Is K-12 Science Education Falling Short?
Conducted online this spring by Harris Interactive, the Healthcare and Science Jobs survey reached over 600 American 13-18 year olds. Forty-five percent reported that they were not considering pursuing a career in either healthcare or the sciences, although only 3% said that they feel there aren’t enough job opportunities in those fields. So why are healthcare and science so unpopular? The survey’s results suggest that students are intimated by them, which may be due in part to a failing of K-12 science education. Twenty-one percent felt that they weren’t good enough at related subjects in school, 19% said they didn’t feel prepared to study healthcare or science in college and 12% said that getting a healthcare degree would be flat-out ‘too difficult.’ There’s been a lot of recent attention to the problems in public science education. Hoping to bolster science and math education, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate program last November. Described as a ‘campaign for excell
