Abstract
Because crystallography has often been regarded as an `experts only' science, requiring advanced mathematics and physics, it has been eliminated from many science curricula. In the United States, high school is a critical time when students are exposed to science at a more significant level, preparing them for university, and it is when they make career choices. A contemporary secondary science teaching credential must qualify teachers to present topics in substantive ways, to attract talented and enthusiastic young people to science, and to develop scientific literacy in the future workforce. Education and training policies put forward by the United States National Committee for Crystallography and the American Crystallographic Association recommend that molecular structure awareness should begin in K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) education as a core component for implementing established national science standards. Furthermore, many contexts exist in which crystallography can be incorporated into secondary education with minimal disruption. Following these guidelines, preparation of secondary teachers should include professional development in crystallography, providing them with knowledge (fundamental and practical), learning units, tools and modern examples to incorporate into their curricula. This article describes activities whose objective is to enhance secondary education by raising crystallography awareness through workshops, summer schools, student/teacher research internships and remote-enabling technologies.
Highlights
Background and significanceCrystallography has often been regarded as an ‘experts only’ science, requiring advanced mathematics and physics to explain the underlying principles
Preparation of secondary teachers should include opportunities for professional development in crystallography, where we in the crystallographic scientific community provide them with knowledge, learning units, tools and modern examples to incorporate into their curricula
Each summer for the past seven years, students from the Troy Tech Magnet Program in Science, Mathematics and Technology in Fullerton, CA, have spent a year-long internship working on research projects at the Keck Center for Molecular Structure (CMolS) under the mentorship of Katherine Kantardjieff (Fig. 2)
Summary
Crystallography has often been regarded as an ‘experts only’ science, requiring advanced mathematics and physics to explain the underlying principles This has kept crystallography education out of wide parts of the curriculum in the United States, as the subject has been considered too difficult and too advanced to introduce until graduate level university classes. 43, 1181–1188 demonstrates just how clever a teacher he was, using actual model airplanes, and the asymmetry of the bottom to the top, as a guide to understand the glide-plane symmetry operation (Fig. 1) He encouraged all of us to use common objects around us to demonstrate these simple principles. National Science Education Standards expect science curricula in grades 9–12 to develop students’ understanding and abilities aligned with the concepts and processes associated with (a) systems, order and organization; (b) evidence, models and explanation; (c) form and function.
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