{"id":828,"date":"2006-11-20T10:38:35","date_gmt":"2006-11-20T10:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/20\/wieman-on-science-teaching\/"},"modified":"2006-11-20T10:38:35","modified_gmt":"2006-11-20T10:38:35","slug":"wieman-on-science-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/20\/wieman-on-science-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Wieman on Science Teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> has a short piece today on a lecture given to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Carl Wieman on how to teach science<\/a>. Though, from the sound of it, it was mostly about how not<\/strong> to teach science.<\/p>\n

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During the talk on Friday, Wieman said that traditional science instruction involves lectures, textbooks, homework and exams. Wieman said that this process simply doesn’t work. He cited a number of studies to make his point. At the University of Maryland, an instructor found that students interviewed immediately after a science lecture had only a vague understanding of what the lecture had been about. Other researchers found that students only retained a small amount of the information after watching a video on science.<\/p>\n

Another problem with the current structure of science education is that teachers try to get students to learn “key concepts” from physics. “We think that physics has a few ideas that can be widely applied,” he said. “So people test for those few ideas.” Wieman says that students really only retain about 30 percent of those key concepts, so this approach simply does not work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He did offer some constructive suggestions, but they have their own problems:<\/p>\n

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While Wieman said that he does not have all the answers for restructuring how science is taught, and added that he is still trying to figure out the best way to teach, he did offer suggestions. First, reduce cognitive load in learning by slowing down the amount of information being offered, by providing visuals, and by organizing the information for the student as it is being presented. Second, address students’ beliefs about science by explaining how a lecture is worth learning and by helping the students to understand how the information connects to the world around them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Everybody in the business agrees that “slowing down the amount of information being offered” will improve student retention. The problem is, we’re rather tightly constrained in how much we can slow things down. Our intro physics sequence is a great tool for producing information overload in first-year students, and would probably work better at a slower pace, but we aren’t free to do that– the bulk of the students in the class are future engineers, and there’s a long list of topics they need to see covered in only two classes. The pre-med class is even worse, but there, the content is set by the MCAT.<\/p>\n

It would be great if we could spread the intro course material out over three courses rather than two, or the pre-med class over four, but that’s not going to happen. Which means we’re pretty much stuck with trying to do the best we can in the whirlwind-survey-course format.<\/p>\n

Some global agreement from all of the science and engineering disciplines that everybody<\/strong> needs to slow down in the interests of more effective teaching would be wonderful. It would also probably double the length of time required to get a science or engineering degree, and nobody’s willing to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed has a short piece today on a lecture given to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Carl Wieman on how to teach science. Though, from the sound of it, it was mostly about how not to teach science. During the talk on Friday, Wieman said that traditional science instruction… Continue reading Wieman on Science Teaching<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}