Is Everything We’re Teaching Garbage?

Artificial intelligence theorist and education reformer Roger Schank has argued that virtually everything we currently teach to kids is a waste of time, according to Good Education.

This provocative statement should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. For one, Good is calling him a “reformer” which, to many teachers, is an epithet most commonly applied to people with little or no training in education who have an ulterior motive (often profit-driven). Second, being an artificial intelligence theorist makes him no better qualified to critique education than any other non-educator.

Nevertheless, he brings up several salient points. For example, he argues that much of what we teach kids (or how we teach it) seems irrelevant to their everyday life. This is often the case, and it has only gotten worse with the mania for accountability and standardized exams, which has led to increasing use of teacher centered lessons and test preparation at the expense of engaging, inquiry-based lessons. Many districts have even gotten rid of science, arts and music to make room for even more test preparation.

However, Schank is not simply criticizing teaching to the test. Even traditional subjects that have held a sacrosanct position in schools’ course offerings are a load of malarkey in his mind. For example, he has called chemistry "a complete waste of time," arguing that no one really needs "to know the elements of the periodic table" or the "formula for salt," including doctors, who he incorrectly says do not use the chemistry they learned in college.

This is a ridiculous assertion. Doctors use their chemistry daily when considering which drugs to prescribe and how they might interact with other drugs the patient might be taking. Understanding how Prilosec helps alleviate digestive problems, for example, requires an understanding of acid/base chemistry as well as the biochemistry of protein channels and enzymes.

A basic understanding of chemistry has important day to day applications, even for people who never take another science course in their lives. It is applicable to cooking, maintenance of common equipment (e.g., cars), health and safety. For example, an understanding acid/base chemistry can prevent serious accidents at home or work when working with common cleaning materials, while a little biochemistry can go a long way toward understanding nutrition and diet, or the safety and proper usage of prescription and over the counter medicines.

One of the most important arguments in favor of chemistry is that it provides important prerequisite knowledge necessary for understanding much of the life sciences content standards, which have become very heavily weighted toward molecular biology and biochemistry over the past decade. Thus, if we are going to teach high school chemistry, it should come before biology. Unfortunately, few schools teach science in this sequence. Schank, by the way, supports the continuation of biology as a high school course, as long as we change how it is taught, which I favor, too.

On the other hand, the California content standards for chemistry require that students learn far more detail than most people will ever need. Unless continuing on to study higher level sciences, for example, no one really needs to know electron orbital configurations or Le Chatelier’s principle. By removing some of these more detailed concepts from the standards, teachers could have more time and freedom to implement curriculum that covers standards that are more relevant to everyday life and in a way that directly ties the content to real world problems.

Another problem is that science is often taught as a serious of facts, rather than a process of inquiry. While many of the facts are indeed important, what really makes science useful (and fun) is its ability to answer questions and make accurate predictions about natural phenomena, something than can and should be taught at school. Sadly, this is rarely the case in K-12 science education. Most science teachers, when they assign lab activities at all, rely heavily on “cookbook” or proof-of-concept activities and demonstrations in which the results are known beforehand. Students are rarely allowed to generate original data, develop their own testable research questions or design their own experiments. It is likewise rare that science teachers have students peer review each other’s lab reports or read and critique articles from scientific journals and popular science magazines, something that can hone both their literacy and critical thinking skills.

One important reason for continuing to teach science is that scientific thinking and analysis can effectively be applied to many nonscientific situations. However, this is only true when science teachers spend time teaching the scientific process, how to analyze data and create graphs, control variables and design good experiments. For example, the news media often publish sloppy graphs and data that poorly formatted, missing pertinent information or lacking a thorough description of the method of data acquisition. Someone who has had a good science education ought to be able to catch these problems and recognize that the conclusions drawn from such data might be inaccurate or exaggerated. In contrast, those lacking such training may buy all sorts of social snake oil, like the notions that poverty doesn’t affect student academic outcomes or that student standardized test scores are an effective and accurate way to evaluate teachers.

Schank correctly points out that the history textbooks are full of untruths. In reality, though, all subjects taught in school are subject to the biases of the ruling elite to some extent. However, this is most apparent in history and social studies courses. That does not mean that history should not be taught. Teachers do not have to use the textbooks at all or they can use the texts and add their own commentary. They can use the portions they find accurate and useful. They can even use the inaccurate parts to teach their students about bias.

