Precocious Precognition: Targeting Tomorrow's University Researchers in Today's Middle Schools.

As Carnegie-classified research "intensive" and research "extensive" institutions plan to prepare for long-term status sustainability, targeting the intellectual capital in middle schools should be considered as a national educational partnership between the K-12 sector and higher education. This partnership initiative is suggested at a time when many members of the professorate are retiring over the coming decade.

Two compelling demographic shifts in pre-collegiate and post-secondary education provide the genesis for this discussion precis. First, most of the enrollment growth in American schools in the next several decades will manifest at the elementary and middle school levels. Second, nearly half of the American professorate is projected to retire between 2000-2010 at a time when "fewer and fewer persons, especially highly talented young students are opting for academic careers," according to Bowen and Schuster (1986), American Professors. This social and economic phenomenon presents a timely and vigilant opportunity for both the K-12 and higher education sectors to develop systemic synergism and strategically plan for producing tomorrow's scholarly researchers in today's middle schools. This critical coaction has future implications for the early foundation-building of intellectual capital for the nation's future research capacity and scholarly capability. Braskamp and Wergin (1998) in The Responsive University:

   Higher education today has an opportunity unique in its history to
   contribute to our society. Institutions of post-secondary education and
   their faculties are expected to become part of these partnerships and offer
   their creativity, knowledge, and analytical problem-solving skills. To some
   this is a new development. But in truth, the work of faculties has never
   existed in a vacuum. Their current research emphasis, for example, is due
   in part to past national priorities on defense and engineering. The problem
   is that today's priorities are different. External audiences are asking for
   a different kind of social relevance for higher education: They are asking
   it to enhance K-12 education and to better prepare the young for work among
   other demands. The academy will benefit by recognizing the depth of this
   concern ... (p. 63)

In Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest Boyer (1990) earlier warned, "linkages between the campus and contemporary problems must be strengthened" (p. 76). Boyer's conceptualization of the challenge, implicitly focuses on two paradoxical core elements for systemic evolution, strategic planning and educational development in the pre-collegiate and post-secondary sectors. The challenge is: who will supersede those who are now charged with fostering creativity and analysis in basic, applied, and action research at our premier "extensive" and "intensive" research institutions? The elements of "partnership" and "research" are at the center of discussion in this precis and collaterally serve as the driving points for "precocious precognition" among the nation's middle schools and research universities. The first middle school was developed in 1950 in Bay City, Michigan; however, the growth of the movement began in the 1960s, at a time when most of the nation's current aging faculty were entering the professoriate as young academicians. The middle school is a pivotal level for the early identification of future research skills and this level of learning should be the primary provenance for the future recruitment of students to the academic enterprise. In addition to the use of interdisciplinary themes in math, science, language arts and social studies, and the developmental characteristics of youth, this school-level promotes an "exploratory" curriculum, and "discovery" through a "common wheel" of intellectual experiences. Typical adolescent characteristics are highlighted in Table A by the National Middle School Association in the work of Allen and Stevens (1998) in Middle Grades Social Studies.

Table A Intellectual Adolescent Traits

* Early adolescents are able to initiate new and higher cognitive processing due to brain growth.

* Early adolescents are intensely curious.

* Early adolescents enjoy both manipulative and intellectually stimulating learning experiences, including active involvement rather than passive.

* Early adolescents are generally intellectually inhabited and find learning most interesting when it is related to immediate goals and interests.

* Early adolescents express a heightened egocentrism. They argue to clarify personal thinking as much as to convince others.

* Early adolescents exhibit strong desires for self-expression and preferences for creative activity.

* Early adolescence exhibits a growing interest in transporting self and others into other situations.

* Early adolescence display wide ranges of skills, interest, and abilities. Interests, attention spans, and concentrations alter during this period of growth and results generally in shorter rather than longer periods of focus.

* In their search for identity, early adolescents seek to understand the meaning and enigmas of life form many perspectives.

* Early adolescents are concerned with intellectual, philosophical, biological, sociological, moral, and ethical issues. They seek casual and correlative relationships. (p. 51)

Both rhetoric and research have addressed the issue of work-force readiness for the modern academy in the new millennium. However, the connection does appear to be made, rigorously, between the targeting of middle school youth as the fundamental derivation for replacing future faculty in specific disciplines of higher education.

