It is not unusual for a Nobel laureate to change
institutions. It is, however, for such a
change to occur because the new institution agrees to set up a $12M initiative
in science education. That is just what
happened recently when Carl Wieman announced that he was moving from the University of Colorado to the University of British Columbia. Wieman was the correcipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for
creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate, and was named the Carnegie-CASE US
University Professor of the Year in 2004.
Weiman believes that most science education today is
generally not effective- often counterproductive, in fact. At the same time, the world is facing many
critical problems that have a huge technical/scientific component, and the
economic health of an industrialized nation is dependent on a workforce with
high-level technological skills. Thus
significantly improving science education has becomes a high-priority
imperative for Carl.
At Colorado,
Wieman has been very active in exploring new ways to teach physics. A number of
his activities are described on his Physics Education Technology website. In an
excellent recent article in Physics Today entitled Transforming Physics
Education, Wieman and Katherine Perkins describe both data demonstrating the
ineffectiveness of most instruction in physics, and the successful approaches
they have taken to achieve better results.
One of the more striking –and depressing- results that they
describe relates to students ability to think as “experts”, e.g. to think of “physics
as a coherent structure of general concepts
that describe nature… and use systematic concept-based problem solving
approaches that are applicable to a wide variety of situations.” Tests given to
thousands of students at many different institutions (many of them world-class
research universities) at the beginning and end of introductory physics courses
lead to the conclusion: “After instruction, students, on average, are found to
be less expert-like in their thinking than before. They see physics as less connected to the
real world, less interesting, and more as something to be memorized without
understanding.” Regarding conceptual understanding,
they cite studies that show that “...students receiving traditional instruction
master, on average, less than 30% of the concepts that they did not already
know at the start of the class. The
result is largely independent of lecturer quality, class size, or institution.” However, many of those students were able to
answer traditional test questions quite well – with little or no understanding
of the concepts involved.
Wieman and Perkins describe what happens when research on
learning actually is brought into the physics classroom. They talk about ways in which the organization
and presentation of material need to change, how cognitive load must be
attended to, and how student prior beliefs must be taken into account. And the positive end results makes this a
story with a happy ending – “ But education research, careful measurement, and
new technology make it possible to guide most students safely along the path
toward a true understanding and appreciation of physics.”
Much of the recent learning research from a large
number of fields is described very well in the 2000 report of the National
Research Council How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (post How people learn, May 1, 2006). Wieman and Perkins also refer to a number of
studies and results that are more specific to learning in physics. There is much to be learned from both of these sources as universities strive to increase the value and effectiveness of their education by becoming more learner-centered.
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