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Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 4)

Written by Jasper on February 17, 2009 · View Comments

(Here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in case you missed them).

Well… I don’t think my stu­dents have this much con­cep­tual dif­fi­culty, but I thought I’d start this post off with a bit of comedic relief.

Any­ways, a week has passed since the last prac­ti­cal but I’m not behind in post­ing because this is the under­grad­u­ate read­ing week. My mind has been bub­bling with ideas since then; most of which are the result of a TA brain­storm­ing ses­sion we had on Fri­day. A group of enthu­si­as­tic learn­ing assis­tants (lured partly by free pizza) gath­ered to share their ideas, con­cerns and advice with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion depart­ment (or some­thing of that sort). It looks like there are a lot of prob­lems with this new physics cur­ricu­lum (IE: the “prac­ti­cal ses­sions”). We con­veyed a lot of wor­ries and put forth a lot of sug­ges­tions which I will try to sum­ma­rize here.

What I should first men­tion is that I am not alone in my dif­fi­cul­ties. Almost all of the other learn­ing assis­tants are, like me, hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. Here are, in my opin­ion, the top three prob­lems that we and the stu­dents are hav­ing with this course:

  1. The TAs and the stu­dents have a severe lack of feed­back from each other.
  2. Stu­dents won’t ask ques­tions about any­thing they’ve been hav­ing trou­ble under­stand­ing in class, on an assign­ment, or any­thing out­side the lab activity.
  3. The stu­dents have dif­fi­culty fin­ish­ing the activ­i­ties before the end of the prac­ti­cal. This leaves almost no time for the­o­ret­i­cal (tutorial-like) questions.

So. Prob­lem 1 (The biggest):

Stu­dents need feed­back on their work so that they can nar­row down what it is they don’t under­stand. I think one of the hard­est things about learn­ing (in a student’s ref­er­ence frame) is fig­ur­ing out what it is you don’t know. But stu­dents are not given any feed­back on their lab book (aside from an ini­tial trial grad­ing of the first activ­ity). The rea­son for this is that not all activ­i­ties in their lab books will get graded, and the choice of which ones will be graded is kept secret until midterm. The prob­lem is that the TAs haven’t been told either… so we can’t go through on a weekly basis and put com­ments in the lab books because we haven’t been assigned enough hours to do that much “cor­rect­ing”. Hope­fully this will be eas­ily taken care of by sim­ply telling the TAs to grade a sub­set of the week’s activ­i­ties on a reg­u­lar basis.

Stu­dents need mean­ing­ful feed­back when feed­back is given to them. It’s quite deceiv­ing when a com­puter tells a stu­dent that they’ve got­ten the ques­tion 100% right when the truth of the mat­ter is there are many things they still don’t under­stand. But this is what is hap­pen­ing. Each week the stu­dents are expected to com­plete an online assign­ment hosted by the Mas­ter­ing Physics web­site. The prob­lem with these assign­ments, I think, is best con­veyed using the anal­ogy of — and I apol­o­gize to the stu­dents for this anal­ogy — try­ing to teach a don­key the way into town by lead­ing it with a car­rot on a stick, then expect­ing it to be able to make the jour­ney on its own. The ques­tions on the Mas­ter­ing Physics assign­ments are good ques­tions BUT they are asked in such a way that holds the stu­dents hands and prac­ti­cally gives them the answers to each step. This severely reduces the effec­tive­ness of the ques­tions. When I asked one of the stu­dents if she had trou­ble with the Mas­ter­ing Physics ques­tions she replied, “Well, I got the ques­tion right … but I still don’t under­stand what I did”. Other TAs and even past stu­dents have told me sim­i­lar sto­ries about these assignments.

… but per­haps these assign­ments are intended to be more use­ful as feed­back for the TAs, you say?

If this were the case, then at least their exis­tence would have some merit. The fact that the vast major­ity of the stu­dents in my sec­tion get above 90% on every ques­tion should illus­trate that this is not very help­ful as feed­back for us. Appar­ently this Mas­ter­ing Physics site has been used for years, much before the recent cur­ricu­lum change. I think it was part of an effort to recy­cle old bits of cur­ricu­lum that is falling short.

