Mary Budd Rowe: A Storyteller of Science

Abstract

This article examines Mary Budd Rowe’s groundbreaking and far-reaching contributions to science education. Rowe is best known
for her research on wait-time: the idea that teachers can improve the quality and length of classroom discussions by waiting
at least 3s before and after student responses. Her wait-time research grew from and helped inform her staunch advocacy of
science education as inquiry; Rowe saw wonder and excitement as central to the teaching and learning of science. She spent
much of her professional life designing professional development experiences and innovative curriculum materials to help teachers,
particularly elementary school teachers, enact inquiry in their classrooms.

Full text

Mary Budd Rowe: A Storyteller of Science
Julie A. Bianchini
Abstract: This article examines Mary Budd Rowe’s ground-breaking and far-reaching
contributions to science education. Rowe is best known for her research on wait-time: the idea
that teachers can improve the quality and length of classroom discussions by waiting at least 3
seconds before and after student responses. Her wait-time research grew from and helped inform
her staunch advocacy of science education as inquiry; Rowe saw wonder and excitement as
central to the teaching and learning of science. She spent much of her professional life designing
professional development experiences and innovative curriculum materials to help teachers,
particularly elementary school teachers, enact inquiry in their classrooms.
Keywords: Mary Budd Rowe, wait-time, fate control, inquiry, NSF-funded curricula
Dr. Mary Budd Rowe saw science as “‘a special kind of story-making’” (Patrick, 1992, p.
2). Across her science education career, Rowe repeatedly argued against representations of
science as long lists of vocabulary terms, disconnected facts, or right answers. Rather, Rowe
encouraged teachers and students to understand science as story – as beginning with wonder,
arguing from evidence, and proposing best-at-the-time explanations. The central and recurrent
theme in such stories, she underscored, should be the excitement and importance of inquiring
into the world around us.
Rowe regularly infused her own stories about science and science education into
discussions with students, teachers, and colleagues – whether in informal conversations with a
doctoral student or in scripted presentations to large audiences. These stories provide a lens to
view both who Rowe was as a science educator and how she thought science should be taught
and learned in and out of schools. I begin this discussion of Mary Budd Rowe’s contributions to
science education with my favorite story about her told in her own words.
It was a strange sight: a man, standing before a fountain, watching the falling water and
tilting his head from side to side. Drawing closer, I saw he was rapidly moving the
fingers of his right hand up and down in front of his face. I was in seventh grade, visiting

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Princeton University with my science class, and the man at the fountain was Albert
Einstein. For several minutes, he continued silently flicking his fingers. Then he turned
and asked, “Can you do it? Can you see the individual drops?” Copying him, I spread
my fingers and moved them up and down before my eyes. Suddenly the fountain’s
stream seemed to freeze into individual droplets. For some time, the two of us stood
there perfecting our strobe technique. Then, as the professor turned to leave, he looked
me in the eye and said, “Never forget that science is just that kind of exploring and fun.”
Nearly half a century later, I’ve spent an entire career trying to impart Einstein’s words to
adults and children all over the world: Science is exploring, and exploring is fun. (Rowe,
1995, pp. 177-178)
Wait-time Research
Rowe’s career in science education is most clearly marked by her pioneering research on
wait-time. Simply put, she found that the length and quality of students’ responses depended on
the time teachers gave students to answer questions. Increasing the amount of time teachers
waited for a response from less than 1 second to at least 3 seconds enhanced the language and
logic of students’ answers. The concept of wait-time should be understood as linked to Rowe’s
desire to improve inquiry instruction in science. It emerged from her involvement in two
different research projects conducted in the late 1960s: a study of high school students’
discussions of findings in biology laboratories with her former advisor, Paul DeHart Hurd, and
an investigation of Harlem elementary school classes while an assistant professor at Columbia
University. From hundreds of tapes of classroom interactions collected across these two studies,
Rowe explained, a handful surfaced where teachers’ pacing of classroom discourse was slower
and the quality of students’ responses higher (Rowe, 1982).

