Andrew Welsh

Dr. Mary Wearn

Senior Project

How to Get High-Schoolers to Listen to What They Don’t Want to Hear: A Case Study

Involving Digital Media, Electrical Circuits, and a Resistant Audience

There is an epidemic in the scientific community – an astoundingly low supply of

physicists to fulfill the demands of new and existing research areas, and there is an even greater

shortage of qualified and dedicated high-school Physics teachers. In 2006, the University System

of Georgia produced a mere 67 graduates from four-year Physics programs, and only three

qualified high school Physics teachers (University System of Georgia 1). At the same time, the

world is meeting with some very serious problems that require the attention of well-educated

scientists and engineers. We face a looming energy crisis as we burn through a finite supply of

fossil fuels. At the same time, the costs of those fuels continue to rise, and we are dumping more

and more wastes into the environment every day. Those are just some of the problems, and there

are many more, along with the laundry list of technological developments, innovations, and

inventions that affect our communication, entertainment and leisure pursuits, which we would

never think of abandoning. This study will identify tools to help this county’s scholastic and

research enterprises in science. My goal is to apply proven media methods to science education

in order to capture a teenage audience and increase student interest and long-term participation in

Physics studies. Specifically, this study seeks to identify and design remedies for the weaknesses

in the science curricula of modern high-school education systems with the hope that these

systems will in-turn produce more incoming college Physics and Physics Education majors.

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Why Teenagers are the Most Promising Target Demographic

The impact of a shortage of science professionals is most visible in the undesirably low

numbers of new college graduates who have completed science and science education programs

in this state. There are several possible reasons that could explain this: 1) students decide to

change their major to a different area of interest after realizing the true nature of post-secondary

scientific academia; 2) students fail and either drop out or change majors to an easier track; 3)

students never chose or never intended to choose a science major in the first place. Each one of

these situations begins with either inadequate or ineffective presentation of science curriculums

in high school classes. Students at the high school level are old enough to begin forming their

own beliefs and values and are already setting goals for their rapidly-accelerating lives. Therein

lies the perfect opportunity to attract more human resources to the sciences: fresh, young and

talented minds who are eager to explore the world, to foster and succeed in their relished

pursuits. Consumer companies have long opportunistically exploited teen potentiality, seeking

brand loyalty with the teenage consumer group, knowing that teenagers who consistently

purchase a certain brand are much more likely to continue to purchase the same brand as adults

(Zollo 16). The objective, then, must be for education professionals to cultivate science studies

into one of those relished pursuits of high-school students -- to brand science in an appealing

way -- so that these students will continue working in scientific disciplines.

In order to accomplish this feat, educators must, like consumer companies, understand

and exploit the unique needs of today’s generation of teenagers as students. Every generation of

teenager who is alive today has grown up in the computer age, and generations to come will

likely enjoy the same luxuries. The effects of technology on the inner-workings of our society

are tremendous, some to such an extent that many younger adults can scarcely recall a time when

limitless information was not just a mouse-click away, when people had to plan meetings and

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outings carefully because they may or may not have access to a land-line telephone wherever

they went. Marc Prensky, a pioneer of technological teaching methods, describes modern

students as “digital natives - ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games,

and the Internet,” (Prensky 1). In his article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” Prensky

argues that, as a result of growing up with so much technology, “today’s students think and

process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors,” (1). Prensky’s claim

points to the fact that preceding generations of students who did not grow up with technology, or

“digital immigrants,” represent a majority of the current educator population (1); he writes, quite

bluntly, that “today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their

students (Prensky 4). Now, the students don’t speak a literal different language per say, so what

does Prensky mean when he says that modern students think and learn differently? -- that they

use a different style of communicating than their teachers? I believe that the communication

breakdown is more than just generational friction: it is a combination of the phenomenon that

Prensky has observed and the effects of this culture’s ubiquitous consumerism that has, perhaps

with no one’s intention, transformed the classroom exchange into something other than just

academic enrichment.

