Carl Wieman is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Last November he visited UBC to speak to a standing-room-only crowd at the Life Sciences Centre. The UBC Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG) helped sponsor his visit to our campus. Here’s a brief summary of what he had to say: the full video of Dr. Wieman’s presentation, along with a lively Q&A session, is available on the TAG Website (www.tag.ubc.ca)

Science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years, but science education has remained largely medieval. Research on how people learn science is now revealing how many teachers badly misinterpret what students are thinking and learning from traditional science classes and exams.

Research is also providing insights on how to do much better. The stage is now being set for a new, more effective approach to science education based on using the tools of science that can provide a relevant and effective science education to all students.

What are some of the failures of traditional educational practices? Most of the time is spent with the teacher at the head of the class in a lecture situation, with exams to follow. Students are expected to retain information from a lecture, understand the concepts of science, and appreciate our beliefs about science.

All the data we have strongly suggests that traditional methods do not lead to a lot of retention. I recently brought a violin into a class and explained the physics of the strings, how they can’t move enough air to make the sound that we hear, and I pointed out that the strings in fact move the back of the violin through the sound posts, and that the back of the violin is actually the source of the sound we enjoy so much.

Fifteen minutes later, after we discussed other subjects in the lecture, I asked the students ‘what makes the sound produced by a violin?” Was it the strings? The back of the violin? Both?…Only 10% of the students got the answer right, after being explicitly told the answer 15 minutes before. There are other studies that show similar results.

Let’s look at ‘conceptual understanding’ Every college and university ‘Introduction to Physics’ class in the first semester discusses Force Concept Inventory, the basic concepts of force and motion, (what happens when a truck runs into a car, etc.) Students are tested at the beginning and at the end of their instruction. No matter what the size of the class, no matter what the institution or the quality of the lecturer, most students understood only about 25% of the Force Concept Inventory after they completed the introductory course. Traditional instruction can be very ineffective.

A colleague of mine at Harvard, Eric Mazur, has had similar results with the concepts of Electricity. Just about all of his students, upon completion of the course, could calculate the currents and voltages in a complex circuit. But when he asked them to predict the brightness of a light bulb when those circuits were closed, they couldn’t. They weren’t thinking about the physics of the problem. They had difficulty with the conceptualization of the problem.

So we anticipate that students will come into the study of science as a novice, but they will become more expert-like after we’ve taught them what we know through lectures. Unfortunately the data shows that the opposite happens. In nearly all physics courses we studied, students came out actually more novice-like after they took the class than when they came in. They had memorized isolated pieces of information to pass the classes, and often had trouble with the coherent structure of concepts and problem solving.

But if we use the tools of science to teach science, we can improve the retention of information from 10% after 15 minutes to greater than 90% after 2 days. Conceptual understanding goes up dramatically from 25% to 65%. And we even show a small improvement (from what was a significant drop) in the students’ belief about science and problem solving.

I go into more detail on these problems and solutions in my talk, available on the UBC TAG website, but here are a couple of examples of the kind of tools I’m talking about.

1. The Personal Electronic Response System (PERS)
They’re used at UBC, they look like a TV remote, and they’re relatively cheap. Each student has numeric code in their clicker, you ask them a multiple-choice question, and they push the button that corresponds to what they think the correct answer is. Class results are instantly displayed on the lecture screen, and individual answers are kept private. If you use these things correctly, they can dramatically improve student engagement in the material and their ability to carry out scientific discourse. The number of questions from the class goes up by a factor of four.

2. Interactive Simulations
We’ve developed a few of these that you can try out online through the University of Colorado website. They range from the Balloon and Sweater test, to Projectile Motion and the Wave on a String. Each illustrates a unique, pedagogically valuable characteristic of interactive simulations, (and they’re fun). Our research shows a substantial improvement on concept questions when these virtual examples are used in a lecture, versus a static image or even a real demonstration.

As instructors we can transform our courses by first identifying specific, quantifiable learning goals as to what the students should be able to do at the end of their instruction. Then we should create valid measures of how well students are achieving those goals. And finally we have to develop practices, materials, and technology to better reach those goals.

The demands of modern society are such that we really need a more effective approach to science education. Traditional lectures, textbooks, homework, and exams often teach against true understanding and interest in science and don’t work for most students.

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