Students and a school subject called science are, in one sense, made for one another. Both are multidimensional and complex in nature; both can be predictable at the same time they are full of surprises. Paradoxically, science can transport struggling students to new academic heights and rekindle their joy of learning, while simultaneously challenging and baffling the most successful students, at times. Parents, teachers, and others in the helping professions who understand the complex and multidimensional natures of children and youth can take advantage of the multidimensional nature of science to benefit the children and adolescents in their care. This brief essay focuses first on the multidimensional natures of our minds and of science, and subsequently focuses on suggestions for matching the needs of students with the rich diversity of science.

The Nature of Our Humanity
Our complex nature as humans is evident from the start. As newborns, we come into the world with healthy brains designed to take in and store information from the five senses in multiple ways that will allow us to survive and adapt to a wide variety of environments. It is no surprise that each of our brains and sensory systems - and our resulting minds and behaviors - individually differ from others around us, no matter how we group ourselves. Biologists suggest that these natural variations have survival value; they are nature's way of ensuring human survival against major environmental changes. Said another way, the variety of differences found in the human population appears to guarantee that some individuals will survive the variety of possible environmental changes. Yet while human populations include all kinds of minds, schools are expected by society to produce "one kind of mind" - a mind that allows every student to read, write, and calculate at increasing levels of competence and sophistication between the ages of six and eighteen years.

Society expects public schools to educate all students to meet standards established by state departments of education, and to pass tests of competence more or less on schedule. In some states, schools and their students are "put on probation" when they fail to demonstrate sufficient progress. How then can parents, educators and others protect the value of all kinds of minds in society? A part of the answer may lie in linking students' interests and affinities for science with learning to read and write.

The Nature of Science

Science is equally complex in its multidimensionality. Scientists typically think of science as a process of inquiry; in other words, science is a way of answering questions. Many scientists are drawn to science because they can earn their living expressing their curiosity and exploring some part of the world or universe. At the same time scientists also think of science as a resulting body of knowledge about the way the world works, or more precisely, the way living things, the earth itself, and the universe function. Some scientists work with living things, others with non-living materials. Some enjoy working with things that are visible and can studied with the five senses or with finely calibrated instruments that expand their capacities to acquire sensory information, while others focus only on processes that are associated with changes in non-living systems. Still other scientists work only with computer-generated models of systems. Thousands of meaningful comparisons and contrasts may be made to capture the essence of science, whether one thinks traditionally in terms of biology, physics, chemistry, earth sciences, and astronomy, or specialized and hybridized sub-fields that cut across traditional fields of science. Most importantly, in terms of this discussion, are two facts: 1) Scientists themselves have all kinds of minds, which leads many scientists to work in teams that take advantage of their varied strengths and that overcome the limitations of any single scientist's knowledge or skill. 2) The great variety across sub-fields in science offers every student unlimited possibilities for developing interests and affinities in science. How can parents and teachers develop students' interests and affinities in science?

Suggestions for Teachers and Parents

Teachers increasingly are asked to focus on science as a body of knowledge rather than as a process of inquiry, in order to prepare their students to meet new state science standards and successfully pass tests of science knowledge. This shift narrows the opportunities for all kinds of student minds to succeed in science. Students who have attentional issues or difficulties retrieving long term memory, others whose language capacities make reading about abstract science concepts incomprehensible, still others who have difficulty interpreting sequential data on charts or translating visual graphics into language all can become discouraged and lose interest in science at any grade level. Yet the richness of science allows every child and adolescent to develop in- and out-of-school interests and affinities in science that will allow them to continue enjoying science and even become science experts in specific areas of science within their classrooms. Teachers who organize science instruction so that classroom projects require team efforts, paralleling the behavior of scientists, have learned to encourage every student to make a special contribution, thus taking advantage of every student's developmental strengths, and at the same time maximizing learning for everyone in the class. Additionally, teachers now direct their students to use web sites such as Launch Point, NASA, and JPL to gain the latest information about specific topics in science.

Teachers and parents who work together can make valuable contributions to every student's academic and out-of-school success by fostering students' interest in science and by developing their children's affinities in specific areas of science. By way of example, parents can arouse their child's interest in science through the search for and selection of television programs, books, newspaper articles and magazines that focus on various areas of science. Television programs that illustrate discoveries in science are excellent sources of easily understood up-to-date information about animals (African mammals, penguins, tropical birds, dinosaurs, butterflies, fish, frogs, wolves, bears and whales are just a few), environmental processes (in the arctic regions, deserts, or undersea), shifts in weather patterns, advances in space travel, and discoveries of new materials and in medicine. Community resources also can nurture students' interests or affinities in science. Science museums, zoos, botanical gardens, planetariums, and vacations or field trips to oceans, swamps, deserts or mountains all offer opportunities to expose children and adolescents to a love of some area of science and to make collections of pictures, maps, charts and other objects that may be collected. Allowing a child to raise a pet, or build a small fish pond in the back yard, to plant a garden or a window box with a variety of seeds, or to feed ducks at a nearby lake or feed birds on the window sill, to photograph plants, animals or geological formations, or to draw them with a special set of colored pencils or pens - all support children's and adolescents' interests in science. These and other activities can provide students with experiences at home and in the community that allow them to share first-hand knowledge with friends and classmates, to write about their new knowledge, and ultimately to understand abstract concepts in science. Whether teachers and parents work together or independently, they can enrich students' knowledge of the way the world works and provide a concrete foundation upon which to build more complex knowledge and conceptions about science.

More can be gained, however. Many teachers report that students who have struggled unsuccessfully in beginning reading and writing make significant progress when reading and writing are connected with a specific area of high interest to the student. Science may serve that function. In addition, those of us who have taught science to students of all ages have observed that students who develop science interests as children and adolescents, and who are encouraged to talk about their science interests with others, appear to gain self-confidence and self esteem, and appear to develop a greater appreciation of the importance that all kinds of minds have for the welfare of society.