Why Media Studies are an Effective Way to Analyze Science Education for Digital Natives

In order to accurately assess high-school science education’s weaknesses, though, this

research must take a new approach. Simply determining that students are not interested in

science subjects is not enough. We must understand why. We must address the shortcomings of

the educational approaches that cause the students to become disinterested. Most often, science

education has been evaluated with traditional teaching rubrics. However, the educational needs

of modern students in our country, which are constantly evolving in relationship to our

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technologies, are more successfully examined as modern consumer media forms rather than as

traditional education forms. Media studies, which analyze the relationship between media and

culture, can provide a way to analyze and improve current pedagogical practices in Science to

address the specific needs of digital natives. In the sense we think of media, a medium is a form

of information exchange. If the science courses in which students are enrolled exist to transfer

information between instructors and students, then, for the purposes of this study, they are

subject to the same evaluations that any more traditional media forms will be.

One particular facet of media studies that can be used to analyze teens and science

education explores the ways in which media’s basic action, or mode of transmission, affect the

experience of interacting with a medium. And, since we live in the “information age,” there is

virtually no limit to the amount, type, or context of information that can transmit across a

medium except for the constraints inherent in the medium itself. Dissecting the effects of a

particular medium can often be a difficult task nowadays due to the sheer volume of information

available and the speed with which we can access that information. However, those qualities

about our media reveal that we value speed and efficiency when accessing information; even,

perhaps, that we demand instant gratification. Marshall McLuhan said, quite simply, that “the

medium is the message” (McLuhan 38). In other words, the aspects of a particular medium carry

more insight about both the transmitter and the recipient of the information than the information

does regarding its subject. The same can be said for educational dynamics: the way a teacher

chooses to teach, and all the attributes of the actual exchange have more to do with the

relationship of the teacher to the students than the relationship of the teacher to the materials he

or she is teaching.

Another useful theory from the discipline of media studies is that media and culture

reflexively produce and reproduce each other. In other words, our cultural values have driven the

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development and spread of media, at the same time the content in media carries a message that

spreads the same values. The media – broadcast television, music, blogs and web-pages, movies,

radio, books, etc. - are where many people now get their ideas about politics, fashion, even

society. Digital media forms are advancing with each generation, and today’s digital natives live

in a world that is so saturated with those forms that using them is becoming second nature for the

teens. The media are responsible for producing the images of personal identity that teenagers

subscribe to, and more often than not, science is not included in those images as a desirable

aspiration. In addition, technology is becoming a vital part of the way the teenagers gather and

interpret information, and serves as the basis for their understanding and application of many

different types of communication. Through this project, then, I hope to determine if the media

forms and techniques that teenagers use to assimilate and cultivate their cultural images can also

be used to sell students on Physics; and to demonstrate how using these media in science classes

can help to provide a richer learning experience for students in all high-school science subjects.

The Medium and Message of Traditional Science Education: A Media Studies Analysis

In Consuming Kids, Susan Linn extends McLuhan’s theory, observing that “…All media

content reflects and communicates the values of those in control of that particular medium”

(Linn 175). Janice Radway’s analysis Reading the Romance, a study of the social values and

effects of romance novels, illustrates the phenomenon Linn identifies. Radway concludes that a

possible effect on women who read romance novels is the unconscious reaffirmation of and

submission to patriarchy as a result of reading the patriarchal values written into the framework

of such stories (493). So, to better understand why science education fails to engage and interest

high school students, we can also apply Linn’s theory by looking at the implied (social) values

espoused in the traditional methods of teaching science.

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Generally, the science classroom dynamic establishes that the teacher is in charge of the

situation, both the gatekeeper to knowledge and the authority/empowered figure of the situation.

The underlying value this classroom configuration transmits is to unquestionably submit to

authority, to buy in to whatever message is being sold. Such an arrangement seems to invite

teenagers, who are particular notorious for rebellious attitudes, to approach “hard sciences” with,

at the least, skepticism, if not outright stand-offish-ness.

