IDEAS
Author Comments:

Having worked with Bill Evans and Techman/Kanata on several projects over the years, I was not surprised when Bill expressed interest in the research that my daughter and I had carried out in the field of science education. As an authority in the area of international product development and manufacturing, Bill is in a position to recognize need for continual improvement in how science and math is taught if we are to maintain competitiveness in an increasing technological world.

Our study was designed to specifically address how we might better prepare high school girls for their first quantitative science course through a supplementary summer program. We designed a summer school course to help prepare girls for high-school chemistry.
We then measured the performance of the girls who took the course (vs. those who did not) in their subsequent high school chemistry class.

We did a careful statistical design for the study, so that we could measure the statistical validity of the results. Comparison of the performance of the girls who took the summer course was compared to that of the control group (those who did not take the course) using the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test. Many statistical tests that are commonly used in these types of studies are based on the assumption that the underlying data is normal, or "bell-curve" distributed. Unfortunately, this is not always a sound assumption. The Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test has the advantage that it is a non-parametric test, which is to say that no such assumption is made about the underlying data.

The girls who took the summer course did a spectacular job in the first semester of high-school chemistry; in fact the top five students in the class had all taken the summer course. However in the second semester of high school chemistry there was no measurable effect of the summer course.

I found the results very surprising (both in how well the students did in the first semester and in how quickly the benefits of the summer course dissipated). It does suggest that we shouldn't be too sanguine about the long term benefits of any one-shot training course. A strategy of recurrent training is most likely to be more effective over the long term.

Harry Garland

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©2007, Dr. Eva R. Garland and Dr. Harry T. Garland