It also looks like a good exam­ple of an over-reliance on tech­nol­ogy to improve edu­ca­tion. Com­put­ers don’t teach peo­ple; peo­ple teach peo­ple. Fancy gad­gets, click­ers and advanced quizzing sys­tems are a great idea, but they them­selves are not enough. They need to be used effec­tively. I think this cur­ricu­lum is still in its early stages of meta­mor­pho­sis and every­one is still try­ing to fig­ure out more effec­tive ways of using the new tech­nol­ogy and new teach­ing methods.

Pos­si­ble solu­tion to all three prob­lems:

One fan­tas­tic solu­tion to this prob­lem came together as a melange of a few sug­ges­tions in the TA brain­storm­ing ses­sion. The orga­niz­ers of this course got rid of the for­mal tuto­r­ial ses­sions because they deemed them inef­fec­tive and thought it would be more effec­tive to work that kind of mate­r­ial into the prac­ti­cals. The way we are cur­rently doing this is not work­ing. Instead, what would be more help­ful is to have “the­o­ret­i­cal” ques­tions as part of the lab activ­i­ties. There are sev­eral ben­e­fits to this if it is con­ducted well.

Firstly, it would encour­age the stu­dents to work out ques­tions as groups inside the prac­ti­cal ses­sions. They could get imme­di­ate feed­back from the TA, and if they worked out the ques­tion on their fancy new white­boards (which I found to be an effec­tive method when I tried it last week) the TA could imme­di­ately gather feed­back from them in terms of con­cep­tual dif­fi­cul­ties and so forth. The ques­tions could be made more dif­fi­cult with­out the “hand hold­ing” for­mu­la­tion because if they truly got stuck, they could ask the TA who would be able to gauge what hints were just enough to get the group back on track.

Sec­ondly, the ques­tions could be directly related to the lab activ­i­ties they would do imme­di­ately after. This could solid­ify their under­stand­ing and also make it more inter­est­ing. They would be able to see the physics hap­pen on paper, and then in real life. From a purely per­sonal per­spec­tive, I fre­quently found the class­room mate­r­ial to be detached from “real life” physics when I was an under­grad­u­ate. It would be nice for the stu­dents to see a strong con­nec­tion between the two through the curriculum.

Thirdly, and most impor­tantly, it would give the stu­dents a taste of real sci­ence. IE: using a model to derive a pre­dic­tion (hypoth­e­sis) and test it out in the lab. This would also mean that stu­dents could be expected to come up with their own exper­i­ment (per­haps with the TA’s help) in order to test their pre­dic­tion. This would elim­i­nate the mun­dan­ity of fol­low­ing lab activ­ity instruc­tions step-by-step with no real thought behind it (as was very com­mon for me in my under­grad­u­ate days).

In all, I think it’s been a pro­duc­tive week for me as a learn­ing assis­tant. I’ve pretty much given up on address­ing them as a class in an attempt to gather con­cep­tual dif­fi­cul­ties. Instead what I found more use­ful was to visit each work­sta­tion  indi­vid­u­ally. They are much less shy when I do that. That, in con­junc­tion with hav­ing them work out a tricky prob­lem on their white­boards, will hope­fully gen­er­ate a bet­ter feed­back loop between us.

I’d love to see more of these TA brain­storm­ing ses­sions for other courses. I think much can be gained from a diverse group of minds and some free pizza.

Categories: Education - Tags: , , ,

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3)

Written by Jasper on February 8, 2009 · View Comments
(Here is Part 1 and Part 2, in case you missed them).

Sorry for the silence this week… you know how it is.

Before I begin, looks like the MIT physics depart­ment is hav­ing a few trou­bles of its own with the new physics cur­ricu­lum. And, don’t for­get to check out the First Excited State for Week 2 of the teach­ing journal.

I need your help. The prac­ti­cals are becom­ing slightly tricky in terms of grab­bing stu­dents’ atten­tion for tutorial-like sit­u­a­tion. As I men­tioned last week, the stu­dents are vastly more moti­vated to do the activ­i­ties than ask tuto­r­ial ques­tions because they will be get­ting graded on the activ­i­ties. We have the abil­ity to cre­ate quiz ques­tions on their work­sta­tion com­put­ers and we’ve tried cre­at­ing a quiz ques­tion to try to draw out ques­tions from the stu­dents. What actu­ally hap­pened was they spent a lit­tle while on the ques­tion, guessed if nec­es­sary (since it wasn’t worth any grades) and then didn’t ask any ques­tions (prob­a­bly for fear of not hav­ing enough time to do the lab activity).