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Rowe identified two types of wait-time: Wait-time 1 referred to the time after a teacher
asked a question; wait-time 2, to the time after a student responded. She conducted a series of
studies that involved either small groups or whole classes of elementary students using hands-on,
inquiry-oriented curricular materials (see Rowe, 1974a, for examples of such studies). She
employed a servo-chart plotter to track the speech, pauses, and silences of teachers and students;
in most cases, teacher-student interactions proceeded so quickly that a stopwatch was found to be
inaccurate. In classes where teachers did not attend to wait-time, whole class discussions
included few pauses across teacher questions, brief student responses, and teacher repetition of
student ideas. Discussions led by teachers who had learned to extend the time they waited before
and after questions, in contrast, looked markedly different: Teachers posed different kinds of
questions, more students in the class participated, student responses were more thoughtful,
students posed their own questions, and students were more likely to interact with one another.
Rowe argued that extended wait-time supported and enhanced the teaching and learning of
science through inquiry:
To “grow,” a complex thought system requires a great deal of shared experience and
conversation. It is in talking about what we have done and observed, and in arguing
about what we make of our experiences, that ideas multiply, become refined, and finally
produce new questions and further explorations. (Rowe, 1986, p. 43)
While most teachers and researchers in science education are familiar with the basics of
Rowe’s wait-time construct described above, fewer understand the larger scope and more
intricate arguments of her wait-time research. Rowe (1974a), for example, recommended
teachers not only extend wait-time, but reconceptualize the larger classroom discourse structure
as well. She described the classroom as a two-player system: The teacher was one player and

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the students, the other. Theoretically, each player had access to four types of verbal moves:
structuring, soliciting, responding, and reacting. In most classroom conversations, including
those held in most inquiry classrooms, teachers routinely used all four types of verbal moves
while students used only one type (responding). Rowe suggested teachers adopt a different
model of classroom interaction, one of joint investigation or reasonable conversation, where both
teachers and students employed all four moves available. Conversations where students
suggested experiments (structuring) and responded to each other’s statements (responding and
reacting), Rowe elaborated, better mirrored the purposes and practices of scientists conducting
inquiry.
Further, Rowe’s investigations on wait-time led her to examine differential opportunities
for learning provided to high versus low achieving students. Rowe found that a few select
students typically dominated classroom conversations; with increased wait-time, more students
in a given class, particularly more students from underserved groups, participated in such
discussions. Equally important, use of extended wait-time appeared to change teachers’
expectations of what some students could do: Teachers expressed surprise at the high quality of
responses by students who they had previously dismissed as low achieving. They noted that
such students indeed had important and salient insights to share (Rowe, 1969). In one study, for
example, Rowe (1974a) asked 26 elementary teachers to identify their five highest and five
lowest achieving students. Before instruction in wait-time, these teachers routinely waited 2
seconds for their top five students to respond to a question while they waited less than 1 second
for their bottom five. When wait-time was extended to 3 seconds, participation of marginalized
students increased.

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Differences in wait-time given to those students perceived as high or low achieving, in
turn, led Rowe (1974a) to examine the reward structure of classroom conversations. She found
most teachers frequently and regularly praised and sanctioned their students. Further, she found
that those students labeled low achieving received less relevant praise and more criticism from
their teachers than those students considered high achieving. As with much of her work, Rowe
used a constellation of theories to support her argument against teachers’ use of frequent verbal
rewards. She “proposed that short wait-times coupled with a strong sanctioning pattern will tend
to induce a low sense of fate control on the part of the student” (Rowe, 1974c, p. 291). Fate
control is the sense that what one does matters; this construct will be discussed below in greater
detail. Operationally, frequent teacher verbal rewards constrained students’ innovative problem
solving and shortened their persistence on inquiry tasks. Rowe encouraged teachers to revise
their reward structure – their pattern of praise and sanctions – and adopt a neutral stance toward
student responses. In other words, Rowe asked teachers to construct safe and supportive learning
communities where students could test ideas, propose explanations, and argue evidence, again,
toward the goal of implementing authentic inquiry instruction in science classrooms.
Lastly, Rowe translated lessons learned from research on wait-time into suggestions for
those lecturing in high school and college classrooms. In her 1983 article “Getting Chemistry
Off the Killer Course List,” she argued that students rarely capture more than 30% of
information provided in a lecture because of lapses in memory. To narrow this gap between
information provided by teachers and noted by students, Rowe recommended teachers pause for
two minutes during every 8 to 12 minutes of lecture so that triads of students could share notes
and clarify questions. Present in this short article was Rowe’s common critique of traditional
science instruction: too many concepts and symbols covered in too many pages of text. Present

