The joy of science

By Bret Hovell

Editor's note: This story originally appears in the fall 2024 issue of ASU Thrive magazine.

Petting fuzzy caterpillars, growing juicy strawberries and studying birds are some ways Sean, ’13, and Lourdes Swentek immerse their little girls in nature. The family goes to the tide pools near their home to look at starfish and sea anemones, occasionally stays up late to spot constellations and even works out together.

“Sia’s 6 years old and really likes anything that involves getting her hands interacting with the environment. She’s just super curious and wants to know about everything,” says Sean. “And so for us, it’s fun to give her that education that she models to her little sister, Aria.”

Sean works as vice president of marketing for a sustainability technology startup, and Lourdes is a trauma and critical care surgeon. He studied digital marketing and ethics and marketing at ASU Online.

“Lourdes knew from age 9 that she wanted to be a surgeon. She’s always been in love with the human body, and how it works, and she’s constantly working on medical inventions.”

So, Sean says, the importance of science makes perfect sense to the two of them.

“I think a lot of people nowadays are not as in touch with the natural world, with biology, with the basic science knowledge that you need to live successfully and healthy as a human.”

Which means that fostering the love of nature and curiosity in their children is important, he says.

Encouraging this curiosity is why Sean’s kids are excited about science, which is a good thing, because getting children excited about science is crucial for our economy, for addressing health challenges and for smart decision-making in our everyday lives.

“It is 100% clear to anyone who has studied the current economy, and the projections of the future economy, that we will need more — vastly more — students who are comfortable in an environment that requires scientific thinking and familiarity with scientific tools,” says Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, and a former U.S. under secretary of education responsible for federal higher-education policies.

A resource used by millions

Have kids or looking to make science more accessible for yourself? Check out the free Ask a Biologist, which features learning materials across numerous topics and formats — including stories, games, activities, videos and more. Go to askabiologist.asu.edu.

That is a consensus opinion. The number of jobs requiring STEM knowledge is set to grow by more than 10 million in the next six years, according to a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. 

ASU is committed to helping graduates land great jobs in their career professions, including in-demand STEM jobs. ASU is ranked second for employability out of all public U.S. universities, according to the 2024 Global Employability University Ranking & Survey.

But to meet that demand, educators and others need to engage students in a way that makes science accessible and relevant enough that more students — maybe especially students who don’t think of themselves as scientists — want to pursue it.

In that we have work to do, Mitchell says. “We’re doing a terrible job teaching science,” he says. “The quality is underwhelming throughout America’s public and private education system.”

Margaret Honey, who chaired the committee that wrote the National Academies report, agrees. “Scientific thinking is a set of habits of mind that are about curiosity, understanding, evaluating information and evidence,” she says. “[It’s] about using those tools to build connections to others.”

But she says those tools — valuable in any job and any part of life — aren’t taught today. Instead science, she says, has been reduced to “a memorization exercise: Read the chapter, answer the questions at the end of the book.”

The current way of teaching science shortchanges students, Honey adds. It makes science inaccessible to those who do not naturally gravitate to it.

The current way of teaching science denies access to a framework grounded in science for finding answers to the questions life asks, Honey says. Understanding science is critical for navigating daily, everyday situations.

It comes in handy in the grocery store when you weigh the nutritional information of what goes into the cart. It proves critical when you’re advocating for a loved one and helping them navigate a medical situation, or, when navigating your own health journey, helping you understand what is happening to your body and your options for improving your health. It’s vital for understanding health information you hear about, and to distinguish the misinformation too.

Mitchell adds another point: When people have the tools to understand science deeply, they not only are better able to solve problems, they gain access to the wonder that can come from scientific understanding — be it the microscopic beauty seen upon observing a cell or the awe experienced when grappling with the enormity of the cosmos.

“Everyone deserves the ability to take a step back and remind themselves of the extraordinary beauty and majesty of the world that we live in and the world around us,” he says.

ASU has long recognized the need for more and better-educated STEM graduates.

“STEM has typically been taught the same way for all of time,” says Lisa Flesher, the head of ASU’s Education through Exploration Initiatives. “And nationally, nearly 50% of students who sign up to be in STEM fields drop out and do something else. We had to do something.”

Enter NeoBio, ASU’s paradigm-shifting approach to teaching science. Currently, in-person and online students use NeoBio in both of ASU’s intro biology courses.

