While the media, politicians, and educators take turns blasting the state of science education in the U.S., Penn scientists are bypassing the talk and making straight for the solution. Two of them, Dr. Kent Blasie of chemistry and Dr. Dennis DeTurck of the math department, are leading efforts to redesign the first year courses in their departments with plans so comprehensive that many are predicting a revolution in the teaching of undergraduate science in this country.

Chemistry's Blasie had been thinking about revising the first-year curriculum ever since he taught the class for the first time in 1990. He began by looking into the math and science preparedness of his students. What he found was distressing. Over ninety percent of the students had a year or more of calculus in high school. However, only about fifty percent of those students chose to take calculus at Penn, most of whom only repeated the first or second semester. This was a particular concern because the course traditionally taught in the department utilized no higher mathematics such as calculus--presuming that students coming into the department would have enough difficulty with algebra "word problems" (which they do!).

After two years of analysis and a thorough examination of other first -year programs at peer institutions, Blasie and his colleagues decided that they should offer a calculus-based introductory chemistry course. The concept was so unusual that only one possible text existed. Blasie's original lecture notes supplied the basic framework for the course with the level of presentation and expectations consistent with this text.

It's not surprising that a calculus-based curriculum would be chosen. While currently a professor of chemistry, Blasie's background is in physics and math. His first position at Penn was in biophysics and physical biochemistry. The archetypal interdisciplinary scholar, Blasie knows just how much the sciences overlap and is dedicated to passing on this knowledge to his students.

"At Penn, for example, the teaching of the fundamental structures of atoms and their bonding in molecules, based on the principles of quantum physics, is done primarily in the chemistry department", Blasie points out. "And since any real understanding of these structures, which is basic to much of physical and biological science, cannot be gained without using higher mathematics, specifically calculus, we really have to make it (calculus) part of the curriculum."

Another motivating factor was the rapidly changing nature of medicine. "The study of medicine is becoming increasingly molecular based," adds Blasie, "and a great number of the students taking chemistry 101 and 102 are pre-med. For us, this was the only logical step, namely to provide these students with the deepest level of understanding of this subject possible, consistent with their prior education. Much of our scientific research has been interdisciplinary for a long time and our courses should reflect that."

The course that emerged from the overhaul differs dramatically from the current situation at other universities. Rather than "dumb down" the requirements, they were upgraded. What was previously offered and intended to provide two levels of instruction (e.g., nonscience VS. science majors) became a single two-semester course, designed to increase the level of mathematical rigor, particularly calculus to place an emphasis on the relationships between physics, chemistry, and biology and to increase the condensed matter component important to SEAS students.

As a safety net, an additional course was developed for students who hadn't taken calculus in high school, but the course was dropped after only one year because of a lack of students. The few students currently taking chemistry without a calculus background do so through the College of General Studies. The new Chemistry 101 - 102, in place now since 1992-'93 and taught by nine different faculty thus far, has been well received. "The only complaints," says Blasie, "are the usual ones from freshmen who are used to getting only A's and B's. But this certainly isn't specific to chemistry or this course in particular, it's just a consequence of their coming to a top-level university like Penn."

The next step was to make a good thing even better, so Blasie worked up a proposal to develop a multi-media hypertext-based presentation of this Chemistry 101/102 sequence and presented it to the associate dean for undergraduate education. The associate dean, Robert Rescorla, responded with funding from the Pew Foundation, about $95,000 over two years, and the project began. Some of the impetus, Blasie admits, came from finding coffee stains and fingerprints on his overheads after sharing them with other faculty (at least those that were returned!). It would be much more efficient, he decided, to make a total package and put it on CD. No stains or caffeine-altered mathematical or chemical expressions--just an indestructible disk where every element of his presentation could be archived.

"My primary motivation was to provide a means of putting on record lecture material, illustrations, and both lecture room and research laboratory demonstrations. Once all of this is on CD, any faculty member can access it, change it, and make substitutions. In this way we can cycle our best faculty through the program and go on to create the best introductory chemistry course possible tailored to educational and research insights of our best faculty.

