"Why should I learn this?"
From Anique Olivier-Mason
When I was 25 years old, I served as a forensics expert for the Innocence Project. The volunteer position was one of several personally transformative experiences I had while working my "day job" as a forensic biologist for the City of New York. On their website, the Innocence Project describes itself as a “national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.” That may be what the organization means to the most people, but to me, it finally answered a question that had been nagging me throughout my education—how were the topics I studied in STEM courses related to the real world? For years, I had dutifully learned about various concepts that seemed totally disconnected from the world I lived in and cared about. At the Innocence Project, I saw how the bench work I had been doing was not in a vacuum, but rather it directly impacted someone else’s life and was important. That realization sparked a curiosity about the biological foundation of forensics that inspired me to pursue advanced study in graduate school.

Now that I am an instructor at MIT in Professor Drennan’s Education Laboratory, I am involved with several educational projects that emphasize the authentic nature of science and help high school and college students see why they should learn and care about different STEM concepts. Educational research supports our emphasis on motivation—there is a direct correlation between inspiration and persistence in science. I’ll describe two easy ways to implement suggestions from our work that can be done in any classroom.

1. Provide students with an example of an interesting application of a concept as a way to motivate them to learn about its intricacies. One way this can be done easily is by embedding short videos into your class. Our group has published online a series of videos, Behind the Scenes at MIT, that highlight the who and the why of chemistry (see the July-August 2013 announcement in STEM Pals). While all less than three minutes, the videos manage to relate specific textbook chemistry concepts to cutting-edge research in medicine, the environment, or alternative fuels and have been embedded within high school and college classes worldwide. Here at MIT, after a student saw the videos in his introductory chemistry class, he commented, “I saw that there was actually an impact in what they were doing. They were changing the world. That’s important I think, that’s important to me.”
   
   
2. Invite a scientist into your classroom either virtually or in-person. Instead of just talking about why learning a STEM concept is important, having a scientist describe how the concept is critically relevant to her research can be a life-changing moment for your students. For many K-12 students, this might be their first interaction with a working scientist and could be an opportunity to dispel the various myths about what type of person becomes a scientist and what scientists actually do while at work. Many graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are eager to meet K-12 students and don’t have the same time constraints as professors. To get in touch with a scientist, you can contact the outreach or education office at your local college or university. Teachers in the Greater Boston-area should consider attending There’s a Scientist in My Classroom, a bi-annual teacher-scientist workshop at MIT; at these workshops, we have helped dozens of teachers find a scientist to visit their classrooms. The next events will be in the fall of 2014.

Teaching a STEM subject in today’s world is exciting because science touches so many parts of people’s everyday lives. While those connections may seem obvious to those of us in the STEM fields, it is critical that as educators we remind our students of these connections and the relevance of each lesson—something that can be accomplished by spending less than three minutes of each class on a real-world example. Such efforts to bring the real world into the high school classroom may ignite in some students a passion for science they had not anticipated.

Anique Olivier-Mason is Howard Hughes Medical Institute Technical Instructor in the MIT Department of Chemistry. (Photo courtesy of Justin Knight Photography)

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