact that you have to be always chasing grant money graduate students they ended up doing the doing a lot of the really routine and maybe not very interesting work and then maybe students would get into that and the reality of science as a university undergraduate just wasn't what they thought it was or didn't appeal to them in the same way that studying it as a as a high school it did. Yeah well there's two different levels to this now this study is about undergraduates so I'll answer that one first one of the saddest things that we discovered is that students come in from high school very often verify it up about science very very interested in it and one of the saddest things about the weed out process of the early classes is that it can destroy that interest kids who were very turned on become very turned off and they're very disappointed they thought that they were going to have a wonderful experience with professors with very interesting research

and it's partly why they came to some of the schools that we interviewed in and they're very very sad and disappointed. On the other side of this I was I asked all the students are there any things that are intrinsically boring is there anything that's about learning the basics of science that it's just hard and you have to get through it and the universal answer was no nothing is inherently boring everything can be taught in an interesting way and to back this up they gave me lots of stories of classes they had been in perhaps they'd taken the same class twice with professor acts and they hadn't done very well and then the next time it came around it was professor why and they told me about the difference between the two ways of teaching the same material or they had stories from their roommates who told same sort of things and of course there is a kind of scuttlebuck around the university about which teachers should go to and why and very often

it's in terms of who is more interesting than whom now you talk also about your graduate school experiences we're doing a study of undergraduate research and its value in this is a quite different study it's still ongoing and one of the things that we discover there is that for some students learning what research is like is is a very important discovery about self research can be tedious it's long-winded it takes time things go wrong all time and some proportion of young people who experience research with faculty decide that it's not for them and that's probably a very important discovery but I don't think that the undergraduates that we're talking about largely in the first couple of years ever got far enough to discover anything about real science they were they were stuck in in lunch classes in lectures learning very passively so they weren't exposed to real science in any sense we're at our midpoint here and we have the cause I promise I will get right to

them but with benefit of anyone who might have tuned in in the last five or ten minutes I'd like to reintroduce our guest the delay in Seymour she's director of ethnography and evaluation research in the Bureau of Sociological Research at University Colorado Boulder she's been there since 1989 and we're talking about some of the research that she was involved in looking at why undergraduate college students leave the sciences the trend that we have been talking about is something around half of the students who go to college intending to major in science math or engineering and it's a little bit different for each of the disciplines but on average about half of them switch to other majors before they graduate and it's not the case that people switch from chemistry to physics they switch from chemistry to anthropology or to history they go out of the sciences completely and it's something that's a trend that's that's even more pronounced if you look at women and minority students she Elaine Seymour has coauthored a length treatment of this along with Nancy Hewitt it's titled talking about leaving why undergraduates leave the sciences so it's out there

it's published by Westview if you would like to look at it she's here visiting the campus as part of the spring lecture series sponsored by a U of I's office of women in engineering we will go back here to thorns and next we'll go to another champagne color this line two hello hi very interesting topic I have two comments to questions the first without being too negative here at the University of Illinois which is very large school and one of the premier schools in Illinois there's some interesting political pressures that I think add to the the weed out during the first two years I had friends who were in engineering and their first two years was totally devoted to tedium they had no opportunity to experience critical thinking or exploration say you you have someone who's going to be a chemical engineer they of course have to take the math

sequence which is five hours a semester but they're also required to take physics electrical engineering chemistry and a wide variety of subjects that are totally determined in fact my friend had no ability to choose a class until almost a senior year and I think there's political reasons for that in the science programs want to keep enrollment high in other science programs but I think it also adds to the weed out factor that people come to college to learn and instead find out they're they're kind of tracked like a train and they have to stay on that track is that something people talked about in the study well remember I was talking to undergraduates and so they feel the effects of things but they don't always know the causes and so they can tell your stories about how it feels and how it was but they don't always know why and but let me say this that since we did this study the book was published in 97 so this is

so this is a little while back and one of the pleasures of of our lives since since this time has been to work with faculty all over the country who are seeking to improve the learning experience of undergraduates and one of the things that I noticed with considerable pleasure in engineering is schools where there's a major attempt to bring a sense of what engineering is about right into the freshman year for instance by introducing early design classes and I think that is very important seems similar things happen for instance in nursing where I as a medical sociologist I had a lot of experience before the same thing the more you can help kids understand what they're getting into to help them decide whether there's a fit with who they are and what they like rather bombarding them with very heavy dose only of the theoretical work which they