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too was Rowe’s longtime interest with technology in education: She suggested computers could
help improve student understanding of chemistry concepts by providing specialized applications
and problems to supplement lectures and texts.
Since first proposed by Rowe, wait-time has been studied in a wide range of contexts and
grade levels. Francis Lawlor, Mary’s first doctoral student, took part in many of the wait-time
studies reported above. He noted: “[Mary’s] work [on wait-time] produced a great number of
research studies all over the country. Mary did object to making wait-time into a rigid formula
that could produce major results in isolation from the whole student inquiry process.” Although
a simple idea, studies of teacher training and implementation made clear that teachers found
wait-time a difficult concept to incorporate into their everyday practice (Rowe, 1986).
Research on Fate Control
Less well known than Rowe’s work on wait-time is her research on fate control, a
concept closely allied to the social learning theory locus-of-control (Rowe, 1974c). Her interest
in fate control emerged during her research on wait-time – from investigating the interaction
between teachers’ verbal rewards and students’ ability to persist in completing inquiry tasks.
Rowe understood students’ confidence to connect to how they view life – as a “crap shoot” with
no influence on outcomes or as a “bowling match” where outcomes could be influenced. If
students understand the world as a craps game (if they have an external locus-of-control), she
explained, their problem-solving processes are different than if they view the world as a bowling
game (if they have an internal locus-of-control). The craps view stresses luck, chance, and
powerful others; the bowler, effort, practice, and persistence. Views of the world as a game of
chance, Rowe continued, are incompatible with the norms and methods of science: Science
requires its practitioners to be attuned to cause-and-effect, to understand that phenomena emerge

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from processes they can discover, and to take thoughtful and reasoned action. As with wait-time,
Rowe’s purpose in investigating fate control was to better understand how to help all students
learn science through inquiry (see, for examples, Rowe, 1978, 1983b).
More specifically, Rowe investigated the relationship between students’ fate control and
the quality and persistence of their problem-solving. Rowe (1974c) conducted a pilot study to
determine if short wait-times coupled with intense sanctioning would maintain or foster a craps
model in students. Thirty second-graders from two inner city schools participated: 10 had
learned science using the Science Curriculum Improvement Study materials (SCIS) plus a
prolonged wait-time and low reward schedule; 10, using SCIS only; and 10, using no science
program at all. Each student was presented with a device called the whirley-bird from the SCIS
program and encouraged to manipulate it to discover relationships. If and when a student
identified a relationship, the researcher was to disagree up to three times. Rowe expected
students in the first group to have a higher sense of fate control and to persist longer in the
whirley-bird task. She found that this was indeed the case (Rowe, 1974c).
In her early years at the University of Florida at Gainesville, Rowe received a grant from
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study fate control on a much larger scale – to
continue to investigate how fate control influences students’ abilities to solve science problems.
Rowe constructed a research trailer with two mini-classrooms at each end and then traveled to
105 classrooms at 29 schools located in 12 counties in Florida. The sample was representative of
rural, urban, and suburban areas and of diverse socioeconomic levels. Three hundred student
pairs were investigated – matched by fate control orientation, sex, and ethnicity. These pairs of
students completed three inquiry tasks: the assembly of a crystal radio, the rolling of cylinders
down a ramp, and the spinning of a table. One of her collaborators on this research project,

