The Principal Investigator

The same day President Barack Obama called upon Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” during his second State of the Union address, the results of a nationwide survey probing what America’s kids understand about science were released – and the findings weren’t pretty.

The science tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2009 assessed close to 308,000 fourth- and eighth and over 11,000 twelfth graders questions on the physical, life and Earth sciences.

For fourth graders, questions varied in level of difficulty from identifying the benefit of adaptation for an organism to designing an experiment that would allow them to compare types of bird food. Questions geared toward students in grade twelve ranged from being able to compare weather data to tell which city has warmer temperatures to whether they could recognize a nuclear fission reaction.

Just thirty-four percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 21 percent of twelfth-graders reached the “proficient level” in science in 2009, according to the assessment. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders, 37 percent of eighth-graders and 47 percent of twelfth-graders failed to meet the basic achievement level for the exam, compared to a mere one to two percent of students at all grade levels demonstrated advanced understanding of science.

Because the test was changed from earlier versions in 2009, it’s hard to say how, if at all, American students’ science comprehension has changed since the last NAEP was performed in 2005. However, one thing is clear from the 2009 snapshot, said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement following the release of the findings: “[O]ur nation’s students aren’t learning at a rate that will maintain America’s role as an international leader in science. When only 1 or 2 percent of children score at the advanced levels on the NAEP, the next generation will not be ready to be world-class inventors, doctors, and engineers.”

The need for schools to accelerate learning in the sciences isn’t an issue the president is blind to, as he noted in Tuesday’s address, where he called for a greater emphasis on training the next generation of educators to help close the gap between American and foreign student performance in science and math.

“We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” Obama said during the State of the Union. “And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math,” or STEM fields.

But just how the President plans to achieve the goal to train 10,000 teachers in the STEM fields and whether it will work remains open to debate. ScienceInsider notes that the White House released a factsheet after the State of the Union that addressed the President’s intention to request an investment of $100 million to prepare STEM teachers as part of the budget. According to the White House document, $80 million would go towards beefing up teacher preparation for the classrooms to help train 10,000 more effective STEM teachers annually. The other $20 million would be invested in research to determine the best way to recruit, prepare and retain STEM teachers.

However, as blog points out, it’s unclear from the document “whether the $100 million is actually an increase over current levels or merely are refocusing of what’s now being spent by both agencies on such activities” – a point that won’t be clear until the president releases his budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. “It’s a crucial distinction at a time when House of Representatives Republicans are trying to roll back civilian discretionary spending – the 15% of the federal budget that includes all investments in research, education, and training, along with myriad other programs.”

We won’t have to wait too long to find out what kind of money is behind the president’s push to invest in STEM teachers and the future of science education in the U.S. On Friday, a White House official told Reuters that the president will release his budget proposal for FY 2012 Feb. 14.