I’ve been toy­ing with a few ideas to try to get their par­tic­i­pa­tion in ask­ing ques­tions. The first is instead of ask­ing the whole class a ques­tion and going over the solu­tion, to instead go around and ask each work­sta­tion one at a time. It would take up the same amount of time for the stu­dents. The upside is that they will be much less shy and almost cer­tainly reveal any gaps they have in their under­stand­ing. The down­side is that any enlight­en­ing bit of infor­ma­tion will be con­fined to that table.

In order for the whole class to ben­e­fit, I’d have to some­how engage the whole class in prob­lem solv­ing. One gen­eral idea I’ve had in that respect is to do away with a mul­ti­ple choice quiz type ques­tion (and elim­i­nate half haz­ard guesses) and instead ask an involved/conceptual prob­lem. They could then write their answers/ideas on their white­boards and share their ideas with the rest of the class. Alter­nately, if they are too shy to speak up, I could go around the class while they are work­ing on the activ­i­ties and look at the ideas on their white­boards and dis­cuss with them.

I think the prob­lem here is shy­ness and time con­straints. I’m won­der­ing if any of you have ideas to get stu­dents to par­tic­i­pate in shar­ing their con­cep­tual dif­fi­cul­ties with the class. Also, I’m won­der­ing if any of you have any ideas for rel­a­tively short, inter­est­ing ques­tions on the sub­ject of sta­tic electricity.

Categories: Academia, Education, Electromagnetism - Tags:

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 2)

Written by Jasper on January 29, 2009 · View Comments

(Here is Part 1, in case you missed it).

Looks like there’s also a dual­ity in the blo­gos­phere. Over at The First Excited State, our favorite semi-anonymous author is join­ing me in this teach­ing assis­tant blo­gothon with his weekly Teach­ing Jour­nal.

Any­ways, another week, another prac­ti­cal ses­sion. As I men­tioned in Part 1, this week the stu­dents mea­sured the speed of sound. So far, the activ­i­ties seem to be on the right track. They encour­age a bit of play­ful­ness and try to help stu­dents get some phys­i­cal intu­ition about the con­cepts they learn in class. This week, for exam­ple, on of the ques­tions asked the stu­dents to play around with the micro­phone; whis­tle into it, speak into it, etc, and look at the result­ing wave­form on the com­puter screen. It’s inter­est­ing to see how the stu­dents react to this type of ques­tion. One of the stu­dents appar­ently sang into the micro­phone in an enthu­si­as­tic oper­atic man­ner and when he noticed that he was being watched by a TA, he expressed very apolo­getic sen­ti­ments. I think it was a small illus­tra­tion of a stu­dent con­di­tioned to believe in the myth that you can’t be learn­ing if you’re hav­ing fun. I try to encour­age such play­ful­ness. I went around the room telling stu­dents to try get­ting two peo­ple to whis­tle into the micro­phone at slightly dif­fer­ent pitches. I demon­strated this to one of the work­space groups and they were impressed that they could actu­ally see the beats show up on the com­puter screen.

That being said, there are some prob­lems creep­ing up. The most preva­lent is time con­straint. These prac­ti­cals are sup­posed to replace the labs AND the tuto­ri­als. Each week we have two hours to try to fit in these activ­i­ties and a lit­tle prob­lem ses­sion. So far, the activ­i­ties have taken the stu­dents the full two hours. Since stu­dents are being graded on the activ­i­ties and stu­dents tend to take a very grade-oriented view of edu­ca­tion, the TAs and the stu­dents both feel pres­sured to just ignore the prob­lem ses­sions and do the activities.

For­tu­nately, we’ve been given the free­dom to grade the stu­dents’ work­books as we see fit. If the major­ity of stu­dents don’t have time to fin­ish all of the “required” activ­i­ties, then we have the author­ity to issue grades which com­pen­sate for this. The won­der­ful fact about the grad­ing scheme is that it is on a scale of: 0–4. This means that the major­ity of the time, the major­ity of the groups will get a 3. This not only takes pres­sure off of the TAs that grade them but also it removes much of the com­pet­i­tive pres­sure on the stu­dents. We’re, after all, try­ing to remove the grade-hungry atti­tude some of these stu­dents have to edu­ca­tion. I am going one step fur­ther and not show­ing the stu­dents their grade unless they explic­itly ask me for it. I’m hop­ing this will force them to pay atten­tion to the detailed feed­back I give them in their work­books, which, unlike an obscure num­ber, is what will really help them know how they’re doing in the course.