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Nathan Swift, a now retired professor from State University of New York, Oswego, noted
findings from this study “never materialized completely although she had very intriguing data.”
“The data didn’t have any clear sensibility to it,” he elaborated. Students were pre-tested using
two different fate orientation instruments, but the two instruments did not correlate in any
sensible way. What was clear, he continued, was that students found the inquiry tasks engaging
and intriguing: “When the kids got into the research trailer, doing those simple experiments.
What they were doing in the research trailer was so much more interesting than what they were
doing in their classrooms.”
Rowe finally published a subset of findings from this extensive research project with a
former doctoral student, June Dewey Main, in the early 1990s (Main & Rowe, 1993). Main and
Rowe found that fate control (as measured by only one of the two fate orientation instruments)
both shaped and failed to shape students’ completion of the cylinder task. Despite expectations
to the contrary, students with internal versus external locus-of-control did not exhibit different
problem-solving strategies. However, students with an internal locus-of-control did present
more accurate solutions and performed better on an after-task assessment.
One can see Rowe’s integration of fate control ideas into her insistence that science
teachers and students ask the question, “So what?” She developed a “So What?” chart for
science teachers, curriculum developers, and policy makers to use in designing and
implementing instruction (see Rowe, 1978, 1983b). Teachers and students were to move through
four components: Ways of Knowing (What do I know? Why do I believe it? What is the
evidence?); Actions and Applications (What do I infer? What must I do with what I know?
What are the options? Do I know when to take action?); Consequences (Do I know what would
happen?); and Values (Do I care? Do I value the outcome? Who cares?). Rowe argued

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movement through these four components would ensure that the teaching and learning of science
was made interesting and relevant.
Efforts to Transform Science Education
Connecting these two lines of research was Rowe’s conviction that science teaching and
learning should be an adventure filled with questions, hands-on investigations, arguments from
evidence, and the making of meaning. Across her four decades of scholarship, in many of her
presentations and publications, she underscored the need for a sense of wonder in science
classrooms. She also routinely criticized the way science was traditionally taught and learned in
the US; it is striking how many of the reasons she identified for inquiry’s absence and the
arguments she made for its importance still ring true today.
For the most part, teachers and texts concentrate on the question “What do I know?”
Emphasis on this question tends to limit the teacher’s function to one of conveying
information and correcting student recitations. . . . The students’ primary responsibility is
to learn the official story well enough to be able to write it or recite it correctly,
regardless of whether they understand it or believe it. . . . Science books have grown by
accretion, packed with more concepts per page, more pages per book, and more topics to
be “covered” than ever before. High-school science texts average between seven and ten
new concepts, terms, or symbols per page. Typically, the 300 to 350 pages assigned
during a school year means that students are expected to learn between 2,400 and 3,000
terms and symbols per science course. Thus, in a school year, . . . twenty concepts would
have to be covered per period, an average of one every two minutes. (Rowe, 1983b, pp.
126-127)

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Would it not be better for both teachers and students if science were taught as a process of
inquiry? Rowe concluded. Much of her professional life was spent trying to find ways to help
teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, enact inquiry in their classrooms.
Science and Science Teaching as Inquiry
Rowe was a staunch advocate of inquiry curricular materials and instructional strategies.
She focused her efforts on trying to infuse inquiry into elementary school classrooms where she
saw children as naturally curious. Scientific concepts experienced and understood early on, she
explained, would prevent the need to unlearn everyday conceptions later. Science can help
students develop better explanatory systems and language fluency, she emphasized. Expensive
equipment is not needed for such inquiry investigations, Rowe (1983b) added; rather, everyday
materials can be used to teach children science through inquiry. Rowe’s passion for hands-on,
minds-on science was evidence during her tenure as a state science coordinator for Colorado in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. She traveled in a trailer to rural areas of the state to demonstrate
for teachers ways of using their natural environment to teach science. In this trailer, students,
many for the first time, were able to investigate science concepts through hands-on activities,
rather than simply hear about them through dry classroom lecturers.
As a graduate student and newly minted PhD, Rowe was involved in many of the NSF-
funded elementary science curriculum projects generated in the post-Sputnik era. For example,
she worked with Robert Karplus, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, on the
Science Curriculum Improvement Study, or SCIS, elementary program. She also served as an
advisor to the curriculum developers of Science – A Process Approach, Elementary Science
Study, and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. She drew from her interests in group
dynamics, change agent behavior, and systems analysis to develop and implement workshops on