There are other variables that effect this phenomenon as well. This shift is further compounded by a widening digital divide in an era of accelerated technological expansion; an increasing call for developing higher order "critical thinking skills" in both the classroom and the workplace among those who also supposedly need remedial development and are considered high risk; and a growing dialogue among educators to teach in K-12 sector as a microcosm of the collegiate environment with strategies like cooperative learning and cross-disciplinary, interdependent pedagogy. The middle school, as it is currently conceptualized, is where the pipeline begins for inquiring and discovery--the cornerstone of applied and basic research in American higher learning.

The scope of scientific research is divided into two categories by Bowen and Schuster. They are, "basic research which is intended to discover the laws of nature regardless of practical applicability, and applied research which is intended to discover ways of putting knowledge into practical use" (p. 16). In the study and development of both types of research in higher education, there are several characteristics that parallel the pedagogical rudiments of inquiry and inquisition of adolescents. In the work of Practical Research: Planning and Design by Paul Leedy (1974), those "discrete" characteristics encompass several notions. They are: research begins with a question in the mind of the researcher; research requires a plan; research demands a clear statement of the problem; research deals with the problem through subproblems; research seeks direction through appropriate hypotheses; research deals with facts and their meaning; and research is circular. Arguably, these tenets apply to academic investigation and cognitive exploration across all disciplines in the natural and social sciences.

In the modern middle school, adolescents are encouraged to develop exploratory skills among the myriad of multiple intelligences. Although not all are necessarily tapped in middle school, Howard Gardner (1993) in Frames of Mind articulate these intellectual amateurs. They include linguistic, spatial, logical abilities, kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalist. These areas could be further examined for developing early research skills among youth in middle schools. As more recently cited by Gardner (2000) in Creative Classrooms, "the purpose of education is to help us understand our various worlds -- the physical, biological, social personal." Callahan, Clark and Kellough (1995) in Teaching in the Middle and Secondary Schools suggest that "adolescents normally are self-motivated, active and interested in novelty." Thus, the second irrefutable question is: wouldn't this level of educational development be most appropriate for nurturing research skills at an early age? The authors suggest that adolescents are constantly interpreting their environment; tenacious, naturally curious, love to explore and are energetic. In Caught in the Middle: Educational Reform for Young Adolescents, the California State Department of Education (1987) suggest that these students tend to exhibit independent and critical thought; be intensively curious; reason with a hypothesis; experience the phenomenon of metacognition; use skills to real-life problems and prefer active versus passive learning experiences among the levels of intellectual development. Callahan and his colleagues, in Table B, suggest that "skillful use of discovery, inquiry, and problem-solving approaches allows teachers to teach students to learn and practice thinking skills," which notably parallel a core consistency with those more advanced areas in higher education research identified by Leedy.

Table B

Thinking Skills

* Recognizing, identifying, and defining problems

* Finding evidence

* Observing accurately and without prejudice

* Interpreting and reporting correctly

* Detecting faculty arguments, polemics, bias, prejudice, poor logic, and other evidence of faculty reasoning

* Detecting relationships, seeing parts in relationship to the whole, typing elements together, and recognizing similarities and differences

* Choosing between alternatives

* Making inferences and drawing conclusions

* Analyzing

* Separating fact from fiction

* Using knowledge as a departure for building new knowledge, ideas, and thought (p. 267).

In Teaching Strategies: A Better Guide for Better Instructions, Olrich and his colleagues (1985) in Table C similarly suggest some cross disciplinary and multi-subject topics that are appropriate for inquiry and discovery in lower-level education.

Table C

Topics Appropriate to Inquiry by Discipline

Discipline           Topics

Art                  Color wheels
                     Drawing: what happens to movement
English              Symbols in a masterpiece
                     Mapping for writing
History              Bias in recording history
                     Life in the Great Depression
Family living        Properties of different textiles
                     Family interactions
Industrial arts      Commonalities of period design
                     Hardware choices
Languages            Cultural differences in prefixes
                     comparing similar objects, e.g., tickets,
                     maps, advertisements
Music                Infer style moods
                     Establish patterns from different composers
Physical education   Disease control
                     Athletic injuries
Science              Animal communication
                     Chemical reactions
Social studies       Demographic trends
                     Cultural geographical similarities and
                     differences
Theater arts         Social impact of playwright
                     Symbolism in a set design (p.278)

