At Portsmouth High School, the number of students signed up to take Advanced Placement science next year nearly doubled since 2006-07. Furthermore, 60 seniors will be taking a fourth year of science over and above the 200 that usually did in the past. They don’t have to. The state requires only three years of science.

They want to. These kids are turned on. The Physics First program seems to have done the job.

Jeffrey Schoonover, science department head at Portsmouth, says, “Students used to hear ‘physics’ and tense up. Only the top kids take it; it’s too difficult. Now every freshman takes physics. Kids are inquisitive, and Physics First is very hands-on, so they get excited about the subject. They don’t want to be lectured to, which still happens, but less. The classes are more about ‘Let’s see what happens when the variables change. Let’s see what happens when we graph the data. Let’s see what happens.’ They construct their own knowledge instead of us telling them, which builds a fondness for science classes.”

What a relief when education gets incentives right. Kids will work harder and take on tougher challenges when they want to. Not so much when we cajole, force, threaten, shame or browbeat them into it.

Four years ago, the East Bay Collaborative began trying to sell schools on the virtues of Physics First, a resequencing of high school science courses. Established over 100 years ago, traditional academia put biology first. But biology is by far the most complex of all sciences. So 9th-graders — the kids most prone to dropping out — confront biology and fail in depressing numbers. Other students soldier through it, but get so turned off they can’t see themselves as science people.

Physics First orders the sciences in their evolutionary sequence: physics, chemistry and then biology. From the atom to the molecule to the cell, kids build their understanding of science with the sequence in which nature built our world.

Back in 2006, Nobel laureate Dr. Leon Lederman, a passionate champion of Physics First, pitched the program at the EBC. He adamantly insisted that the traditional sequence not only gets the story all wrong, but it undercuts all the drama and appeal of science. “Stories are important. You have to tell how science works. How do you make a discovery? It’s the messiest process in the world. Who are scientists? What happened to them? Physics First is the harbinger of a real revolution in science that gets right, finally, the storytelling of the three years of high school science. So you start with Newton’s law and from there build the cognitive structure.”

Whether from desperation or farsightedness, six brave schools decided they would sign on in 2006. That fall, their freshmen were the first to study physics, but without the advanced math or calculus that traditional physics requires. Portsmouth High still offers senior (traditional) and AP physics. But with basic physics already under their belts, seniors are now free to take all sorts of advanced science, including oceanography, anatomy, urban ecology, as well as AP biology and chemistry. Many are doubling up on science courses. This is great.

Over at East Providence High School, the science staff’s time is consumed by the switch from a two-year science requirement to three years. But even there, twice as many juniors, a full second class of 20, are taking AP biology.

Janet Miele, secondary superintendent of science in Woonsocket, reports that failure rates in her high school’s science classes have dropped since adopting Physics First. And the kids are doing much better at performing the science tasks for the RI Diploma Project. Woonsocket High hasn’t scheduled its courses for next year, but Miele states definitively that “teachers are enjoying the teaching more, and the students are enjoying learning more.”

Cranston West’s Science Department head, Steve Krous, says that prior to Physics First, the school usually had about 20 kids in AP bio. Fifty have requested it for next year. In fact, requests for elective science courses are so strong, the school can’t accommodate 15 sections.

Schools like Times2 — with their enviable 100-percent graduation rate — and private schools like Rocky Hill and Portsmouth Abbey adopted Physics First independent of EBC. Other public schools have since joined the EBC project, so now 30 percent of Rhode Island’s students are involved with Physics First.

Mt. Pleasant High School was one of the six early adopters, but the Providence School Department recently withdrew from the project. Supt. Thomas Brady explained that the district is developing a K-12 curriculum that will be standardized across schools. The curriculum developers believed that Physics First is less well suited for preparing Providence students for the state’s NECAP tests than the traditional sequence.

Gerald Kowalczy, director of the East Bay Collaborative, and Ronald Kahn, EBC science expert, hotly repudiate that assertion. They pointed to reports and data available on its Web site, especially the Hezel Report.

But over the next few years, kids’ performance on the new NECAP science test will determine the efficacy of all schools’ science programs.

Except for those at Times2, none of the juniors who took the first such test last spring went through the Physics First program. The results were dismal — 17 percent proficient — even worse than the kids’ first efforts at the high-school math test. Still, it’s a baseline. If Physics First has strong academic efficacy, the proof will be in the new tests.

In the meantime, however, more kids are taking AP-level science courses, passing science and seeking science challenges. This is huge. This state’s workforce development gurus, including the governor, have been dreaming of just this: more kids in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pipeline. Physics First is doing the job by making learning science so darn interesting.

Good incentives work magic. The field of education needs many more.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.