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NSF elementary curricular materials for teams of teachers, administrators, science educators, and
scientists from across the country. These were intensive two-week experiences where
participants conducted hands-on experiments themselves. Teams were then expected to organize
workshops for other teachers and administrators back in their local context.
While an assistant professor at Columbia, Rowe initiated Science and the Inner City, a
teacher professional development and curricular innovation project centered on inquiry at the
elementary school level. She worked with teams of teachers in each of several schools in
Harlem, providing workshops for these teachers, supporting them during the year through
classroom visits, and furnishing materials for their inquiry lessons. Lessons were drawn from the
then recently developed, NSF-funded elementary curricula, but employed inexpensive, everyday
materials. Francis Lawlor elaborated on this effort to infuse science as inquiry into Harlem
elementary schools:
Mary did not believe in the use of textbooks. . . . She thought that the kids were the
teacher’s textbook. The teacher was doing inquiry with the children as they did inquiry
with the materials. It was up to the teacher to learn from the students and from what
difficulties they were finding.
As stated above, some of Rowe’s research on wait-time was conducted in these inquiry
classrooms in Harlem. Rowe thought students more likely to look to their teacher for right
answers than to use evidence grounded in materials to support their claims. She connected the
need to improve the quality of discussions between teachers and students to the demands placed
on students when conducting inquiry investigations.
Children need to monitor their materials more carefully than they monitor the teacher’s
face. Ideas can be modified or even discarded if the evidence requires. No particular

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point of view in the class is more sacred than another. What counts is what happens in
the system of materials. Authority rests with the idea that ‘works.’ (Rowe, 1969, p. 12)
In later years, Rowe turned her attention back to these very same inquiry materials funded by
NSF in an effort to preserve them for future generations. This will be discussed further in the
section on technology below.
Rowe’s interest in inquiry extended beyond both NSF-funded curricula and the US
context. First published in 1973, Rowe wrote a science methods text for preservice and
inservice elementary school teachers: Teaching Science as Continuous Inquiry. The text was
divided into four sections: basic concepts and processes grounding inquiry science curricula;
experiments and investigations to do with children; strategies for teaching science as inquiry; and
strategies for evaluating and maintaining inquiry science programs. Across sections, Rowe
emphasized science as story:
In this book, science is viewed as a kind of journey into the unknown, with all the
uncertainties that new ventures entail. Doing science means using intuition; it means
creating abstract ideas out of concrete instances, in order to find out:
1. How things work (description)
2. Why they probably work that way (explanation)
3. What must be done to make them happen in other situations (control)
The reader accustomed to standard textbook formats need to be alerted that much of this
book reads more like nonfiction literature than a text. (Rowe, 1978, p. x)
In 1979, she served as a member of a National Academy of Sciences delegation to China.
Dr. J. Myron Atkin, now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, recounted the following
story:

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By 1979, the Chinese were desperate to reconstruct science education. So they invited
the National Academy of Sciences to put together a delegation who would come over for
two weeks and visit schools in China and make recommendations to the Chinese about
how their science education might be improved. Thirteen of us went. Paul Hurd chaired
the delegation. Jim Rutherford was on it. And Mary Budd was on it…. [One day,] Mary
and I were in an elementary school classroom. Mary had the children involved in looking
at things through a hand lens. She looked at me; I was wearing short sleeves. “Take your
hand lens and go over and look at Professor Atkin’s hairs on his arms.” The kids came
all around me with their hand lens to look at my arms. She got a good chuckle at that.
As a visiting professor at Stanford in the early 1990s, Rowe served as an advisor to a
team of scientists and science teachers working to develop an integrated human biology
curriculum for middle school students. She also conducted her last research project on an
innovative, inquiry-oriented chemistry curriculum for high school students: Chemistry in the
Community. The resulting case study of ChemCom was one of eight such studies constructed of
science and mathematics innovation in the United States (see Rowe, Montgomery, Midling, &
Keating, 1997). The research project was funded by the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD).
Using Technology to Enhance Science Education
Mary Budd Rowe was recognized as a pioneer in the use of technology in science
education. She purchased one of the first portable video recorders, a Sony camera, to capture
classroom data for her wait-time research in the 1960s. Reflecting her view of video as a crucial
medium of communication, in later years, she served as a science adviser for the children’s
television programs Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact, and Voyage of the Mimi. She also

