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If you ask the average ten year old in America what a scientist looks like, they almost always describe 
an older man with crazy white hair 
and a lab coat. If you ask a group of 
adolescents how many have looked 
through a microscope, few raise their 
hands. If you discuss the implications 
of genetic research with a group of 
high school students, they’re likely to 
cut your next class. The reason why 
these students have such profound 
stereotypes of scientists and are less 
than enthusiastic about science’s 
impact on society is simple—the lack 
of exposure they receive during their 
pre-college education. According 
to a preliminary study conducted 
at Leicester University in England, 
students are often repeatedly 
confronted with stereotypes of science 
and scientists via television, cartoon, 
and comic book characters as well as 
uninformed adults or peers (McDuffi e 
2001).

A university set in a major city has 
the resources to change the mindset 
of urban students and engage them 
in the exciting fi eld of science. At 
Thomas Jefferson University (TJU), 
located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 

a team of scientists and educators has 
developed a program that breaks down 
the stereotypes of the science fi eld and 
allows students to engage in real, live 
experiments at their own schools. 

Why Are Such Programs 
Necessary? 

Around the world, educators face 
diffi cult choices in focusing educational 
goals with limited resources. In the 
United States, the No Child Left Behind 
Act, which guides school funding policy, 
currently places an emphasis on literacy 
and math in schools, with the result 
that best programs and practices in 
education are increasingly directed 
toward these two areas. Unfortunately, 
science education has become a 
lesser priority. Teachers are not given 
adequate resources to allow students to 
“get their hands dirty” during science 
lessons. If we want a society that is 
interested and knowledgeable about 
the need for scientifi c research, the 
basic principles of the life sciences 
need to be integrated early in the pre-
college curriculum (Sylwester 2001). 
We developed the Thomas Jefferson 
University Science Outreach Program 
(TJUSOP) to address this key issue 

and provide inquiry-based educational 
strategies through collaborative efforts 
between the university’s faculty and 
partnering school districts.

How Are We Making a Difference? 

Using the TJU facilities and 
laboratories, this innovative program 
integrates life science into the 
education of students between 
the ages of eight and eighteen 
from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, 
and Delaware. The mission of the 

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Open access, freely available online

Community Page

Breaking Down the Stereotypes of Science 
by Recruiting Young Scientists
Jamie Schaefer*, Steven A. Farber

Citation: Schaefer J, Farber SA (2004) Breaking down 
the stereotypes of science by recruiting young scien-
tists. PLoS Biol 2(10): e279.

Copyright: © 2004 Schaefer and Farber. This is an 
open-access article distributed under the terms of 
the Creative Commons Attribution License, which 
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc-
tion in any medium, provided the original work is 
properly cited. 

Abbreviations: TJU, Thomas Jefferson University; TJU-
SOP, Thomas Jefferson University Science Outreach 
Program

Jamie Schaefer and Steven Farber are at the Kimmel 
Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadel-
phia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. 
E-mail: jamie.schaefer@mail.tju.edu

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020279



PLoS Biology  |  www.plosbiology.org 1528 October 2004  |  Volume 2  |  Issue 10  |  e279

TJUSOP is to foster an enthusiasm for 
science education, promote interest 
in future participation in biology-
related fi elds, and allow all students 
the opportunity to learn life science 
through a hands-on, student-centered 
approach to instruction. The program 
is a supplement to the established 
curriculum, developed to support the 
content knowledge that is taught at 
each grade level. Teachers are invited 
to attend a professional development 
workshop held at the beginning of the 
school year where they receive training 
and resources for the units. Then, 
TJUSOP educators assist the teachers 
and students in their own classroom 
in running a weeklong experiment. 
This allows a large amount of group 
work to be completed simultaneously, 
even when teachers are faced with time 
constraints and large class sizes. This 
program is at no cost to the districts 
participating and is funded through 
the Jefferson Medical College and 
the Kimmel Cancer Center, as well 
as through the generosity of several 
local and national groups including 
Glaxo Smith Kline, the Christopher 
Ludwick Foundation, the Joan and 
Joseph Fernandez Family Foundation, 
the Brook J. Lenfest Foundation, the 
Foerderer Foundation, Drinker Biddle 
and Reath, and the Pennsylvania 
Department of Agriculture.