Finally, I’d like to point you to a post on the School of Every­thing blog to do with some­thing I’ve been think­ing about for a lit­tle while: adapt­ing teach­ing meth­ods to reflect the diver­sity in ways peo­ple learn. It goes over the great uncer­tainty in clas­si­fi­ca­tion of learn­ing styles and the dif­fi­culty this causes in try­ing to gen­er­ate a teach­ing style that accounts for the diver­sity of people’s minds. I found it very inter­est­ing, and thought you might too.

Categories: Academia, Education - Tags: , , , ,

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 1)

Written by Jasper on January 22, 2009 · View Comments

Well, the first of my first “physics prac­ti­cals” were this week. By this I’m refer­ring to the TA job I’ve been rav­ing about. I promised pic­tures of the shiny new rooms we get to use, so with­out fur­ther ado:

Behold!

So hope­fully these pic­tures will help you under­stand why I say the new rooms feel like a sportscar.

… okay, so if they feel like a sports­car, how’s the mileage, you ask?

A fair ques­tion. The way these rooms are con­structed make them ideal for group inter­ac­tion. They take focus off of the LA, which is as it should be. The LA is not a lec­turer. But for that same rea­son it is very dif­fi­cult for the LA to hold stu­dents’ atten­tions if they are telling them some­thing impor­tant. To com­pen­sate for this they have a wire­less micro­phone and speak­ers installed to give LAs voices a sort of omnipres­ence in the room. In addi­tion to that the LAs have the abil­ity to con­trol the stu­dents’ com­put­ers (indi­vid­u­ally or in bulk) from the main com­puter at the front of the room; pro­ject­ing infor­ma­tion onto them, cre­at­ing mini quizzes, tak­ing full con­trol, writ­ing on them, etc. Overuse of these tools could result in the stu­dents going through a whole prac­ti­cal with­out inter­act­ing directly with the LA. I see this as a poten­tially bad thing. So what I’ve tried to do is avoid using the micro­phone alto­gether. Noth­ing says I need to address the class from the front of the room. I just walk to the mid­dle where every­one can hear me better.

This is what I did the first day, and before I opened my mouth I sud­denly felt that sen­sa­tion I had been warned about by my TA friends: the moment of dread. All of those eyes of stu­dents in a required course, some of whom hate physics and don’t want to be there, star­ing at me, expect­ing me to do some­thing… after about five sec­onds it passed and I broke the silence with an overly enthu­si­as­tic “HI!”. (I might have scared a few). After that I radi­ated as much enthu­si­asm and per­son­al­ity as I could muster. One of the first ques­tions I asked them was: “who here absolutely hates physics?”. Out of a class of about thirty stu­dents, seven hands shot up. I’m focus­ing on those seven. If I can make them curi­ous about physics, the rest will be a piece of cake.

The first practical’s activ­i­ties were a bit of a drag. They mainly involved ana­lyz­ing flash sim­u­la­tions of waves. Next prac­ti­cal, how­ever, will be fun. I’ve got it all planned out. The sched­uled activ­ity for that prac­ti­cal will be mea­sur­ing the speed of sound using a stand­ing sound wave in a closed tube. The physics and process behind that exper­i­ment is com­pletely anal­o­gous to my post about mea­sur­ing the speed of light with choco­late and a microwave. They will use a micro­phone to find the pres­sure nodes (quiet bits: reverse ana­log of the soft bits of the choco­late), and use this to mea­sure the wave­length for a given fre­quency (pitch).

My plan is to begin the prac­ti­cal by show­ing this youtube video. It’s a video of a Ruben’s Tube (if you haven’t seen a Ruben’s Tube you must watch that video). The physics behind the shape of the flame in a Ruben’s Tube is the same physics they will be using in their activ­ity. With a Ruben’s Tube you could just take a ruler and mea­sure the wave­length directly since you can see the shape of the wave in the fire. Unfor­tu­nately for the stu­dents, they won’t have that spec­tac­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the wave and will have to resort to using a micro­phone to find the quiet bits.