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developed a video series, The Science Helper Video Series, to teach physical science concepts
and instructional strategies to elementary school teachers. These eight videos included
instruction in science concepts, like force, motion, and pressure. Each ended with Rowe working
with a small group of students to illustrate how concepts covered in the video could be translated
into the classroom. This video series remains available to professional developers and teachers
through the original publisher, The Learning Team.
Rowe was also one of the first to use CD-ROM technology for educational purposes.
Although common today, in the 1980s, few had heard of CDs. More specifically, in the 1980s,
Rowe began work on a Science Helper CD to provide a searchable database of thousands of
lesson plans from out-of-print, or hard-to-find, NSF-funded science curriculum projects from the
1960s and 1970s. Rowe, as stated above, was intimately involved in the design and
dissemination of many NSF-funded elementary curricular projects; she was afraid these
potentially rich inquiry resources would be lost to future generations of teachers and students if
not collected, organized, and preserved. Rowe followed development of the Science Helper CD
with a Culture and Technology CD for similar out-of-print, NSF-funded social studies curricula.
The Science Helper CD is still published by The Learning Team; the Culture and Technology
CD is no longer available.
To repeat, Rowe was one of the first outside of the military to use CD-ROM technology
and one of the first to design an interface to allow users to sift through digital material. Francis
Lawlor described the Science Helper project in detail:
A major effort by Mary involved the preservation of the final products of all the years [of
post-Sputnik, NSF-sponsored curriculum materials]. She proposed archiving this
material on some sort of new device. When Mary called me from Washington at some

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time in the eighties, as I recall, very excited about a new technology developed by the
Navy for access to super compact digitized equipment manuals on warships, I thought
that she had gone “round the bend.” She had seen a demo of this radical storage
technology at some military research center and immediately decided that it would be a
fantastic educational tool for curriculum development and for classrooms. Thousands of
pages of information on some sort of disk? . . . It was an idea very ahead of its time. . . .
Mary introduced the first elementary school Science Helper CD at a time when no school
had a means of playing one. She got a workshop funded to introduce school
superintendents and science coordinators to the materials and had to supply each one with
a CD player to be plugged into a computer. This disk was said to be [one of] the first
educational uses of the CD.
Finally, Mary’s interest in technology led to work on electronic teacher communities in
the 1990s. Rowe, for example, established and researched a computer network for teams of
middle school teachers involved in the design and pilot testing of an integrated curriculum
developed at Stanford University, Human Biology. In her case study of ChemCom for the OECD
research project, she also investigated the use of an electronic bulletin board by teachers
implementing the innovative curriculum. While chat rooms, blogs, and on-line courses are
common today, at that point in time, encouraging teachers separated by grades, schools, and
states to communicate with one another using computers was considered innovative.
Rowe’s work in technology once again foregrounds the importance she placed on
transforming the way science is taught and learned in classrooms. Edward Britton, a former
doctoral student of Mary’s and current Associate Director of WestEd’s Mathematics, Science

