Washington Post spotlights an “evolving vision” of college science education
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0714
As reported earlier, a Yale astrophysicist’s Washington Post science-education commentary complemented Science magazine’s recent similar calls for reform. Now the Post‘s front page has offered a lengthy article that begins, ‘Science, math and engineering departments at many universities are abandoning or retooling the lecture as a style of teaching, worried that it’s driving students away.’
The opening continues:
The faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has dedicated this academic year to finding alternatives to the lecture in those subjects. Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and even the White House have hosted events in which scholars have assailed the lecture.
Lecture classrooms are the big-box retailers of academia, paragons of efficiency. One professor can teach hundreds of students in a single room, trailed by a retinue of teaching assistants.
But higher-education leaders increasingly blame the format for high attrition in science and math classes. They say the lecture is a turn-off, higher education at its most passive, leading to frustration and bad grades in highly challenging disciplines.
Nowhere in the article do the terms deficit model and engagement model appear, though that’s the contrast involved. The article quotes Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard: ‘You have a professor reading a book to you. It should be insulting. But this model is so ingrained.’ That ingrained approach is the deficit model, in which scientists hope that unidirectional lecturing can defray knowledge deficits. The article adds that Mazur has ‘developed an interactive teaching technique called peer instruction, in which the lecture is broken into chunks. Between topics, Mazur poses questions and students work together to answer them.’ That interactivity is the engagement model.
The article cites other engagement techniques. ‘Faculty are learning to make courses more active by seeding them with questions, ask-your-neighbor discussions and instant surveys,’ it reports. ‘Students are working experiments, solving problems, answering questions—or at least registering an opinion on an interactive ‘smartboard’ with an electronic clicker.’
The article also explains that the increasing popularity of online lectures by academic stars sets at least part of the context for all of this. It reports that some ‘scholars are working to improve, rather than replace, the lecture model’ via initiatives that can be scaled up cheaply for use in large classrooms. For example:
At Johns Hopkins ... the Gateway Sciences Initiative [includes] 10 redesigned courses that might hold the future of math-science instruction there.
In one new course, chemistry instructor Jane Greco records her lectures and posts them online as homework, a popular new use for the derided tool. Greco uses her time in the lecture hall as a sort of ‘office hours for everybody,’ an interactive discussion of the lab experiment students completed in the previous session.
One goal, she said, is ‘to separate out what you’re getting in our classroom that you can’t get online.’
The article’s ending acknowledges that none of this is really new to anybody who has monitored STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education in recent decades:
Not all the ideas are new. At the University of Maryland College Park, engineering professors eliminated introductory lecture courses in 1991. Since then, students have spent the crucial first year engaged in actual engineering, building swing sets, helicopters and hovercrafts.
‘What generally used to happen, almost across the country, was that the very first experience a student would have with engineering was a very large lecture hall,’ said Kevin Calabro, an engineering instructor in College Park. ‘And I think a ton of students were turned off.’
Maybe somewhat curiously, given the anti-lecture theme, the online version of the article includes an invitation for readers to submit videos of their favorite college lectures. The invitation link leads to a page containing a few such videos. The first, a four-minute clip, shows a physicist, Nick Warner, teaching and also illustrating Newton’s third law. At the end, he demonstrates reaction propulsion by sitting on a skateboard and holding a fire extinguisher modified to expel its contents especially fast.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.