Six Steps To More Effective Science Teaching

Trim the curriculum Ronald Gillespie, a professor of chemistry at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, is one of many teachers who noticed about 10 years ago that the 1960s trend of stressing physical chemistry concepts in introductory courses omitted inorganic, descriptive chem- istry. As a result, his students knew little about common chemicals. The solution in the United States and Canada was to put the missing topics back in--but the average chemistry textbook swelled to more than a kilopage, and instructors felt compelled to race through it all. The same expansion was happening in biology. With added material on genetics, behavior, health, and environmental problems, texts swelled to an unmanageable length. Gordon Uno, a biology professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, offers one increasingly common solution in burgeoning scientific fields whose content refuses to be crammed into an academic calendar: "Realize that you can't do it all. It's better to know a few things well than a lot of topics not well at all." One new biology text has sheared 200 pages off the typical 1,000 by substantially shrinking the diversity section, instead weaving in examples of different organisms in all chapters. Another approach to handling the information overload is a "cap- stone" course in the senior year to tie together concepts learned in different courses. Or, simplest of all, a single course too packed with topics can be expanded to two semesters. Separate out the majors At Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., business majors can take professor David Adams's "Chemical Technologies in the Manufacturing System." Through case studies, students learn only those chemical principles that relate to energy, materials science, and waste management. Exams ask the nonscience majors to apply chemical concepts to real-life dilemmas. A nonmajors' course should be built around the students' "need to know," downplaying details. "There is no reason for a nonmajor to learn the details of the Krebs cycle. They need to know that there is a cycle, but that's all," says George Hudock, a biology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Adds physicist Jack M. Wilson, director of the Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y., "A nonscience-majors' course has got to reflect the flavor of the science as it is being done, and how a scientist works, because this is the last opportunity these students will have to look at it." Increase hands-on learning Ways to rev up learning in laboratories and lectures are as diverse as the scientists who dream them up. In Andy Sae's "people's chemistry" class at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, students are handed a blouse bearing a rust-colored stain and are given wet citric acid; the class is asked to figure out how the spot is removed. At Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, B.C., professor Gordon M. Barrow shows his students chemical reactions, sometimes rather explosively, before he instructs them to write equations. Each week at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pa., 1,200 introductory biology students pile into vans and take to the nearby Allegheny foothills. Here, they examine undisturbed ecosystems, as well as those ravaged by acid rain, agriculture, and strip mining. This ambitious program speaks to a compelling problem: Today's molecular biologists often lack the field experiences that were an integral part of training in biology in generations past. Science courses must also more accurately reflect how science is done. "There is a tremendous gulf between what we tell students about and what is really happening in science. Students are 100 years behind the rest of science," says Wilson. Physics students at RPI are given access to UNIX workstations, tools used by "real" physicists, for their entire four years, Wilson says. Reduce memorization Doing science means asking questions and seeking answers through activities. Teaching should follow this paradigm, many say. "One style of teaching is to lecture, and [the information] is recorded in the student's mind like words inscribed on a blank slate. All the students have to do is listen, take notes, study, and they've learned. Or, you can give experiences for them to reconstruct the knowledge for themselves," says Paul Germann, an assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Oklahoma's Uno offers an example of such inquiry-based learning. His students compare the structures of several fruits and tomato plants with small fruits and flowers. They deduce what a fruit is, rather than memorizing the definition: "a fruit is a ripened ovary containing seeds." In this setting, Uno says, the teacher is a catalyst, not a provider of information. But inquiry is not always welcomed by spoon-fed students. An innovative genetics exam given by a biology professor at the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany, for example, listed eight principles discussed in class, and 20 experiments not discussed. The students were asked to state the principle illustrated by each experiment. A contingent of angry students, who had gotten A's on the previous multiple-choice exam and poor grades on this one, complained to the department chairman. Interestingly, a handful of students who had done very poorly on the multiple-choice exam earned near-perfect scores on the innovative one. Perhaps traditional methods of assessment do not measure the ability to think like a scientist. Do not teach in a vacuum "Science-technology-society" is more than just an educational buzzword. It is an idea that was expounded by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and is today the subject of journals, conferences, and organizations. Explains Shirley Gorenstein, chairwoman of the department of Science and Technology Studies at RPI, "One thing that scientists can do in teaching more effectively is to help students to recognize the social, cultural, and political context in which science is done." Scientists must also stress the conceptual threads connecting the disciplines. This is soon to be taken to extremes at the middle- school level, where texts are being rewritten to combine physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in each chapter to present the interrelationship of basic scientific concepts. At the college level, it is more difficult to weave such a scientific fabric. One innovative idea, from a recent American Chemical Society- sponsored meeting of biologists and chemists, is to hold summer workshops for college science faculty to enhance each other's courses. Sharing scientific turf may at first be difficult, as Richard Wilkinson, chairman of anthropology at SUNY Albany, discovered when he met with members of the biology department to design a human biology major. Some of the biologists did not think that anthropology involved biology at all! "We had to drag out our journals, with titles such as Human Biology," Wilkinson says. "They weren't aware of such things. Call it scientific snobbery, but we did manage to mend whatever fences had to be mended." The new major, suggested by students dissatisfied with the traditional approach to biology, is quite popular. Personalize learning An instructor facing a lecture hall brimming with hundreds of students may feel more like a rock star than a professor. Yet teaching the same subject to a only few dozen students can be a rewarding experience for all. Slashing class size and emphasizing individual participation is a must in the process of breaking barriers to learning science. Seminar courses provide a wonderful alternative to lecture learning. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, James Deavor and Henry Donato, Jr., run a popular freshman chemistry seminar that applies chemical principles to environmental problems. Each small group session is headed by a faculty member, and is followed by a group lunch. Terry Hufford, an associate professor of botany at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., took a cue from The Paper Chase, the 1970s film about Harvard law students, and encouraged his students to form study groups. He also divided the large lecture class in two, provided a guide to test-taking and studying, and stressed cooperation and sharing data in lab; these measures all contributed to higher student achievement, he claims. The laboratory component of a course is an excellent place to encourage both creativity and cooperation. Several professors have put an end to the cookbook lab exercise. Gordon Uno's introductory botany students work like scientists, choosing topics, designing investigations, writing proposals, and conducting the experiments throughout the semester. "It is `real science' because the student goes through the process of setting up and carrying out a controlled experiment. Nobody is in the bind of having to do the same things as everyone " he says. Biochemistry students at Stanford University do the same, designing their own experiments around a particular topic, such as enzyme function. In such student-directed laboratory sessions, individuals of all abilities participate, learn, and most important, have fun. --R.L.

Six Steps To More Effective Science Teaching

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