"What's great about this is that while no other professor has the time to sit through my lectures and demonstrations, they can look at the CD at their leisure. A new professor coming to Penn, for example, could see what I've been doing or a current faculty member could ask, 'How did Blasie teach that subject?' or 'How does this demonstration relate to the lecture material?' and find out immediately. Everyone can add their best bits and pieces on each subject and the resource will grow. In the past few years we've had some of our most visible researchers teaching freshman chemistry. With this system we can also bring most pertinent experiments from their research laboratories to the lecture room, either on videotape or on the computer. I'm betting that faculty, being naturally competitive, will respond by saying, 'Hey, I can do better than that,' and they'll want to contribute."

As for the students, Blasie plans to put his lecture notes and illustrations (which are currently being enhanced and colorized) on the computer. Next will come his demonstrations of experiments that will first be recorded on videotape and then edited on the computer. These demonstrations also include the use of symbolic computation provided by the software programs Mathematica and Maple in the solution and illustration of the calculus employed. Finally those students in the back rows of the large chemistry lecture room will be able to see as well as those in the front and missing a class won't mean missing the demonstration. Also, demonstrations of experiments that require multi-million dollar equipment or take place in dangerous situations can be videotaped and presented in lecture. In the end, these materials will be made available to the students either on CD or over Pennnet.

What will not be included in the resource are the lectures themselves. Blasie is adamant that faculty will continue to deliver lectures and that students must come to class in order to gain their unique insights and explanations of the material, which most students find difficult and challenging. The technology will be used to significantly enhance the teaching of chemistry--but never substitute for it.

Meanwhile, down the street from the chemistry department and working from the math perspective is Dennis DeTurck, chair of the undergraduate division of the math department. DeTurck is working with a consortium of local schools and organizations--Penn, Villanova, Polytechnic University, Community College of Philadelphia, two Philadelphia public high schools and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)--to overhaul and revise the way math is taught to American students. Their funding is a $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The consortium involves several departments at each school (in addition to math departments). At Penn, various engineering and science departments, as well as some departments in other schools, are involved. In particular, Larry Gladney of physics and Jacob Abel of mechanical engineering are other project leaders at Penn.

DeTurck's motivation came, in part, from hearing the phrase "Don't you teach them anything?" from colleagues in departments across the campus. "We were teaching math," he explains, "but the issue was not just mathematics. The typical Penn engineering student spends the first two years doing mathematics in a math department, physics in a physics department, and chemistry in a chemistry department. But they never put it together until much later. They learn calculus from us but don't realize that they should be applying it to their physics classes downstairs or their chemistry problems up the street. They expect to begin to apply it later, when they start their engineering courses, and that's when the engineering faculty asks if we've taught them anything."

This project is designed to bring applications into the mathematics curriculum right from the start. The consortium intends to explore ways to do this at many levels--beginning with grades 10 through 12. "Everyone goes to a school that is something like one of the members of the consortium," explains DeTurck. "And, in case we've missed someone, we're working with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) which represents every element of professional mathematicians. We are recruiting teachers and faculty from everywhere and asking them to join our group. This way, when we have a final product it will be inclusive enough not to be dismissed by someplace like Villanova, for example, because they don't do things the way we do them at Penn."

But mathematics and examples alone won't fill the bill. The old way was to demonstrate a problem and convince students that this knowledge would be useful in the future. "Of course, faculty are the last people a student is going to believe," DeTurck explains with a grin, "and so we're integrating examples that are presented by real people--not faculty." One such example, being developed with Ponzy Lu of the chemistry department, features a biochemical process associated with DNA. All genetic information about an organism is encoded in its long, double- stranded DNA molecules. The experiment cuts these long thin molecules into short strips and then separates the two helical strands from each other. The separated strands then seek their partners and come back together. The speed with which they recombine determines how complicated the encoded genetic material is, and this is where the math comes in.

This very visual demonstration is further enhanced by having a Penn alumna, Jennifer Lindsey who works for the FBI, demonstrate just how this information would be used in her job as a forensic chemist. The student, who may not identify with the professor, sees a person in a profession he or she might enter doing the math they are learning. A connection is made and the math becomes relevant. DeTurck especially likes to have alumni as case studies for his Penn classes and looks for careers that touch a number of fields.