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and Technology program, agreed: Rowe was intent on helping real teachers teach science to real
students in interesting and engaging ways.
She kept moving back and forth across the line between primary research around
academic questions to build a body of knowledge and applied research on how to make a
difference with teachers. . . . What motivated her to keep crossing that line? She just
couldn’t help wanting to make a difference. She wanted people to use things and do
things and change things.
Rowe’s Lasting Influence on Science Education
Mary Budd Rowe’s life was one of both constants and changes. She grew up in New
Jersey and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and physics education from New Jersey State
University in 1947. She taught science to students in Santa Barbara, California and overseas at
military schools in Germany, as well as served as a state science coordinator in Colorado. She
received a master’s in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1954 and ten years
later, her doctorate in science education from Stanford University. Her doctoral work was
completed under the mentorship of another giant in the field of science education, Paul DeHart
Hurd. In her dissertation, The Influence of Context-learning on Solution of Task-oriented
Science Problems which Share Concepts: A Study in Elementary Science Education, Rowe
investigated how 60 first grade boys approached and solved problems in magnetism across six
different instructional contexts.
Across time and professional settings, Rowe’s focus remained elementary science
education and teacher professional development. Rowe served as an assistant professor at
Columbia University before making her way to the University of Florida at Gainesville in the
early 1970s. She was a division director for Research in Science Education at the National

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Science Foundation from 1976 to 1980. In 1983, she became an advisory board member to
NSF’s Research in Science Education program. She was elected president of the National
Science Teachers Association in 1989 and later received its most prestigious honor, the Robert
H. Carleton Award. She became a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow
for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Rowe was a visiting professor at
Stanford’s School of Education in the years before her death in 1996. I was one of her last
graduate students.
Rowe was said to be more interested in generating and investigating new ideas than in
publishing findings from research studies. In light of the large amount of data she collected on
fate control, for example, she wrote little of her findings. Patricia Swift, a former research
associate at State University of New York, Oswego and a close colleague of Rowe, explained,
“The very process of publishing was so dull to her. [Rather,] she loved getting the new ideas,
seeing the research work put together, collecting data, talking to teachers, and getting other
people like us excited about continuing her work.”
That said, articles Rowe published had an indelible and far-reaching impact on the field.
A research paper on wait-time published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching in 1974
was awarded Best Article by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching the
following year. This article was later reprinted in the 2003 supplemental edition of JRST as one
of the 13 most influential articles in its 40-year history. A second article on wait-time published
in the National Association for Science Teachers’ Science and Children in 1969 was reprinted
after Rowe’s death in 1996 to honor her many and significant contributions to science education.
Finally, Rowe’s article on the importance of teacher caring first published in NSTA’s The
Science Teacher in 1977 was reprinted in 2000 as part of that journal’s millennium issue; the

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editor had examined articles written over the journal’s 66 years to select those most significant to
the 21st century. The fact that her published work fundamentally and unalterably changed the
field of science education underscores the point that quality of thought can be more crucial than
number of publications.
Rowe also left lasting imprints on members of the science education community through
personal interactions – whether chance encounters, involvement on projects, or attendance at
guest lectures. Ray Hannapel, former Program Director of Research in Science Teaching at
NSF, reflected on how Mary influenced his thinking:
I first came to the National Science Foundation in 1966. . . . We became quite interested
in doing innovative things to help teachers in schools begin to implement the new [NSF-
funded, inquiry-oriented] curricula. . . . I heard about the work that [Mary] was doing at
Columbia’s Teachers College in the Harlem schools. . . . We had some very interesting
discussions about what are feasible ways to help teachers implement these curricula
effectively. And these discussions led to a NSF initiative, Resource Personnel
Workshops [workshops for teams of science educators, teachers, and/or science
supervisors to learn how to implement these new curricula materials].
Francis Lawlor underscored Mary’s ability to inspire others. “Rowe was fiercely task
oriented but even more fiercely person centered. She had a marvelous way of making personal
contact and of imparting her vision of what could be done.” Mary exerted influence, Lawlor
continued, without every losing her perspective on self or her sense of humor.
I saw just what impact Mary had [on science teachers] at an NSTA conference in Kansas
City. Mary and I were walking down a hallway in the conference center when a group of
teachers approached. . . . One of the teachers, loaded down with sacks of promotional

