DrClaude said: Is that really the case? Fifty years ago, teaching was definitely not hands-on, but rather rote learning.

Forget about education in general - focus on middle and high school science education. And forget about rote vs hands-on. Focus on whether there is adequate emphasis on the path from data to conclusions. Most of my observations are from the 70s to the present. I have not investigated or spoken to many colleagues about their education experience in the 60s.But in the 70s and 80s, a few things were much more common than today:1. A careful evaluation of the historical experiments and data that underpinned important new theoretical developments. Yes, one might consider this "rote" learning, but more students learned about the experiments and even went over the data in class relating to essential developments like the law of definite proportions, Kepler's laws, Boyle's law, and Pasteur's spontaneous generation experiments. Yes, these still are "covered" today, but students are less likely to be required to summarize how the experiments support the emerging theory (or disprove the older theory) in graded work.2. The number of science experiments that are performed during class time and require testing a hypothesis and writing a lab report presenting the data and discussing whether or not the hypothesis was supported. Back in the 70s and 80s middle and high school science students were much more likely to see 10-15 of these science labs each year. Today, worksheet based labs with far less thinking and analysis are more common.3. Science fair participation at the school level is much lower today than in the 70s and 80s. Back in the 70s and 80s, at least half of high schools in my colleagues experience required science fair projects in at least some of their science courses. Today, other than magnet schools, private schools, and charter schools, schools that require science fair projects are uncommon. I've mentored projects at science fairs in a number of states, and it's the same handful of schools sending projects to these fairs year after year.