In Teaching for Thinking (1986), Raths and his colleagues likewise recommend projects and investigations for middle school adolescents. They find that this type of work is more appropriate for junior and senior high school students, but it is also given in the upper grades of elementary school (hence, middle school age). There is a myriad of teaching modalities and instructional models that could be prescribed for cultivating these types of research enhancement skills. Joyce and Weil (1972) in Models of Teaching chronicled many years ago, several conventional teaching prototypes, based on major theorists, that remain applicable to today's educational setting. Table D highlights some selected excerpts from their work:

Table D

Selected Models of Teaching for Developing Research

Model                    Major Theorist           Family or
                                                  Orientation

Inductive Teaching       Hilda Taba               Information
Model                                             Processing
Inquiry Training Model   Richard Suchman          Information
                                                  Processing

Science Inquiry Model    Joseph J. Schwab (also   Information
                         much of the Curriculum   Processing
                         Reform Movement; see
                         Jerome Burner The
                         Process of Education
                         for the rationale)

Advance Organizer        David Ausubel            Information
Model                                             Processing

Social Inquiry Model     Byron Massialas          Social Interaction
                         Benjamin Cox

Synectics Model          William Gordon           Person

Model                    Mission or Goals for
                         which Applicable

Inductive Teaching       Primarily for development of
Model                    inductive mental processes and
                         academic reasoning or theory-
Inquiry Training Model   building, but these capacities are
                         useful for personal and social
                         goals as well.

Science Inquiry Model    Designed to teach the research
                         system of the discipline but also
                         expected to have effects in other
                         domains (i.e., sociological
                         methods may be taught in order
                         to increase social understanding
                         and social problem solving).

Advance Organizer        Designed to increase the
Model                    efficiency of information-
                         processing capacities to
                         meaningfully absorb and relate
                         bodies of knowledge.

Social Inquiry Model     Social problem-solving primarily
                         through academic inquiry and
                         logical reasoning.

Synectics Model          Personal development of
                         creativity and creative problem-
                         solving (p. 11-13)

Employing the common "educational objectives" taxonomy classified by Benjamin Bloom, these models could be considered for the middle school delivery system--particularly the higher level classifications of analysis and synthesis. The fourth level, "analysis," emphasizes the breakdown of the material into its constituents parts and detection of the relationships of the parts and of the way they are organized. "Synthesis," the fifth level, is defined as the "putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole." Lesson plans could be implemented based on the above traits, skills and topics.

Thomas Armstrong (1998) in the Awakening Genius in the Classroom, describes the qualities that build on the intrinsic genius of young people, and they are most appropriate to reiterate in this precis. These qualities include curiosity, imagination, creativity, wonder, and inventiveness. There are others, but these particular individual cognitive properties relate to the future advancement of adolescent minds and the early development of research skills in middle schools. These skills lay the common ground work in the future systemic learning between middle schools and universities. Research institutions have been charged to develop research-based charters, as well as, at the undergraduate level, research initiatives to improve learning. Toward this end, middle school youth can re-apply their early developed skills, abilities and later competencies in college. An excellent resource here is Teaching Middle School Students to be Active Researchers by Judith M. Zorfass with Harriet Copel, and Practical Action Research for Positive Change, by Richard A. Schmuck. Among the areas that have been recommended by the Carnegie Foundation for reinventing undergraduate education at research universities are: making research-based learning the standard; constricting an inquiry-based freshman year; removing barriers to interdisciplinary education; and using information technology creatively. As the academy's faculty resources continue to downsize, both K-12 and higher education are challenged to plant the seeds for the future intellectual capital at our research institutions. The academic marketplace will experience an unprecedented transformational exodus, among the faculty ranks, that will not necessarily manifest as the result of retirement. The academy is also projected to experience voluntary departures, involuntary separations, work force, transitions, professional transfer and life expiration.

Both pre-collegiate and post-secondary sectors should follow a systemic-based articulation framework for fostering alliances of this scope and nature. The Carnegie Foundation's School and College by Gene Macroff describes five basic principles for alliance-building collaborative projects to succeed. First, educators at both levels must agree that they have common problems. Second, traditional academic territories must be overcome. Third, collaboration must be sharply focused. Fourth, recognition should be given to those who participate in the collaboration. And, fifth, for the collaboration to work, there must be focus on action. Turning a systemic vision into practice requires that a strategic plan be implemented with measurable goals and a reasonable timeframe with resources to achieve them. The demands for the new technological, global academy will require educational planners to implement early intervention and recruitment in the middle school, where the embryonic skills of research inquiry and discovery can be developed. To this end, the following framework is suggested, as originally conceptualized by Rigden (1990) in Restructuring Schools. It has been re-conceptualized for this precis, relative to relationship-building between pre-collegiate and post-secondary levels of education.