In fact, the more our technologies progress, the bigger authoritative role science assumes

in our society. Thomas Gieryn observes that “ ‘science’ often stands metonymically for

credibility, for legitimate knowledge, for reliable and useful predictions, for a trustable reality…

If ‘science’ says so, we are more often than not inclined to believe it or act on it” (1). It

shouldn’t be surprising, then, that such a broad realm of academia, which is arranged around a

system of “laws” and strict order, is met with resistance at a high-school level. The message that

often comes across in the class is that, science, having been established by prior generations, is

the “ultimate authority;” that it should not be questioned; it must be regarded with respect and

reverence; it reserves no room for playful exploration. These transmitted cultural values teach

high-school students that science is more about doing serious work than actually accomplishing

something enjoyable, that science is something bland for old people to do and not something

engaging for teenagers to enjoy.

Connecting McLuhan’s and Linn’s theories of the cultural values of media with Prensky’s

theory of the digital native, let us examine the logistics of a science lesson. Traditionally, the

teacher stands in front of the class, lecturing, writing on a chalkboard or dry erase board. The

students take notes; they may work on problems that the teacher has written on the board, or read

and work problems from a textbook. The “laws” and formulae and theories of science are

generally presented as absolutes. Unlike language arts and socials studies classes, in which

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exploration and interpretation techniques are the focus, science class leaves no real room for

interpretation or debate between students and teachers. When performing lab “experiments,” the

students are actually told what effects they should be trying to achieve, and they are given an

already-formulated procedure to achieve those effects; they must often repeat the experiment or

suffer grade penalties if they do not produce the “desired results.” These teaching practices in

science classrooms are the methods of Prensky’s “digital immigrants” – the computer illiterate,

or at least computer uncomfortable, who prefer the original media like written text – and they

don’t appeal to teenagers, not necessarily because the information is outdated, but because the

presentation of the information is outdated; it belongs to the teachers, not the students (Prensky

2-3). This can suggest to teenagers that their preferred methods of obtaining and learning

information are unimportant and inappropriate in a scientific arena.

Indeed, the traditional science classroom has largely failed to exploit the channels of

communication to which today’s teenagers are naturally attracted: modern-style television

programming, video games, P2P (person-to-person) internet chatting and sharing, radio

broadcasts (and contemporary podcasts), blogs and wikis, etc. Teen marketing expert Peter Zollo

observes that “teens are not only big media users, they're also big media fans, and their avid

consumption of media helps to nationalize the teen experience, connecting teens through

common images and expressions” (66). What Zollo means is that today, teens identify

themselves as users of media, such as television and interactive internet platforms; that teenagers

feel not necessarily that these media belong to no one else, but that they definitely belong to

teenagers, and that a now natural part of being a teenager is using digital technology. Traditional

methods of teaching science, which ignore teen-focused media, appear to alienate students from

the scientific community, which is ironic and unfortunate because so much of scientific work

nowadays involves technology.

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Moreover, the relationship between students and media goes beyond just identification.

In fact the pervasive use of communication technologies such as computers, the internet, cell

phones and video games has changed the way students learn and interact with their world, and

the traditional science classroom has been slow to adapt to this fact. Recently, web browsing,

both on computers and on cell phones, along with video games have emerged on television’s

coattails to catch teenagers’ interests, and all of these activities involve a highly interactive

experience with information, as opposed to reading a textbook or passively listening to a

classroom lecture, which can seem rather unidirectional. Computers and the Internet have made

information available almost instantaneously, and they have the potential to create very different

techniques for acquiring knowledge and to generate new expectations about learning. Prensky

elaborates on this sentiment:

Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel

process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the

opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when

networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They

prefer “games” to serious work (2).

High-school aged students feel that they should be using media to receive information, otherwise

they are disconnected or disadvantaged -- they aren’t connecting with their peers, and they aren’t

using the most efficient means of information processing. Most of the functions that media

facilitate, such as hypertext searching, viewing multiple documents in different browser windows

and chatting, are impossible to do with a textbook, or the classroom dynamic does not readily

provide for them (consider students quietly listening to the teacher lecturing for an hour, or

studying under the threat of earning a bad grade rather than receiving a tangible benefit from

hard work). Fundamentally, the traditional communication style of a science class is not

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compatible with the everyday “cultural” ways teenagers are accustomed to learning and

processing information.