One of Schank’s beefs with history is that U.S. presidents keep repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam War. By this we can presume he is talking about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this criticism belies his own misunderstanding of both history and politics. Politicians did indeed learn from the mistakes of Vietnam: Don’t have a draft; Do most of the killing from the air to minimize troop casualties; Subcontract most of the work out to private contractors;  Keep independent journalists away; and Do as much of the dirty work as possible in secret. On the other hand, why should politicians give a damned about history? Even if they can’t “win” outright, wars are still profitable and they still help maintain our geopolitical dominance. But this interpretation of history will never make it into the history books as it conflicts with the myth that America is the world’s greatest proponent of democracy and freedom.

Shoddy Science By Scientific American

“Experience and degrees don’t matter in the classroom nearly so much as mastery of science and math and some plain old smarts,” (Pat Wingert, Scientific American, August 2012).

Image from Flickr, by IrisDragon

Scientific American generally does a pretty good job of presenting exciting new discoveries in a clear and accurate manner. However, Pat Wingert’s piece, “Building a Better Science Teacher,” falls far short. In fact, it is outright embarrassing for its shoddy science and journalism.

To start with, her lead paragraph contains a math error. While I am happy to write this off as a typo, brain fart or slip up by the editors, a first impression often sets a negative tone for what follows—in this case, more of the usual education reform nonsense.

Let’s examine the above quote concerning experience versus “mastery of science.” Few teachers begin their careers with a mastery of every aspect of the content standards. The standards for some disciplines (e.g., life science) are so broad that it is impossible to master all of them. Consider that even a tenured professor in cell biology is unlikely to also have mastery of ecology, evolution and the nervous system (though he or she likely has a broad, general knowledge of them). Yet a high school biology teacher is expected to master each of these subjects sufficiently to not only teach the facts, but to identify the prerequisite knowledge necessary for teenagers to understand them and ensure that his or her students have mastered this, too.

It is through experience, not mastery, that teachers learn where their students tend to struggle and where they will need additional support and background knowledge. This forces a reflective teacher to not only learn that material more deeply, but to figure out how to make it more tangible and accessible to her students. Furthermore, an experienced teacher can quickly master new content, as I have had to do on numerous occasions when asked to teach a course I have never taught. An experienced teacher also develops the ability to make that science exciting and fun for children. She learns how to identify their particular academic strengths and weaknesses, manage their behavior, design engaging and meaningful lessons and lab activities, write good exams, and deal with the often conflicting demands of administrators, colleagues and parents. Mastery of science has little to do with these teaching responsibilities.

Wingert, like many who write about education reform, has identified a school (Troy Prep in New York) that has high science and math test scores on standardized exams despite having a predominantly lower income student body, and she uses this anecdotal example to draw the conclusion that Troy Prep has somehow found the magic formula that has eluded other low income schools in the country.

From a scientific point of view her example might be called intriguing and worth exploring, but certainly nothing close to compelling. Troy Prep is merely one example. In science, we need to have a statistically significant number of examples with similar results before we start getting excited. One reason for this standard is that the result might be coincidental. Her article provides no evidence of why their test scores are high or even if they have the ability to maintain those high scores. Troy Prep could have higher test scores for reasons that have nothing to do with teachers’ skill, experience or “smarts.” For example, it might attract a higher than normal percentage of students who have an interest in science and math or who have families that are more involved in their children’s education. They might receive more funding and support from philanthropists with STEM backgrounds. They might even push out students who tend to score lower on standardized tests.

Even if the school has found a legitimate and reproducible way to boost test scores, this is not evidence that its students are learning more science or learning it better. Most standardized science tests assess students’ knowledge of basic facts, like the role of mitochondria or their ability to translate DNA sequences into amino acid sequences, not mastery of the scientific process. The tests do not assess the ability to design a controlled experiment or critique the merits of an experimental design. Students are not expected to generate original data or draw logical conclusions from that data. Furthermore, most of the things that are tested can be taught through rote memorization and pen and pencil simulations and do not require that students engage in authentic science. The consequence is that even students who do well on standardized exams are not necessarily prepared to think scientifically or to explain why a particular scientific explanation is valid (or not).

Wingert makes another common error by drawing conclusions from a statistic that are not supported by that statistic. In this case, she uses Eric Hanushek’s claim that highly effective teachers make about three times the academic gains of those with less talented teachers, regardless of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, to support her argument that a “good teacher trumps such factors as socioeconomic status, class size, curriculum design and parents’ educational levels.”

While it stands to reason that a good teacher will have more success with her students than a mediocre one, it does not necessarily follow that she will be able to overcome the effects of poverty or that she will be effective with all of her students. For example, her classes might get better overall test scores than those of her mediocre peer, yet she could still have a significant number of students who do poorly on the tests because they are reading far below grade level, have too many absences, do not do homework or have trouble focusing for extended periods of time—all problems that are more common among lower income students.