Since its inception in August of 
2002, this program has reached 
over 2,000 students and 75 teachers 
through our one-week zebrafi sh 
classroom experiments, our hands-
on zebrafi sh and Drosophila facility 
tours in conjunction with Dr. James 
Jaynes (a Drosophila scientist at the 
Kimmel Cancer Center), and our 
High School Mentorship program 
held each summer. One of the 

main goals of TJUSOP is to reach 
students from ethnic and economic 
groups that are underrepresented in 
the scientifi c community. We have 
successfully partnered with the School 
District of Philadelphia, where 84.9% 
of the students come from ethnic 
backgrounds other than Northern 
European and 80% of the students are 
eligible for free or reduced-cost meals. 
This district, among many others, 
receives pre- and post-instruction for 
all teachers and students at no cost 
to the district, allowing it to improve 
the quality of its science education. 
Although we target these school 
districts, it is important to note that the 
US is facing a problematic decrease 
in the number of Americans, of any 
background, entering the science and 
engineering workforce. According 
to a National Science Foundation 
report, “If action is not taken now to 
change these trends, we could reach 
2020 and fi nd that the ability of U.S. 
research and education institutions 
to regenerate has been damaged and 
that their preeminence has been lost 
to other areas of the world” (National 
Science Board Committee 2004). In 
regard to this unsettling discovery, 
TJUSOP welcomes all districts to 
participate and hopes to secure 
funding to double the number of 
students reached per year. 

 Anyone Can Be a Scientist

Our pedagogical approach to 
experiments allows students and 

teachers to become scientists, 
following the scientifi c process from 
beginning to end. Our live, one-
week classroom experiments for the 
fourth, seventh, and tenth grades 
use zebrafi sh, a popular model 
organism for genetic research. A 
curriculum sample is as follows: in 
the seventh-grade unit, the students 
mate albino (recessive trait) male and 
a wild-type (dominant trait) female 
zebrafi sh in order to observe what 
the offspring will look like. Students 
form hypotheses, such as that the 
young offspring will look like the 
mother and the older offspring will 
be striped. Throughout the week, 
students observe and record embryos 
developing a head, tail, and notochord 
and pigment development. By the end 
of the experiment, a live heartbeat can 
be seen as well as the individual blood 
cells fl owing throughout the larvae 
using a stereomicroscope TJUSOP 
provides (Figure 1).

Grade-specifi c scientifi c journals 
are given to the students. The journals 
contain an introduction to TJUSOP 
and the experiment, background 
information about zebrafi sh in 
research, scientifi c vocabulary words 
used throughout the unit, and a word 
search activity. Students are given the 
title of “Junior Scientists” in grades 
4 and 7 and “Student Scientists” in 
grade 10 and are asked to record the 
research question, a hypothesis, daily 
observations, and the conclusion of the 
experiment (Figure 2). 

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020279.g001

Figure 1. A Philadelphia Student Uses the 
Zeiss Stereomicroscope during the Weeklong 
Experiment

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020279.g002

Figure 2. An Example of a Seventh-Grade Journal Entry



PLoS Biology  |  www.plosbiology.org 1529

How to Break the Stereotypes 
of What Science Is

TJUSOP allows student participants 
to use scientifi c tools, talk with real 
scientists, and gain scientifi c knowledge 
so they can become informed members 
of their communities. Upon asking a 
fourth-grade student why she thought 
it was important to learn about science 
using zebrafi sh and the microscope, the 

student wrote, “I think it is important 
because we can fi nd facts about oursefs 
[sic].” This sounds like a good start. 

For more information about the 
program, or if you would like to 
get involved in the initiative, please 
contact Jamie Schaefer, at jamie.
Schaefer@mail.jci.tju.edu or visit 
http:⁄⁄www.kimmelcancercenter.org/
scienceoutreachprogram. �

References
McDuffi e TE Jr (2001) Scientists—Geeks and 

nerds? Dispelling teachers’ stereotypes of 
scientists. Sci Children May: 16–19.

National Science Board Committee (2004) An 
emerging and critical problem of the science 
and engineering labor force: A companion to 
science and engineering indicators 2004 (NSB 
04-07). National Science Foundation. Available: 
http:⁄⁄www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsb0407/start.htm 
via the Internet. Accessed 2 August 2004.

Sylwester R (2001) Genetics: The new staff 
development challenge. Educ Leadership 59: 
17–19.

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Open access, freely available online