Science Education Reform Should be Easier

The medieval dynamics holing us back

I’m grateful that my own field, chemistry, has been spared conscription into the education culture war; it’s hard to convince people that carbon is woke, for instance. However, that the discourse hasn’t found a way to politicize chemistry (yet) isn’t to say that the field is apolitical. Underneath our impartial veneer lies an array of bizarre policy choices and an ethos of willful stagnation. These are not seen as political. They ought to be. The sciences, especially chemistry, are in trouble. From 2019 to 2024, Chemistry bachelors’ degrees fell 14.1%. Student interest fell 17% between 2021 and 2025. The administration’s recent federal cuts are making this even worse. Without funding, universities can’t operate equipment. Without equipment, universities can’t attract as many incoming students, which affects their funding, and so on. In an ideal world, our government would simply recognize the need for chemistry and fund it anyway. Amidst this decline, Chinese universities have taken a much more dominant position in chemistry research. They have already surpassed us in chemical industry R&D spending. Our pharmaceutical industry is still dominant, but this is deceiving; China plays a much stronger role in active pharmaceutical ingredient production; our output is, in many cases, downstream of theirs (and because many are sole suppliers, tariffs won’t even work).

The problem is as follows: because chemists are chemists who love chemistry, we behave as though the value of our field is as self-evident to everyone as it is to us. It’s not. When governments see declining enrollment numbers, they aren’t thinking about the inevitable disaster that will befall many of our critical industries should we fall behind in chemistry. They’re thinking about declining enrollment numbers. I do not begrudge them this; we are accountable to the institutions that fund us. If we want to justify (and I do) an increase in funding, we have to show results.

Science curricula do not undergo the reform cycles that math, English, and history do. This is partially because lay civil society, for better or for worse, has opinions about how those subjects should be taught, fueling reform movements. By contrast, chemistry experiences no such pressure; parents are generally willing to take textbooks’ word for it when they know less about the subject in question. As such, the political battles in science education take the shape of textbooks and standards applying pressure to faculty, with reform attempts lacking a popular constituency. I would not prefer to Monkey’s Paw our way into an arrangement involving STEM Moms for Liberty, but what we do have is similarly bleak in its stagnation.

Barring the election of an ideologically pro-science government, our best course of action is to take advantage of the relative pedagogical freedom of chemistry faculty. Educational interventions have proven effective. Peer led team learning has consistently improved student performance across all student demographics. Importantly, students for whom PLTL and other active learning interventions were implemented were more likely to continue with chemistry education, persisting to organic chemistry from general chemistry at greater rates than average. Increased student performance is important, but retention is the real aim of the game here. Departments are more capable of justifying their funding when enrollment is high, so interventions that increase enrollment ought to be implemented whenever possible, and sooner rather than later.

Of course, if pedagogy were enough on its own, the problem would truly be apolitical. It’s not. In order for reform to be maximally effective, changes in teaching methods need to be coupled with curricular reform. A Journal of Chemical Education study pointed out this discrepancy– reformed course structures result in improved attitudes and performance, but do little to advance long-term conceptual learning when using an unchanged curriculum. Quality matters. Researchers have found that deep engagement with content has a causal relationship with persistence as a STEM major. The above JCE study noted that the changes in course structure took place within unchanged, memorization-based curricula. If our goal is retention, we need to tackle both.

Curriculum reform is much more difficult. Professors do have the final say over how they teach their courses, which matters, but, especially at an introductory level, their choices are limited by content coverage requirements. Besides the limited and unevenly implemented 2014 AP Chemistry reforms, these have not been fundamentally restructured since the 1960s, have never been verified, and are SEVERELY dated. One means of determining what to include, the nodometer method, involved observing whether students fell asleep in class when covering a given topic. If they did, the topic was thrown out. The inferences from this research remain influential to this day, informing the content of all major textbooks and standards. So while pedagogical reform can be conducted on a department by department basis, curricular reform is more difficult. Entrenched interests within science education not only have a direct incentive to resist change; they directly hamstring actors who do want to adapt.

In order to improve chemistry education, faculty must be given freedom to do what they do best: experiment. It makes little sense to chafe at the idea of bold curricular experimentation when much of the current curriculum rests upon the nodometer tests of the 1960s; we gain nothing by playing it safe, and there is so much to lose if we fail to adapt. Several sweeping department-scale reform efforts have already been implemented. Chemistry Unbound at Emory University has directly aimed to increase retention by enacting several data-supported curricular reforms, including early exposure to subdisciplines and long-term engagement with consistent conceptual themes. The Chemical Thinking curriculum at the University of Arizona, which replaced the traditional rote content sequence with system and model focused learning, has already improved retention within the institution.

Challenging the dominance of established content coverage requirements is a difficult task with a serious upside. Data-driven intervention faces a lot of institutional inertia; it is seen as easier to simply teach to the textbook. The literature suggests that targeted funding can overcome faculty reluctance to enact curricular reform. We can and should put our hand on the scale here. The administration’s cuts to research funding has received much attention in the discourse. When we restore funding, we must subsidize not only scientific research, but science education research, lending support to bold ventures that can restore and expand the prestige of American science.