Numerous studies have found that an achievement gaps exists before children even begin school (see here,  here and here) and that it tends to grow over time. Poor children may come to school hungry or malnourished, which affects their ability to concentrate. They tend to miss far more school than their more affluent peers because of lack of health insurance, which decreases the chances they will graduate on time. Poor children have higher rates of lead poisoning, iron deficiency anemia, low birth weights and other health issues that can lead to learning disabilities or cognitive impairment. And they suffer more familial stress which can lead to chronically higher levels of cortisol in the blood, which some researchers suggest can impair memory and learning. Furthermore, lower income children have less access to enriching extracurricular activities after school and during the summers that contribute to the academic growth of their more affluent peers. Children who fall behind their peers, particularly in math and reading, tend to fall behind in other subjects as a result. Many lose self-confidence and self-efficacy and, as a result, tune out or give up on school.

Mastery of science content does not make a teacher better able to address these seemingly intractable problems, though it certainly could make the teacher better able to design authentic science lab activities for those students who have the requisite skills to benefit from such curriculum. Experience, on the other hand, is far more likely to help a teacher serve the diverse needs of today’s classroom. For example, experience not only helps a teacher learn to recognize when a student is losing focus or misbehaving because of hunger, pain or familial stress, but also to develop strategies for helping that student survive in the classroom.

It would behoove Wingert to not only pay closer attention to the logic (or illogic) of her arguments, but to also look more closely at the breadth of work of those she cites. Eric Hanushek (whom she quotes to support her claim that teacher expertise trumps socioeconomic status),  also said that less than 10% of students’ academic success is attributable to teacher quality and the rest was due to other factors, including students’ socioeconomic status.

Wingert also makes a number of interesting claims without providing any citations, which is frustrating for those of us who would like to read the studies. However, it also draws into question the validity of her claims. For example, she says that “several studies indicate higher math achievement among students whose teachers hold an advanced degree in math,” yet she does not identify any of these studies or their authors.

Nevertheless, it does seem likely that a more in-depth training in their disciplines would benefit teachers in concrete ways. For example, one would expect them to be better able to answer students’ questions, make connections to current research trends and discoveries, and to design more authentic science activities.

Yet even if advanced training does improve the quality of teaching, one must consider whether the costs are worth it. Requiring advanced degrees for math and science teachers would also require significantly higher pay and probably greater autonomy and academic freedom, too. Anything short of this and those highly trained scientists and mathematicians will go to work in academia or private industry where they could make a lot more money and have a significantly higher social status, with a lot less of the aggravation. As it stands, too many teachers from all disciplines leave the profession because of dissatisfaction with the overwhelming and often unreasonable demands, low status and pay.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Of course there are many out there who would argue, “Yes, it is worth it—anything to improve our schools!” But these same “reformers” seem to have no interest in increasing taxes to a level that would permit ample funding of our schools or provide the services and support that would shrink the wealth gap or give lower income children some of the same developmental advantages that affluent families take for granted.

There are numerous reforms that would probably give more bang for the buck than requiring higher degrees for teachers. For example, many districts, in response to the harsh punishments of NCLB, have slashed science curriculum in the k-5 grades in order to create more space for test prep. As a result, many kids now receive little or no science education prior to middle school. Thus, ending NCLB and the testing mania that has decimated education over the past decade seem like the cheapest and most expedient ways to improve science education and achievement.

Other relatively inexpensive reforms include requiring preschool or head start, particularly for lower income children, as it would help close the achievement gap before kids start school and improve their chances of being academically ready for science. Likewise, state-funded summer school could help shrink the achievement gap that typically occurs during the summer.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

Brookings Study Indicates Public Education Not So Bad After All

We're #11 Mofo! And Proud of It!

The 10^th Brown Center Report (Brookings Institution), which analyzed PISA and other common standardized test scores, debunked two common myths: that the U.S. once led the world in math and science education scores and that it has been declining ever since. In reality, the U.S. has never led the world on international achievement tests, according to the report. The report also found that some of the states that won federal Race to the Top (RttT) grants actually underperformed states that did not receive the grants on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), thus suggesting that the “reforms” mandated by the Obama Administration are not improving educational outcomes.

According to Brookings scholar Tom Loveless, U.S. science and math scores have been mediocre compared to other wealthy nations since at least 1964 and, contrary to the claims of Ed Deformers and accountability maniacs, they have not been getting any worse. America’s schools are NOT in a state of crisis or deterioration. Indeed, evidence suggests that they have been improving (see Jay Mathews’s Class Struggle). In 1964, we scored near the very bottom, compared with 2010, when we scored near the middle in science and literacy.