* In the spirit of the increasingly widespread movement of "school-college" partnerships and collaboratives, school districts must develop research integration initiatives with neighboring colleges and universities (perhaps on-line and onsite).

* Examine the methods and means to integrate research-enhancement technology across the entire curriculum; teach in the classroom as a "microcosm" of the college classroom.

* Formulate these methods and means into a step-by-step plan with measurable and achievable lesson plan objectives for its implementation on a school-wide or college-wide basis.

* Develop, as part of the strategic plan, a "cadre" of energetic, enthusiastic, and committed professionals on the campus whose responsibility will be to innovate, intervene, initiate, and implement ways to bridge inquiry and discovery for research skill development.

* Establish a reward system for faculty and students who teach research and developmental skills with objectives and outcome plans.

* Institute a school-wide or college-wide-training and development effort for one-or more of the models in Tables A-D.

* Actively identify and encumber financial, technological and human resources.

* Constantly review with all faculty, the educational and economic forces affecting the systemic educational process.

* Monitor external as well as internal systems procedures and policies which dictate the educational culture.

* Deliberately and decisively remedy conflicts, impediments, barriers or other challenges to success and progress upward; build a intersections and a consensus when necessary.

* Monitor and evaluate the plan on an ongoing basis -- particularly as related to the designation and distribution of fiscal, human and facility resources.

* Actively build alliances or engage in related partnerships with business and government to meet the challenges of the future academy.

* Include this systemic alliance as part of the campus outreach planning effort and comprehensive infrastructure for early recruitment.

These outreach initiatives might include sponsored scholarships for exceptional high school students as mentors to middle school teachers and giving faculty institutional recognition for meeting two of the dimensions; in the professorial scope--service and scholarship. Likewise, graduate and professional students could serve as preceptors to students. In sum, preparing future faculty from our present human resources is key to the economic vitality and heuristic veracity in our growing academy. Indeed, this is precocious precognition.

References

Allen, M., & Stevens, K. (1998). Middle School Grades Social Studies. Allyn and Bacon: Boston.

Armstrong, T., (1998). Awakening Genius in the Classroom. ASCD: Alexandria.

Bloom, B. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. McKay, NY.

Bowen, H., & Schuster, J. (1986). American Professors: A National Resource. Oxford Press: NY.

Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate. Carnegie Foundation: Princeton.

Braskamp, L., & Wergin (1998). Forming New, Social Partnerships, in The Responsive University. William Tierney, Ed. John Hopkins Press: Baltimore.

California State Department of Education (1987). Caught in the Middle : Educational Reform for Young Adolescents. Sacramento, CA.

Callahan, J., Clark, L., & Kelough, R. (1995). Teaching in the Middle and Secondary Schools. Prentice-Hall: NJ.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind. Basic Books: NY.

Gardner, M (2000). Making the Most of Young Minds in Creative Classroom. (Vol 65, No. 6 In Education Digest).

Joyce, B., & Weil, M. (1972). Models of Teaching. Prentice-Hall: NJ.

Leedy, P. (1974). Practical research: Planning and Design. Macmillan: NY.

Maeroff, G. (1984). School and College. Carnegie Foundation: Princeton, NJ.

Orlich, D., Harder, P., Callahan, R., Karvas, C., Kavchak, D., Dendugrass, R., & Keogh (1985). Teaching Strategies: A Guide to Better Instruction. Heath: Lexington.

Raths, L., Wasserman, S., Jonas, A., & Rotnstein, A., (1986). Teaching for Thinking: Theory, Strategies and Activities for the Classroom. Teachers College: NY.

Rigden, D. (1990). Restructuring Schools: Schools for Better Student Learning. Council Aid to Education: NY.

Schmuck, R. (1997). Practical Action Research for Positive Change. Skylight: Arlington, VA.

Zorfass, J. & Copel, H. (1998). Teaching Middle School Students to be Active Researchers. ASCD: Alexandria, VA.

Dr. Stevenson, Eminent Scholar, Center for Urban Education & Innovation.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Stevenson, Center for Urban Education and Innovation, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199.