I’ve been keep­ing notes of ideas I have to make the prac­ti­cals bet­ter. My plan is to get as much feed­back from the stu­dents as pos­si­ble. Hope­fully some fine tun­ing will get everyone’s enthu­si­asm res­onat­ing through­out the practicals.

Categories: Academia, Education - Tags: , , ,

A spring TA offer that adds a spring to my step

Written by Jasper on December 1, 2008 · View Comments

Hope­fully the reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog have deduced that I am dri­ven to invoke enthu­si­asm about physics (and sci­ence in gen­eral) in any­one I come into con­tact with. One fac­tor moti­vat­ing me is the fact that peo­ple gen­er­ally have mis­con­cep­tions about sci­ence and sci­en­tists that push them away from learn­ing won­der­ful things about the world. Recently, I found a link to a sub­site of SEED mag­a­zine that overviews the cur­rent state of sci­ence. The site, among many other things, high­lights this pub­lic per­cep­tion of sci­ence.

I also hap­pily dis­cov­ered that one of my fleet­ing ideas involv­ing mix­ing cof­fee and sci­ence has actu­ally been well estab­lished for a while! Maybe you’re like me and you like the idea of dis­cussing inter­est­ing aspects of sci­ence in a cof­fee shop set­ting. If you are, and you haven’t heard of sci­ence cafés, behold!

Sci­ence cafés are live events that involve a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion with a sci­en­tist about cur­rent sci­ence top­ics. They are open to every­one, and take place in casual set­tings like pubs and cof­fee­houses.

At a café you can… learn about the lat­est issues in sci­ence, chat with a sci­en­tist in plain lan­guage, meet new friends, speak your mind and, talk with your mouth full.

And to make things even bet­ter, there are even a few in Canada. One of which, based in Toronto, I hope to check out some­time in the near future. When I do, you’ll hear about it.

Let me also remind you of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with con­ven­tional teach­ing meth­ods (in physics), which I think can poten­tially do more harm than good at the intro­duc­tory level. After all this buildup I can now tell you what the title of this post has been allud­ing to and hope­fully you will under­stand my excite­ment. I just attended the first TA meet­ing to pre­pare me for the new pilot physics lab course at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto. The physics depart­ment has caught on to what physics edu­ca­tion researchers have been say­ing for a while: con­ven­tional lec­tures add lit­tle or noth­ing to a student’s con­cep­tual under­stand­ing about basic physics con­cepts. One tested improve­ment on physics edu­ca­tion is called Peer Instruc­tion which takes advan­tage of the fact that stu­dents pre­dom­i­nantly learn best by inter­act­ing with each other. The U of T physics depart­ment is apply­ing this method to one of the intro­duc­tory physics courses. The cur­ricu­lum empha­sizes a hands-on approach to learn­ing. Stu­dents work in small groups on con­cep­tual prob­lems which force them to dis­cover things for them­selves. The TAs act as guides who pose lead­ing ques­tions rather than giv­ing solu­tions away (which sounds right up my alley!).

Even the archi­tec­ture of the rooms has been com­pletely rethought (I’ll post pic­tures when I have a chance). They are shiny new rooms with hexag­o­nal work­sta­tions able to seat a group of stu­dents. The work­sta­tions are each equipped with desk­top com­put­ers and con­ve­niently placed elec­tri­cal sock­ets (for lap­tops, lab appa­ra­tus, etc…). The walls adja­cent to the work­sta­tions are cov­ered with panes of translu­cent glass which, other than look­ing styl­ish, act as “white­boards” on which to work. One of the pro­fes­sors described the moti­va­tion behind the archi­tec­ture as follows:

If you walk into a fast-food joint, there is an obvi­ously placed counter under­neath bill­boards that show the menu items and com­bos. There is a cash reg­is­ter at one end and meal trays on the other. Upon see­ing this con­fig­u­ra­tion, it is obvi­ous that a cus­tomer should walk up to the counter, place their order, pay, and then sit down and eat. By con­trast, a fancy restau­rant con­tains groups of tables and a cash reg­is­ter near the door. Again, the archi­tec­ture com­mu­ni­cates that in order to get food, one should sit down, wait for some­one to take your order, then pay when you are ready to leave.

In the same way, a lec­ture hall gives the fol­low­ing mes­sage to a stu­dent: sit down, the teacher will be the cen­ter of your atten­tion, and don’t talk to each other. These new rooms fight that mes­sage by encour­ag­ing the oppo­site: group work and peer instruction.