have to do but to give them a feeling that yes I belong here and I say this because one looking at what allowed people to persist I see that the motivation and we looked at a number of them the motivation that held them better than anything else was an abiding interest in the subject in the discipline and if you can sustain that through what are very tough majors then you will hold the students even though it's the work is intrinsically hard if they if they enjoy it they know it's interesting they enjoy it and if they've got a sense of where it's taking them particularly in engineering that to know what engineering is and is not this is a very powerful thing that will sustain them and then part of the wheat out process I noticed my undergrad was a while back but say in a field like computer science frequently the instructors are are looking for their future

grad students I remember taking a 20 question test and only being able to answer three of the questions but still getting a B which is very disconcerting because they are looking for future grad students answer the whole test but in the case of my daughter who's a freshman at the U of I I think for young women at a university the size of the University of Illinois there unfortunately is not the peer support network when you're say in first semester calculus for young women that they're perhaps is for young men where it's much easier for a young man to say ask the other young men in class for their dormitory hey are you taking calculus can you help me with this problem because I found my daughter while she was capable of doing the homework and could figure it out on her own at home there was really no one she could turn to in the classroom or in her setting you know because most of the young women that she was associating with were in the

defining applied arts so I wonder about that as far as the dropout rape for young women or not dropout excuse me the switch rate so thank you for your time and I'll listen thank you yes you raise very very important issue and for any group that is in a numeric minority you put your finger on a difficulty young women if we talk about them specifically have two very powerful needs one is for into one of them is for interaction I've already mentioned that to learn interactively is something that they have brought with them high school and they can't understand why they can't seem to evoke an interactive response from faculty that's one issue the other is the issue of interpretation kids coming from high school at this level of ability have been used to high grades the young women in particular are a bit like the cart horse in animal farm their response to every difficulties to say I will work harder and they they do have a tendency to

get extremely hard so they're very puzzled they can't understand particularly where curve grading is used why their grades seem to be slumping and what they need is somebody to say to them and it could be a senior woman in their dorm it could be a member of the faculty it could be a TA they need somebody to say to them look and a bee in in in calculus two is a very good grade you may have got a is in in high school but a bee or a sea here is pretty normal and you are doing just great hang in they need somebody to say that the worst thing that can happen is coming from high school kids can assign the the grade as part of their identity so if I get a bee I am a bee if I get an A I am an A and there is unfortunate tendency particularly in high schools where they didn't have to work hard if they had a very good facility with math to assume that they were

worth A's so what does it mean when they're getting C pluses does it suddenly mean their less worthwhile as human beings and if somebody will do that interpretive work and say look this is normal tough it out grades here are a bit like weather it snows it rains it the sun comes out you can't be always sure what you'll get but it's not you you just keep working and you are doing fine it sounds like a small matter but it's not it's huge and as you say if you're isolated and don't have someone to explain this to you then you can leave a major as women do at my own university with higher average performance scores than the men who stay another corner here this is someone on a cell phone and it's line one hello hi interestingly enough as soon as you started talking I called because I'm a professor right now who is the tired professor so I immediately had an opinion which I often do and luckily my cell phone was disconnected so I had to listen

to what he's been saying and the callers and I changed my mind completely first I want to say agree with you totally in regard to the lack of the college of engineering we really don't do that I know two individuals who became head of the undergraduate program their department because they couldn't stand teaching anymore that's sort of a weird career move but the reason they got tired of teaching is they taught the same courses over and over and over and over again in my 30 years I only taught five courses five different subjects better they're good you get tired of the same questions and you get less friendly towards the students let's say the other thing I wanted to mention and this is one of your previous callers said is the fact that many students when they come into engineering have to stay all have to start with the basic core technical courses and those courses are forced not taught by the department

in which they are in in other words if you're in biology you would have to take a course in the math department or physics course or chemistry course those courses are taught by specialists in no field and so the student who comes in and wants to study subject A is learning subjects B C and D taught by people who don't try to make their subjects relevant to the major of the students but the student says I came here to study something and instead of picking this math course and I don't know what that has to do with my subject I will find that out until I'm a junior and by that time I've lost interest because I've been studying things that don't interest me and I think that that's a major problem that we have and finally as another caller said wherever research boring into university at the university of Illinois and teaching is something we have to do there are some of us who actually enjoy it but I know that the key to most professors they'll tell you that they are not educators they are scientists what they are engineers