As with Blasie's work, DeTurck plans a multimedia presentation that faculty can adjust to their needs and students can use as a resource. The math department is already using Maple to do calculus, algebra, derivatives, and differential equations as well as drawing and animating three-dimensional graphs and the like in its basic calculus course sequences. Alongside Maple there will be video, text, computer programs and equations. But these are for enhancement only; there are no plans to replace the professors. They will remain at the head of the class.

Why has reform taken this long to get going? "Team teaching," DeTurck says, "is often very difficult to do, especially at a place like Penn where you have researchers at the top of their field. The very qualities that make our faculty stellar researchers, namely intellectual independence, agressiveness and intensity, make it difficult for them to reach the intellectual compromises required to shape material from their discipline to another discipline's needs.

DeTurck believes that the time is really right for reform because the lines between the disciplines themselves have become quite blurred. Many things that used to be called physics are now considered chemistry, and something similar is happening in biology. Since math and particularly calculus supports all of it, this seems to be the ideal time to integrate in both directions.

Applications of mathematics to scheduling problems are an area being considered, and if the consortium has its way, tomorrow's students will not only be able to calculate that old chestnut about trains from NY and California meeting in Kansas City, but will understand who wants the answer to this question and why. Airline schedulers and traffic controllers, for example, or the person who runs the Frankford El, all need to know this. The person who decides where to put the "Apply Brakes Here" sign for the El can't do it by trial and error. That person will use math and will certainly understand why we need to know the relevant formulas. Here again, the goal of the project is to transform math from a series of isolated equations into a set of interesting questions whose answers just happen to be numbers.

But before the reform is complete, a major battle about how math is taught in the lower grades will be fought. For many people, the computations we did in grammar school--the thousands of multiplication tables and long division problems--comprise math education. "The truth is that's not really math at all," DeTurck explains. "It's bookkeeping, or accounting, but it's not math--just the mechanics of math. Students have machines that will do all those problems now so what they really need to understand are the principles of multiplication, division, derivatives, integrals, and the like. Ultimately, they will have to know what to put into the machine to get the right answer back. Do we really need to spend two months on methods of integration when a machine is perfectly capable of performing integrations more quickly and accurately? Although the answer seems to logical to me, it will probably take a lot of time and effort for the community to reach consensus --- after all, we've had hand calculators for 20 years and we're still having the debate over whether and how elementary school students should use them."

And why did he take on such a big challenge? On the one hand, DeTurck figured that examining and improving the curriculum was part of his job when he became undergraduate chair. Moreover, the project was a perfect fit for the university-wide focus on the undergraduate experience. "This is also a different type of math research project," he adds, "and there is a lot to be learned from the experience. Mathematicians consider teaching a crucial part of their work, because it provides a useful counterpart to pure research. Math research can be terribly frustrating. It's not like some laboratory sciences where you investigate the truth of a hypothesis by doing experiements. Then, if the experiments indicate that the answer is 'yes' you publish, and if the answer is 'no,' you still publish. Not so in math. Here you're trying to solve a problem that has never been solved and if you fail, you don't publish, you just start again. So, it is very important to be in a situation like teaching where you know what the answer is every once in a while.

The consortium currently has $1.1 million for two years and will then receive another $1.1 million for the following two years. At the end of five years, DeTurck figures that they will have produced several sets of CD's, new courses with interdisciplinary cooperation, and lots of material for the world wide web. And like Blasie, he intends to leave all kinds of loose ends so that his competitive colleagues from all schools and all disciplines will take a look, say 'I can do that better,' and then do it, adding to the project.

At the end of their grant, DeTurck and his consortium plan to have developed an approach to teaching math that integrates its applications into other fields and its uses into everyday life situations. This, in turn, could change the way future generations feel about math education in particular and science in general. And who knows what will happen if students stop dreading math class and start plugging numbers into adolescent and young adult imaginations? We may find that, instead of forever losing kids who fail math in high school, we'll have them developing new mathematical theories for the 21st century. Only time, and the work of people like DeTurck and his consortium, will tell.