Teenagers are apt to decode messages that science class sends on many levels, including

the message of science education’s intent. To analyze these messages, consider Raymond

Williams’ study of the experience of watching television in “Programming as Sequence or Flow.”

He examines the pervasive addition of commercial advertisement to every aspect of television

programming, from the traditional time-space between feature programs (234), to “interruptions”

that occur during the program itself (235). Williams concludes that watching television is no

longer about evening entertainment, but rather buying and selling products, transforming the

living room into an individualized consumer realm.

Unfortunately, the structure of science education sends similar messages in the same way,

and the messages do not appeal to high-school students’ values. Zollo notes that teenagers have

developed highly-refined consumer skills, that they “are more brand conscious today than ever

before” (24), and if they don't accept the message coming across through the advertisement,

“they can quickly reject not only the message but also the messenger” (6). In the science

classroom, the message comes across as an order rather than an appealing option, and the

messenger can manifest not only as the educator, but also the academic subject. What’s more is

that because science teachers’ quality/success are often measured by the grades that their students

earn rather than assessments of their own abilities. Students can often perceive such evaluation

criteria as a lack of concern for their own quality of learning experience.

In contrast, teenagers want to have fun, socialize, and learn about themselves as they

grow into their lives. According to Zollo, “among teen's top 10 favorite things about school, all

but one are extracurricular,” and “no more than 12 percent of (his teenage study sample) liked

teachers, classes, grades, and tests,” which are actually among their strongest dislikes about

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school (266-67). Thus, science subjects, which are centered around teachers' lectures, practice

problems, and grades carry the message that pursuing science and math has no benefit for the

students, who are more likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss scientific

work as personally fruitless burden rather than spend time shaping them into appealing and

gratifying long-term pursuits.

In addition to the flawed means of transmission of science education, the traditional

classroom has also flagged in the “message” arena by failing to dislodge cultural myths

surrounding science and math, myths that stigmatize these subjects in student populations and

can account for much of teenage students’ resistance to science. Stereotypes of the scientist

persona, describing what scientists looks like and how they behave in social settings, are

pervasive in United States culture. According to Sandra Laursen, scientists are commonly

imagined as “white, male, and middle aged;” they are seen as “‘geeks’ or ‘nerds,’ ‘book-smart’

but lacking social skills;” they are usually envisioned “wearing glasses, lab coats, and pocket

protectors, and having eccentric hair styles;” they are believed to “work indoors or alone,

surrounded by equipment or ideas but not other people” (Laursen 1). So, not only do the

techniques used to teach science turn teenage consumers off from buying the science product, but

the product itself appears to them to be something very undesirable! Teenagers’ primary

concerns in high-school involve socializing, and Zollo explains that “the quality of ‘coolness’ is

of paramount importance” (26), that “status and image drive teen hierarchy” (136) to the point at

which appearance becomes the number one credential (202). Buying into the stereotype of the

un-cool, unattractive, asocial scientist, teenagers, then, decide fairly easily that an interest in

science is of no use to them. Put simply, our stereotype of a scientist is rather unattractive, and

“the reason why these students have such profound stereotypes of scientists and are less than

enthusiastic about science's impact on society is simple—the lack of exposure they receive

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during their pre-college education” (Farber 1).

The Solution: Changing the Medium and Message of Science Education

Students in American high schools have come of age in a consumer country. Having

been bred as consumers from the cradle, today’s teenagers are, not surprisingly, becoming the

most advertisement-targeted consumer demographic, and there are a variety of factors that make

them more influential in the national economy each year. Companies have realized the

purchasing power that teens wield, over $140 billion annually and growing, and retailers have

begun to devote massive amounts of marketing capital to research and advertisements aimed at

establishing brand loyalty from a surprisingly early age (Zollo 7). Advertising obviously works

on teenagers, so advertising and marketing theory can provide educators with techniques to

better tailor science subjects to a teenage market. And, by viewing students as “consumers”

rather than “pupils” we can begin to devise marketing strategies that will entice and engage

students in scientific disciplines.