and because of that they don't view their students as anything but sort of a receptacle to receive the knowledge that the professor has and so there is that lack of empathy and it was that's been my experience in 30 years at the university of Illinois and I think when I listen to these other callers into use because they think more deeply about what it is that that we're failing at thank you very much all right well you want to respond to any of that yes yes thank you very much for your thoughtful response to what I was saying application is a huge problem it's certainly one that's identified by students who are hungry for it students of course don't always know what's good for them they can tell you how they're suffering and what they're what they're struggling with but of course they don't always know how to fix it and but application is one thing they're very clear about they want to know what the nodules for they want to know how ideas connect and not just within let's say mathematics they want to know how this connects

with their engineering or their physics and so on so they're really looking for connection relationship of ideas and an application and I also feel a lot of fellow feeling for engineering faculty because other people do that weed out your students for you because there you are as you say with students in mathematics or physics or whatever the required courses chemistry and other one and before you end up with this with the group of students that you're going to be working with for the the last two or so years of the engineering degree other people have decided for you in a sense who's going to leave and who's going to stay and you're quite right that is faculty we don't know a whole lot about teaching none of us do your colleagues on the other side of the campus likewise that we learn on the fly and that we we know how we were taught and we replicate that and we don't pay any attention particularly to the folks in education who might tell us something

about interactive and active pedagogy or constructing a curriculum such that it's digestible and comprehensible to students so we we're kind of self-taught and a bit arrogant about it and that's you know not just scientists you haven't gotten monopoly on this so I think you you you you you make two very good points we have about 15 minutes left we have a number of other callers and we'll try to get in everybody in the time that remains again our guest is Lane Seymour she's a sociologist from the University of Colorado Boulder where she works in the Bureau of Sociological Research and we have been talking about an area that she's been interested in for a long time now and that is why it is that undergraduates leave the sciences why it is that so many young people go to college intending to major in science math or engineering and that they end up switching to other majors outside of the those fields questions are certainly welcome three three three nine four five five toll three eight hundred two two two nine four five five next caller is in Lafayette line three hello

it's called over there on in in Lafayette line three okay let's go to Urbana line number two hello yeah the American Association for the Advancement of Science just reported on how to design a program to keep people in minorities and woman in the yeah in the sciences but looking out there what they found it's basically the kind of stuff that would that would lead you to think they were good teachers in general you know which is kind of funny but I thought the first caller I want to I want to repeat what he said which I didn't think he answered very well because you were talking about how kids say that absorbing the material is so difficult it's like chasing from

a from a fire hose that kind of thing but he brought up that and and I would substitute for that metaphor the have a chance that the kids don't have a chance to critically evaluate what they're being presented with you know and it's you know look at the popularity of of stuff like forensic science on TV and what you said in response to that was you want to make the students seem as if they belong you know feel as if they belong more but you're but the science curriculum it's just it's just completely fraught with with you know learn these facts never look at how the are almost never I can't say never but almost never look at how

how the facts present were presented to the person who discovered this or that you know so that you kind of critically evaluate how they how they came to that conclusion and kind of put yourself in their place that would be a really exciting part of it and and and they just you know these these classes are terrible in that sense but in the one last thing that you don't mention you don't seem to mention or have any kind of appreciation for in my from what I've heard so far at least the kind of emotional investment that's put into the ethnic makeup of science workers because quite to the contrary of of what the the myth is you know almost anybody can contribute to to science it's not it's very unusual in that way and that's mainly because experimentation has it's very method uh methodology you know it's very tediously

method dial methodological and you know and you have to go through these very laborious depths and almost anybody you know with some level of integrity could help and you don't get any sense of that in the sciences and there's a lot more you could mention how you can't you don't get paid early on in career and so on and so on but I'll let you respond to that and I'll hang up thanks okay thank you um there are so many things in what you say I like going to have to pick and choose a little bit one of the things I didn't make as clear as I should but let me lay it down now is that of 23 factors which contribute to students leaving the sciences but which are also a problem for people who stay then the number one factor is the learning experience and behind that the the loss of of loss of interest for the switchers in the sciences which is very very sad I think and you touch on that the the issue of understanding what science is and

is not how knowledge is constructed how it's formed where ideas come from and the the lack of an opportunity to argue and debate and discuss what one reads what you're learning in lab to see the connections between the hands-on science and the theoretical science these are all things that make science alive and exciting for people and we are not giving that to students I think in many many classrooms they are learning that science is dull and boring and yet the people who are teaching them have very rich lives professionally as researchers and the students are disappointed that they don't often get a flavor of that from the people who teach them in the early classes they would like to know more about the production of science the doing of science and one of the