NeoBio (“neo” is a Greek prefix that means “new”) has two main pillars: adaptive learning, which replaces the conventional, lecture-and-textbook learning of a traditional class — and immersion in a virtual reality lab, which uses powerful technology and narrative-style storytelling. The concept of “Neo” learning applying adaptive learning and immersion will eventually cover all kinds of inquiry, from biology to chemistry to art history and beyond.

Michael Angilletta, a professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and the associate dean for Learning Innovation at EdPlus, and his team have spent years studying what employers want and need. He says that teaching scientific skills better prepares students for the workforce.

“Those skills are transferable,” Angilletta says. “Because the job you have today may not be the one you have 10 years from now. What we’re doing is producing master learners in a way that’s better than what we have been doing.”

So far, it seems to be working. In a controlled study comparing student outcomes, learners randomly assigned to NeoBio biology classes outperformed their peers in traditional biology classes by almost a full letter grade. That improvement held across all demographic and socioeconomic groups and leveled the playing field between students who had studied biology in the past and those who had not.

John VandenBrooks, professor in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts and associate dean for Immersive Learning for EdPlus at ASU, says the new curriculum is more rigorous and requires more problem-solving than traditional courses.

“With this rigorous curriculum, we never could have imagined such outcomes,” VandenBrooks says.

Here’s how the adaptive learning portion of NeoBio works together In an online course. In a college biology class delivered online, instead of sitting in a lecture hall or reading from a textbook, you learn new concepts by watching short videos and immediately solving problems related to what you just learned.

Suppose you get one of those problems wrong and aren’t sure why. Instead of waiting to ask, the software will identify the concept you didn’t understand. And the very next prompt will teach you the information you misunderstood or forgot.

“Then you’re automatically given another similar problem,” Angilletta says. “So you have to solve it until you get it right.”

This happens in real time, and each student gets personalized refreshers.

One such student is Taylor Aschenbrenner, a physical therapist assistant in Kansas who is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in medical studies through ASU Online and the College of Health Solutions. She took the adaptive learning modules that are built into ASU’s introductory biology course, BIO181, and now is experiencing the modules in BIO182.

“Adaptive learning is extremely helpful. It gives you options to listen to the lecture, then you go ahead and take a quiz. And then if you didn’t quite understand something in the lecture, it goes through it with you. It tells you which questions you didn’t quite understand and you practice those,” she says.

“I also like that you can pace yourself, so you’re not getting thrown all this material at one time,” Aschenbrenner says. “I thought it was really well portioned out.”

Brooke Arneson, a student in Barrett, The Honors College, started hearing buzz about NeoBio’s virtual reality lab before she walked into the introductory biology classroom as a sophomore.

“So she’s like, ‘Brooke, it’s a virtual reality thing. It’s crazy!’” Arneson says, channeling her friend’s enthusiasm.

It’s called Dreamscape Learn, and it is unique in higher education.

When Arneson, a biomedical engineering major from Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, put on the virtual reality headset, she was thrilled when she saw the vibrant, colorful Alien Zoo, an immersive and beautiful setting for NeoBio.

This world is the creation of Dreamscape Learn, which Walter Parkes, the former head of DreamWorks Motion Pictures, leads in collaboration with ASU faculty. The result allows students to travel through the virtual space, to feel like they are flying around this foreign world, exploring its terrain and marveling at its alien beauty. In this imaginative setting, students become scientists to solve novel problems, analyze data and ultimately help the creatures in an intergalactic wildlife sanctuary.

The storytelling is compelling. The technology makes students feel like they are really in an Alien Zoo. And the combination seems to drive students to work harder.

“They care,” VandenBrooks says. “They feel like they’re the ones who have to solve the problems.”

Students taking NeoBio classes on campus experience Dreamscape in a fully immersive way — sitting in chairs that vibrate as they move through the virtual world and reaching out to touch buttons that appear in the ship they are piloting. ASU Online students get the same storytelling in a two-dimensional environment. And as virtual reality headsets become more affordable and more students have their own, ASU will begin offering the three-dimensional experience to online students as well.

“It’s the compelling storytelling that is key,” says VandenBrooks. “And that is available to our on-campus students and our ASU Online students.”

Flesher says that soon, ASU will have created an entire NeoSTEM ecosystem. Students working on any problem in the sciences or mathematics will be directed to the information they need to succeed.  

Bret Hovell is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who covered the White House, the Capitol and national politics for CBS News and ABC News. He has spent the last decade working in higher education.