University professors are partnering with local high school teachers to improve science education in Alabama, UA Professor Martin Bakker said.

Virtual Integration of Science and Technology in Alabama (VISTA) has professionals on campus working on experiments that will help high school students be more prepared when entering into college science courses.

“The idea is to build partnerships with our local school so that our teachers are better able to teach science, so when [their students] walk into my freshman chemistry class, they are more comfortable thinking for themselves,” Bakker said.

Many college students find themselves in a new environment, Bakker said, as questions in high school have changed from ones meant to gain answers to tests to those meant to gain deeper knowledge. By giving students a more hands-on and thorough understanding at the high school level, students will have an easier time transitioning from high school to college-level sciences, Bakker said.

“We feel that if we can improve the way that science is taught at the high schools and middle schools, the students coming into our classrooms will be better equipped, and the graduates who leave our university will be more prepared,” he said.

Lauren Mangurian, a junior majoring in biology, said she found that her high school preparation mattered little at the Capstone.

“I learned information for my tests in high school and here it no longer cuts it,” Mangurian said. “My high school teachers did not prepare me conceptually for the introductory science classes here at Alabama.”

Students need this vertical integration that VISTA provides to meld the educations that they receive in high school and in college, Bakker said.

“We hope that we can improve science at all levels,” he said. “The driving force of this program is bettering students in their ability to learn science and teachers in their ability to teach science to their students.”

One hurdle in improving science classes in high school is the myth that science is boring, Professor Laura Busenlehner said. UA professors and high school teachers are partnering together to make their classrooms more innovative, she added.

“We hope to spark an inquiry-based approach to experimentation where students themselves come up with a hypothesis and test it with little input from the teacher, reinforcing key concepts in science and helping them develop lifelong skills of deductive reasoning,” Busenlehner said.

One such experiment deals with producing protein in a test tube. The protein luciferase, which makes a firefly glow, can be duplicated by students in the lab. The experiment tests if a protein can be duplicated outside an organism if all of the other biological components are present.

“If [the students] are successful, their test tube will glow when exposed to ultraviolent light,” Busenlehner said.

Sarah Jane Crane, a junior majoring in education, said she finds that when dealing with students, hands-on experiments can make difficult concepts make more sense.

“My showing the students an experiment reinforces the idea better and makes them learn the concepts more concretely,” Crane said.