Appar­ently they’ve con­ducted a pilot pro­gram for this course. I asked about the effect it has had on the stu­dents’ learn­ing and over­all impres­sion of physics. The pro­fes­sor com­mented that the grades on the midterm have greatly improved from pre­vi­ous years. But what I find more excit­ing is his com­ment that he now sees stu­dents who, after being forced to leave the class­room, seek out unlocked class­rooms to fur­ther dis­cuss with each other what they’ve just learned! And these aren’t physics majors. These are stu­dents from var­ied pro­grams of study!

… and I get to be a Teach­ing Assis­tant…
or should that be Learn­ing Assis­tant now…

Categories: Academia, Education, Public Knowledge of Science, Uncategorized - Tags: , , , ,

My Issues With Physics Education

Written by Jasper on November 17, 2008 · View Comments

A bunch of rocks | XKCD.comA few days ago I was chug­ging through the huge list of sub­scrip­tions I have on google reader, and I came across this post at ZapperZ’s Physics and Physi­cists: “What Is Worse Than A “Lost Soul”? An Igno­rant Lost Soul!”. I enjoy read­ing his opin­ion posts and gen­er­ally agree with most of what he writes (and this post is not an excep­tion to that trend). Zap­perZ writes a rebut­tal to an opin­ion col­umn in an inde­pen­dent uni­ver­sity online news­pa­per. The author of this col­umn argues that the Human­i­ties need more atten­tion as an aca­d­e­mic sub­ject, how­ever, the point is argued in a way that attempts to dimin­ish the impor­tance of Sci­ence edu­ca­tion in a gen­er­ally spite­ful manner.

Today it seems like the empha­sis put on math and sci­ence in our coun­try has made stu­dents sat­is­fied with learn­ing by sit­ting in lec­ture and sim­ply regur­gi­tat­ing facts on multiple-choice Scant­rons in a mind­less Dark Age of their own.
[…]
Sure, they can daz­zle with Darwin’s the­ory and cal­cu­late quan­tum physics, but in the area of crit­i­cal think­ing, they seem to be lack­ing.
[…]
all we can really do as [human­i­ties] stu­dents is hope for some­thing bet­ter for our­selves as crit­i­cal thinkers. We need to defend our edu­ca­tion as worth­while and pur­sue the human­i­ties because we like to do what we like and leave the rest to do the math. In the end, the human­i­ties cap­ture what the rest can­not, and that is, what it means to be human in this chaotic world.

This encom­passes two sen­ti­ments that I’ve already blogged about in “Cre­ativ­ity in Physics”, and “It’s not just about access, it’s about acces­si­bil­ity”; over­look­ing the cre­ative aspects of sci­ence, and fail­ing to real­ize that the sci­en­tific curios­ity which inspires us to study this “chaotic world” has as much to do with “being human” as the curios­ity that inspires one to pur­sue any other dis­ci­pline. I’m not going to try to tell you why this author’s opin­ions are poorly moti­vated, Zap­perZ does that well enough. I would, instead, like to ask you to look beyond the sur­face mat­ter of these opin­ions and think about what is moti­vat­ing this author’s spite and dis­taste for sci­ence. Pre­sum­ably the only promi­nent expe­ri­ence he has had with sci­ence is through the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Pre­sum­ably these opin­ions are for­mu­lated from his expe­ri­ences of the sci­ence classes he has attended in high-school. I can’t help but feel that his arti­cle illus­trates more than just spite for sci­ence; it illus­trates a fail­ure of the sci­en­tific edu­ca­tion system.

Over at Back­re­ac­tion, Bee has fre­quenly expressed the need for a sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion in many aspects of soci­ety, and I would like to add to that by say­ing that one of the most impor­tant rev­o­lu­tions that has yet to take place is in edu­ca­tion. (Physics edu­ca­tion is what I know best, so that’s what I’ll talk about, how­ever, it’s entirely likely that one can draw many par­al­lels to other fields of edu­ca­tion.) For a while now, as a stu­dent, I’ve been devel­op­ing a grow­ing sus­pi­cion that we suck at the basics. The more of my peers I talk to, the more I get the feel­ing that insti­tu­tions just sim­ply have no idea how to prop­erly teach physics. I think this is largely due to lack of proper sci­en­tific research in edu­ca­tion. Iron­i­cally, the very thing we are attempt­ing to teach sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions — namely proper appli­ca­tion of the sci­en­tific method — is the very thing we are not apply­ing to try to under­stand how best to carry that out!