Teenage students cannot help but evaluate their education the same way that they

evaluate the products they purchase, so science needs to cater to their fundamental need in order

to reach them as consumers. Through his digital native discourse, Prensky expresses that

teenagers need to use media technologies in order to be fully engaged. They use media for a

variety of tasks -- communicating, information gathering, entertaining themselves, purchasing,

etc. They prefer using technology, and, though there is no substitute for written work and a

teacher’s lessons, the use of technology itself can help make science education a more teenage-

centered experience. Since high-school aged students are so inclined and proficient when using

multimedia technologies, and since they possess honed consumer skills, the most suitable way to

utilize technology in science education is to implement it as a hands-on utility for teenagers to

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create their own learning experiences in which they can take the liberty to determine the most

appropriate way to meet their educational needs and goals. Specifically, interactive and

incorporative multimedia that are conducive to collaboration will prove most helpful in

educating teens: demonstrative videos that incorporate auditory and possibly even textual

expressions with visual aids; web utilities such as pages that students themselves can design;

blogs and forums on which students can interact and cultivate relevant discourses; digitized data

that students can manipulate, transport, and share amongst each-other. Matthew Kearney

describes this type of proposition in terms of established constructivist educational theories:

Constructivist learning theory emphasises that learners construct their own

knowledge, strongly influenced by what they already know. Social constructivists

view learning as an inherently social process, using peer discussions as an

opportunity to share alternative viewpoints, to challenge others’ ideas and help

develop alternative points of view. Over the past decade, the field of educational

technology has endorsed constructivism as a suitable referent for the

development and meaningful use of appropriate software in education. Examples

in science include the constructivist use of multimedia such as video-based

laboratories and student multimedia authoring, microcomputer-based laboratories

(MBLs) and microworlds (2).

According to Kearney, the foundations for effectively placing technology in the hands of

students already exist in these educational theories and pedagogical practices. Simply by putting

the students themselves at the head of the projects, educators can overcome several of the points

of contention with teenagers: teens’ naturally questioning/rebellious attitudes, and their feelings

of alienation from a sciences. Communications specialists Allison Davis and Paul Brown state

that “the key principle of getting and holding attention is to focus on the audience -- to help your

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audience solve a problem, meet a need, and answer a question” (22). By shifting the focus and

allowing the students to direct their own media projects, students will be empowered to negotiate

their own learning experiences instead of being bound to teacher-centered science classes. The

students can engage themselves in understanding scientific theory and pondering experiments;

they can be junior scientists, and thus become a part of the scientific community; they can freely

discuss and explore science in their native digital language. Kearney explains that, “in making

their own multimedia students improve their self-confidence by planning, producing and sharing

productions in a cooperative learning environment,” and they can therefore feel more

empowered and even welcomed in a scientific discipline after learning to view themselves as

competent with scientific research and information (4-5).

Providing this type of exposure to teens can also help dispel their myths about scientists

and scientific work. First, it will provide teens with the opportunity to spend enough time

researching and exploring scientific disciplines to realize that the traditional “mad scientist” is

not what real-life scientists look like. Over a little time, they perhaps may begin to assimilate

scientist identity into their own culture when they observe more people, especially students like

themselves, involved in similar research. The more freedom they have to collaborate with peers,

and the more they observe the social processes involved in scientific research, the more they will

see that science is not a solitary and isolative field, and that quite often socializing with a

scientific reference can be as much fun as extracurricular activities. Ultimately, teenagers

working on their own scientific studies using digital media will begin to incorporate science

studies into their expectations of their “teenage experience.” Realistically, the goal is not to

make a scientist out of every high school student; but rather make science a more personalized,

engaging and even enjoyable component of their academic undertaking.

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Putting the Theory into Practice: My Technology Project

For the technology component of this study, I applied these educational theories to two

media forms that are popular among teenagers: digital video and web pages. The first

component, the digital video, takes the shape of a student-crafted documentary/reality-style

expose, a teen “video-journal” of sorts. Since teenagers are as eager to learn about themselves as

they are to learn about their friends, they naturally will feel inclined to showcase their developing

talents and passions. I scripted the video in this manner with the supposition that this type of

project would be used as part of his class’s lessons on electricity. In this short video I produced,

a fictional student named Jordan Spencer describes his passion for playing guitar as it relates to

his academic work in a high school Physics class. Through the video’s dialogue, Jordan gives a

concise, yet thorough explanation of the mechanics of an electrical circuit. Though the film is

not a true documentary --although Jordan doesn’t really exist and a teen didn’t really produce the

video-- my project demonstrates how a real media based science project might take shape.

