Dominican-American Students & Science : A Call To Action
One of the central principles of science education can be stated simply: "Know your students and teach them accordingly." As a science teacher, do you know your students? Nationwide, for example, 42% of public school students are from minority groups, nearly a 100% increase since the 1970s (Dillon, 2007). The profile of America’s school children has undergone a remarkable transformation in the past 30 years. In the American West, Whites now comprise a minority of public school students (~46%), and even in the Midwest, the whitest region of the nation, minorities now comprise 26% of school students. The most pronounced growth in minority enrollment has been among Latino students. From 1972 to 2005, for example, this student population has increased from 6% to 20% nationwide (Dillon, 2007).
Within the Latin-American population, the number of Dominican-Americans in the United States in general and New York City (NYC) in particular has also grown rapidly. In NYC, for example, Dominican Americans comprise the largest Latino subgroup with a population greater than 500,000 (Torres-Saillant and Hernandez, 1998). Dominican Americans have also comprised the largest share of students entering the NYC public school system since the 1980s.
One might predict that the dramatic rise in Latin American and Dominican American K-12 populations has resulted in concurrent increases in the number of Latin American and Dominicans Americans attending post-secondary schools. Sadly, this has not been the case; between 1996 and 1999, for example, only 5% of Dominican Americans graduated from college (Leavitt, 2001:52). Only a fraction of these college graduates majored in the sciences.
A brief look at the state of secondary science education in the United States partially explains the paltry representation of Latin-Americans in college and university science programs. At every grade level, White students are characterized by higher science content and inquiry skills than Black and Latino students (Rakow, 1985). Black and Latino student performance in math and science have remained well below those of White students. As Lee and Luykx (2006) point out, White and Asian American 8th grade math and science performance is very similar to that of African American and Latino 12th graders.
One conclusion – the wrong one – that might be drawn regarding the gap in performance between Latino and non-Latin-American students is that Latin- American students have little enthusiasm for studying the sciences or pursuing professions that require higher-level science education. Current and future science teachers of Latino populations need to know that their student’s attitudes toward science do not appear to parallel performance measures. Indeed, Rakow (1985) and Kahle (1982) found that minority student’s positive attitudes toward science were comparable to, or in some cases greater than, White students. Additionally, science career choice aspirations were similar among racial and ethnic groups (Lee and Luykx, 2006). Likewise, a “funds of knowledge” study conducted through the DR Science project revealed that 80.8% Dominican-American students have aspirations for higher education, and that the careers they wish to pursue in the future include many high- skilled occupations (e.g., lawyer, doctor, teacher, nurse, Nehm et al., 2008). In this same study, Dominican students reported liking science a “fair bit” and viewed science as “somewhat important” while at the same time reporting that their teachers talked about science jobs “very little or not at all” and generally did not encourage students to pursue science.
Such findings suggest that as science educators we need to concern ourselves with a second “gap”, one that perhaps supersedes the disparity in achievement between Whites and Latinos; it is the gap between Dominican American youth's stated interest in science and science education and the degree to which we as science teachers recognize and act upon their interest. Clearly we need to do a better job of capitalizing on Dominican student’s basic valuing of science as a course of study and career pursuit.
In order to help teachers have a greater impact on the science education of Dominican-American students, the website www.DRScience.org provides three digests that introduce important tools, resources and strategies for classroom application: DR Digest 2: Cultivating a Sense of place; DR Digest 3: Mining Funds of Knowledge; and DR Digest 4: Designing Culturally Relevant Curricula. Collectively, we hope these digests provide guidance for teachers who want to make science accessible to the diversity of students who sit in their classrooms.