CHANGE HOW SCIENCE IS TAUGHT: Traditional lecture-based science courses don’t stimulate large numbers of entering students to pursue a career in science. ISTOCKPHOTO, LISA KLUMPP
Imagine the impact on the arts if we required every aspiring instrumentalist to complete 12 years of theory and careful study of the masters before being allowed to pick up an instrument and play.
Yet somehow we’ve come to think that a critical mass of facts and concepts must be absorbed before the human brain is able to do science. It has become the norm that science and the related disciplines of technology, engineering, and math (STEM) require students to complete years of lecture-based coursework with only a weekly stint in the lab before allowing them to actually practice science the way scientists do. Yet we continue to lament that only small numbers of students survive and thrive in the STEM pipeline. In fact, the ...