encouraging things I've seen all over the country in the last 10 years our faculty who as groups and as individuals are attending to that there are workshops everywhere there's masses of stop on websites where faculty are fast exchanging ideas about how you make science hands-on lively active above all interesting and real because there's a sort of level of abstraction about early classes which leads students to despair they'll ever get to the real stuff seniors in their stories often talked about this they would laugh about it they said we we know there's the real stuff out there but we're not quite sure when we're when we're going to get around to it so your description of the experiences I think very accurate we have other colors again we'll try to get in as many as we can in the time that remains the next person in line is in champagne and line one hello yes hi yeah thanks for taking my call I'm curious to hear a little bit more about minority

students you mentioned I think earlier that the rate of switching is higher for minority students is that right I don't exactly know what it is at the moment the problem is there are very few minority students coming in and we lose almost as many as we take in there is a revolving door problem the Nakami the National Action Council for Engineering Education keeps a very close tally on our progress with students of color and the and the sad pictures we're not making any we had very small numbers to choose from in our sampling I think I managed to talk to 88 students of different races and ethnicities and that was difficult enough to find we have spent very large amounts of money as a national community something like three billion dollars trying to bring students of color through in the high schools through into university and up to graduate school level and we're not making any progress at all and my thought about that is in order to

address the problem of students of color being underrepresented in the sciences and in order to bring more young women into science we're making some headway there particularly in the life sciences mathematics and some branches engineering but in order to bring more through in chemistry and physics for example we're going to have to do something seriously about our mode of teaching because I think what do we have tried to do is approach this problem over the last 10 years or so by setting up programs for students of color and for women which in fact marginalises the problem it doesn't help I think the rising tide lifts all ships and this is the approach we probably should be taking and indeed many many faculty are taking that if we can improve our pedagogy and make it more active and interactive include more group work include more relevance

make it more interesting then we will actually increase disproportionately the underrepresented groups in our science and engineering classrooms I think that's probably the way to go rather than setting up programs for people who are underrepresented which is hugely stigmatising and not working right did you find with with the few students that you were able to talk to students from minority groups did you find differences differences in reasons that they're leaving are different factors that would contribute to their staying yes and it's complicated but I would I'd say this that one of our errors was to treat everyone who was not white as if they had intrinsically something common they were often glossed by the term minority students and often were in the past treated as a group this has been very unfortunate the reasons why people come and go for each group and the problems for each group are different so the problems for Native Americans from

reservation society versus urban society are different the problems for urban and non-urban African American students are different and the Asian students Asian American students also have issues which are different so in order to understand this takes a little trouble to look at the picture for each group for instance amongst Asian American students there was the feeling that they had been railroaded very much into the sciences and mathematics because of an almost racist assumption that they are good at this kind of thing and somewhat it's supported by parents who are concerned that they get good positions in life but it's also subscribed to by by their teachers and the advisors in school I had one kid who went from from the life sciences to history who was a career in American say to me you know I've been in a little bamboo cage

all my life and I had to fight with everybody to get to do history so he was one young person for who the switch was in highly appropriate move because it was an act of autonomy in self and self determination but so this is sorry it's rather rambling answer but the problem is you have to look at each group separately to understand the factors here right okay well thanks for your answer all right thank you we're coming down to the point here we have maybe about a minute or a minute and a half you undertook the started to undertake this work in 1990 I 1990 or well I forget now so it's and and so obviously it takes a while to do it and and and look at it and get to the point where it's something that you can actually publish yes so but you've been at this for now more than a decade has has things do you think over that time improved or are they essentially the same as they were in the same now as they were 14 some years ago when you actually started this work they are they are changed but I will say it takes a long time to turn an oil tanker

around and we've got an oil tanker here there's a lot of students that a lot of classes and a lot of institutions a different type so it's a big piece I can't say that any one institution as an institution has managed this what I do see and this is very encouraging and we work as evaluators with with groups of faculty all over the country who are very much engaged in proving the learning experience of students and I do see considerable progress and I do see science faculty teaching each other how to do this and learning from what is known from cognitive science and sharing that knowledge and I find this extremely encouraging and I think that what will happen eventually is the people on my side of the campus the social sciences the humanities and so on will eventually be recognizing some of their science colleagues as knowing far more about it than they do and will be coming to them for advice well I thank you very much for being with us it's my pleasure Elaine Seymour from the Bureau of Sociological Research at University Colorado Boulder and I

mentioned if you're interested in exploring in greater detail this study that she was involved in it has been published as a book it's titled talking about leaving why undergraduates leave the sciences it's published by the west view press the doctor Seymour visiting here her visit is sponsored by the University of Illinois office of women in engineering