Notably, the video juxtaposes the student’s “real-life” interests -- his love of guitar -- with his

scientific pursuits. Grounding an abstract concept like the inner workings of an electrical circuit

in a real-life application like a guitar amplifier, this type of project would allow the student

audience to identify with the subject of the video on a more personal level; Jordan’s digital media

exploration of his own interest in electricity makes the scientific values more accessible and

appealing to the demographic that the lesson targets. Jordan, the engaging and appealing

teenager at the heart of the project, helps to convince his peers that science is “cool.”

There are educational benefits for the student who makes the project in addition to the

project’s science appeal for the student audience. A demonstrative video would provide a student

in Jordan’s situation with the opportunity to conduct first-hand research on a concept such as

electricity, and to practice a thorough understanding of all the related scientific principles in

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order to achieve the fluency required to explain and demonstrate a subject like electricity as part

of a class lecture. By researching and presenting science subjects to classmates, students will

gain a deeper understanding and relationship with scientific concepts as they apply to individual

interests, such as playing guitar; they will in turn develop a sense of confidence and ownership of

the subjects they present through their own work on their projects. And, by capitalizing on the

personal aspects of these projects, science educators can shift students’ learning motivations from

grades and tests to personal accomplishment and a communal scientific discourse that connects

the students with their peers.

To add another dimension to the project as an option available to students who want to do

something other than or in addition to a demonstrational video, I uploaded the video to YouTube

and have displayed it on a Googlepages site, which I also created as a simulation of work done

by the character from the video. I chose Googlepages as a host because there are no costs to

create a site, no knowledge of domain and browser hosting required to begin creating pages and

adding content, and a relatively high degree of utility available to incorporate multimedia. The

steps required to build a site with Googlepages are essentially as easy as putting together a linked

PowerPoint presentation, thus bypassing resources and training required to teach students how to

build a site from scratch. Students also have the option to link to each others’ works, collaborate

on wiki-projects, and make researching a science subject an interactive and creative undertaking

through activities like blogging.

Conclusions

There are problems in the presentation of high-school science education that contribute to

a collective lack of enthusiasm for science among teenage students. Those problems arise from

dated teaching methods that do not address the technological needs of modern students, who

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speak a “digital language;” they are amplified through the dynamic of most science classes, in

which the teacher is situated as the center of the learning and the students’ personal experiences

are situated as a second or even third priority; they are fortified by an emphasis on grades and

already-found knowledge; they are exacerbated by alienating and undesirable stereotypes of

scientists and scientific work. A reasonable solution, then, is to re-arrange the dynamics of

science lessons so that the students -- their educational needs, and their personal experiences

with scientific concepts -- are the top priority of science classes. A good way to accomplish such

a task is to address the aspect of today’s students that distinguishes them from previous

generations of “book learners” - a natural aptitude for technology. By allowing students to use

technology to produce scientific projects, and to control the parameters of those projects within

the scope of a specific science topic to address, educators can serve students’ needs to use

technologies such as the internet, digital video, and digital communications in order to gather and

process information, as well as their inclination to collaborate with each other, with the hopes

that teenagers in high school science classes will begin to see the global importance and the

personal benefits of working in scientific disciplines.

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1. Brown, Paul and Alison Davis. Your Attention, Please. Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media,

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2. Farber, Steven and Jamie Shaefer. “Breaking Down the Stereotypes of Science by Recruiting

Young Scientists.” PLoS Biology. 12 October 2004. 2 April 2009.

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3. Kearney, Matthew. “Using Digital Video to Enhance Authentic Technology-Mediated

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ndoutv2.PDF

5. Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. New York, New York:

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The New Press, 2004.

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11. Zollo, Peter. Wise Up to Teens. 2nd ed. Ithaca, New York: New strategist Publications, Inc.,

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