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materials, came up to Mary, dropped his precious cargo, and shook Mary’s hand
exclaiming, “I can’t believe that I am meeting a living legend!” Naturally, we all
addressed her as “living legend” for the rest of the weekend.
I close this reflection on Mary Budd Rowe’s legacy with another story Rowe herself told
often. Several themes discussed above – the idea of science as story, the importance of wonder,
and the need for innovation in science teaching – are revisited here. The point of Rowe’s story
remains salient: Reform in science education is needed if students are to learn science in
thoughtful and relevant ways.
On a flight to Europe several years ago, I sat next to a sixth-grade boy who watched me
use my calculator [in other versions, it is a slide rule] to analyze some data. "When you're
finished, where are you going to look up the answers?" he asked. "No book has an
answer to the problems I'm working on," I said. "It's up to me to find the answers."
"Then will your teacher tell you you're right?" "No," I replied. "I'll show my results to
other people, and I’ll explain my answers, and we'll talk it over." "And then will your
teacher tell you if you are right?” he persisted. "No, I'm afraid not." He sighed
sympathetically, "Some teachers are like that, you know."
For this boy, the world was full of right and wrong answers. He didn't realize that
science is not just facts, but the meaning that people give to them – by weaving
information into a story about how nature probably operates. The best way to respond to
a child's question is to begin that process of story-making together. (Rowe, 1995, pp. 178,
181)
References
Atkin, J. Myron. (2007, September 6). Personal communication.

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Britton, E. D. (2007, September 6). Personal communication.
Hannapel, R. (2008, February 4). Personal communication.
Lawlor, F. X. (2007, September 21). Personal communication.
Main, J. D., & Rowe, M. B. (1993). The relation of locus-of-control orientation and task
structure to problem-solving performance of sixth-grade student pairs. Journal of
Research in Science Teaching, 30(4), 401-426.
Patrick, C. (1992, February 18). Science “a special kind of story-making” to educator Rowe.
Stanford University Campus Report.
Rowe, M. B. (1964). The influence of context-learning on solution of task-oriented science
problems which share concepts: A study in elementary science education. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.
Rowe, M. B. (1969). Science, silence, and sanctions. Science and Children, 6(6), 11-13.
Rowe, M. B. (1974a). Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on
language, logic, and fate control: Part one – wait-time. Journal of Research in Science
Teaching, 11(2), 81-94.
Rowe, M. B. (1974b). Reflections on Wait-time: Some Methodological Questions. Journal of
Research in Science Teaching, 11(3), 263-279.
Rowe, M. B. (1974c). Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on
language, logic, and fate control: Part two – rewards. Journal of Research in Science
Teaching, 11(4), 291-308.
Rowe, M. B. (1977). Teachers who care. The Science Teacher, 44(5), 37.
Rowe, M. B. (1978). Teaching science as continuous inquiry: A basic (2nd ed.). New York:
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Rowe, M. B. (1983a). Getting chemistry off the killer course list. Journal of Chemical
Education, 60(11), 954-956.
Rowe, M. B. (1983b). Science Education: A framework for decision makers. Daedalus,
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Rowe, M. B. (1986). Wait time: Slowing down may be a way of speeding up! Journal of
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Rowe, M. B. (1995, May). Teach your child to wonder. Reader’s Digest, 177-184.
Rowe, M. B. (1996). Science, silence, and sanctions. Science and Children, 34(1), 34-37.
Rowe, M. B., Montgomery, J. E., Midling, M. J., & Keating, T. M. (1997). ChemCom’s
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Julie Ann Bianchini is Associate Professor in Science Education at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. She received both her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences and her Ph.D.
in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University. Mary Budd Rowe was her
dissertation adviser. Her research investigates preservice, beginning, and experienced science
teachers’ efforts to learn to teach science in equitable and effective ways. She views teacher
learning as emerging from knowledge of students, teachers’ own inquiry into practice, and
teachers’ participation in professional communities. Bianchini serves as the faculty director for
UCSB’s Science and Mathematics Initiative, a UC-wide effort to recruit more science and
mathematics undergraduates into teaching, and as section coeditor of Science Teacher Education
for Science Education. She was awarded the 1998 Outstanding Paper in the Journal of Research
in Science Teaching the 2000 Early Career Research Award from the National Association for
Research in Science Teaching.