A D- in science education

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.