Despite the fact that we’ve never been number one (or even close to it) in K-12 math and science scores, the U.S. has continued to dominate the world economically over the past 50 years, suggesting that pundits and critics have been completely wrong about the importance of this metric to our international competitiveness. Furthermore, despite our relatively weak K-12 math and science scores, we continue to pump out some of the most effective scientists and mathematicians in the world, including more Nobel laureates than any other country.

One might conclude from this that our K-12 science and math education has been sufficient for preparing students for the rigors of university level science and math. This would probably be an incorrect assumption. What is probably happening is that some U.S. students are excelling at science and math (primarily the same middle class and affluent students who tend to excel at school, in general) and these students are also succeeding in college, while large numbers of lower income students are struggling across the board, including in math and science.

The improvements in PISA scores, as well as the increasing numbers of lower income and minority students who are taking and passing SAT and AP exams, probably do reflect improvements in teaching, as well as changing attitudes and policies about promoting college and higher level course work to low income and minority students. Yet our inability to score at the top of international tests is not due to the quality of the schools and teachers, which have been improving, but to socioeconomic conditions, which have actually been declining for large numbers of Americans. When disaggregated by class, our middle class students do as well as those from almost any other country. At the same time, the countries with the highest PISA scores tend to have far less childhood poverty and income gaps than we do.

Thus, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, if we really want to see PISA scores go up, along with graduation rates, science literacy, and any other academic indicator, we need to close the wealth gap, end poverty and start investing in education a level comparable to Finland.

Science News: Victory for Peppered Moth

Image by Виталий Гуменюк

For decades science teachers have used the Peppered Moth (Biston betularia) as a prime example of natural selection. Prior to the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the Peppered Moth population in England consisted of a high percentage of light-colored salt and pepper moths (known as typica) and a low percentage of dark moths (known as carbonaria). At that time, the majority of trees were also light-colored due to the growth of lichens on their bark, providing typicas camouflage. Dark moths, it was presumed, were disproportionately spotted by birds and eaten, thus keeping their population low.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the lichens began to die and the tree trunks became darker as they collected soot from the growing number of factories. At the same time, the percentage of light moths began to decline, while carbonarias increased and became the majority. The assumption of scientists was that now the darker moths had better camouflage and the best adaptation to avoid predation, while the lighter moths were now easy prey.

This is classic Natural Selection: A given population (members of the same species living in the same place and time) always contains a variety of phenotypes (traits), some of which are better than others at helping an organism survive long enough to reproduce and pass the adaptation to their offspring. However, environmental changes (like pollution) can alter the balance, shifting greater fecundity to organisms with a different phenotype, causing their proportion in the population to increase.  

The example was so classic, so cut and dry, so obvious, that few scientists and even fewer science teachers ever questioned its validity. The hypothesis was proposed as early as 1896, according to The Scientist (May, 2012) and validated in the 1950s by Bernard Kettlewell, who collected compelling evidence that bird predation was in fact the selective force at work and that moth camouflage was affected by pollution, by placing light and dark moths directly on trees in polluted and unpolluted tracts.

However, in the 1980s, Peppered Moth experts started to identify flaws in Kettlewell’s experiments. Perhaps most compelling was their finding that tree trunks might not be the moths’ preferred resting place, thus calling into question the whole camouflage/bird predation hypothesis. It also threatened to make fools of the thousands of science teachers who were still using the Peppered Moth as a prime example of Natural Selection. Worse than this, however, was the field day it created for creationists, who called the Peppered Moth story a fraud and an example of scientists’ fallibility.

Enter Michael Majerus, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Cambridge, and a 50-year expert on Biston betularia. Starting in 2001, according to The Scientist, he set out to confirm Kettlewell’s findings using a more robust and convincing protocol. First, through years of direct observation, he discovered that the moths’ preferred resting site was the lateral branches of trees (not their trunks). Then, rather than artificially placing moths in a desired setting as Kettlewell did, he released thousands into an unpolluted tract covered with nets (so they couldn’t escape and confuse migration with predation).

Over the course of seven years he found a 9% lower survival rate for carbonaria moths, indicating that they indeed had a lower fecundity in an unpolluted setting and suggesting that they were in fact being consumed at a higher rate.

Majerus died in 2009 from an aggressive mesothelioma before his results could be published. However, a detailed account of his work was published this year in Biology Letters (February 2012) by some of his peers.

The lesson for K-12 science teachers is that they need to stay up to date on scientific discoveries and debates. In my experience, this does not happen often enough. Many (if not the majority) of those who teach science have little, if any, practical experience doing science in a real-world setting and few read scientific journals with any regularity. Furthermore, it is very rare that they have time to meet with colleagues to discuss new discoveries, review journal articles, analyze methodologies, or debate controversies, something that is an important cornerstone of university research.