When I think back to high-school, I remem­ber the vast major­ity of my friends devel­oped a loathing for physics class, and hence, physics itself. Why? Well, I think it really all comes down to lack of con­text. Learn­ing is an active process; no teacher can force large amounts of infor­ma­tion into a student’s mind. It is the stu­dent who ulti­mately decides what infor­ma­tion is going to stick. With­out moti­vat­ing the stu­dent, with­out pro­vok­ing thought and curios­ity to learn the topic, lit­tle will actu­ally be learned. From what I gather, the physics cur­ricu­lum in high-schools seems to exhibit a very indus­trial approach to learn­ing. It’s as if we are try­ing to pro­gram stu­dents minds like a com­puter. Surely you know as well as I know that stu­dents’ minds are not com­put­ers, but the cur­ricu­lum doesn’t seem to reflect this truth. The stu­dents are first taught the math­e­mat­i­cal back­ground needed to under­stand physics, then they are pre­sented with phys­i­cal laws, usu­ally in the form of eas­ily mem­o­riz­able equa­tions, then they do some exam­ple ques­tions which tend to be extra­or­di­nar­ily detached from “real life”. By this time, most stu­dents become frus­trated and/or apa­thetic and won­der: “why the hell am I learn­ing this?”. If the stu­dents are lucky (like I was) they will have a physics teacher who pro­vides “inter­est­ing prob­lems” per­haps relat­ing to “real life” sit­u­a­tions that pro­voke curios­ity and creativity.

… if your teacher was so good, why did your friends get so frus­trated with physics, you ask?

A valid ques­tion. For­tu­nately (or unfor­tu­nately) for me, I was not an “A” stu­dent. I had aver­age grades good enough to get by, so I felt safe enough to be able to skip some of the reg­u­lar home­work prob­lems in favor of the more “inter­est­ing”, ungraded prob­lems that fell out­side the reg­u­lar cur­ricu­lum1. I also, luck­ily enough, hap­pened to pick up a pop­u­lar physics book which gave me added con­text and made me curi­ous about things like rel­a­tiv­ity, curv­ing space­time and black holes. I reas­sured myself that all of these things I was learn­ing like “vec­tors”, “forces” and “energy” would get me closer to under­stand­ing black holes. But as for the other stu­dents, who had no inten­tion of becom­ing physi­cists2, they were given no moti­va­tion (even from a curios­ity per­spec­tive) for learn­ing these con­cepts. To min­i­mize the pain of endur­ing this kind of sys­tem­atic force-feeding of knowl­edge, stu­dents begin to make their own asso­ci­a­tions; they asso­ciate spe­cific prob­lems with spe­cific equa­tions and mind­lessly chug through to get a num­ber at the end (hope­fully not for­get­ting the units in the process).

This kind of cur­ricu­lum does not facil­i­tate the learn­ing of cre­ative and crit­i­cal think­ing that are char­ac­ter­is­tic of “real life” sci­ence3. It is, there­fore, no sur­prise to me that many peo­ple do not asso­ciate these things with sci­ence. Peo­ple, of no fault of their own, fail to real­ize that sci­ence is not a col­lec­tion of facts, sci­ence does study the new and unex­plained, and sci­ence is not a belief sys­tem; it is more like a “doubt sys­tem”.

For­tu­nately, peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that the edu­ca­tion sys­tem is not all it’s cracked up to be. I saw the first glim­mer of hope (and got the courage to develop the opin­ions I’m pre­sent­ing) after attend­ing a lec­ture given at McGill by Eric Mazur of Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, who is prob­a­bly best known for his research in edu­ca­tion. His find­ings are prob­a­bly best summed up in this New York Times arti­cle. Here’s an excerpt:

From what I’ve seen, stu­dents in sci­ence class­rooms through­out the coun­try depend on the rote mem­o­riza­tion of facts. I want to change this. The stu­dents who score high do so because they’ve learned how to regur­gi­tate infor­ma­tion on tests. On the whole, they haven’t under­stood the basic con­cepts behind the facts, which means they can’t apply them in the lab­o­ra­tory. Or in life.

Just today I read a post on sci­encegeek­girl (a recent blog find for me… I’m enjoy­ing the read) describ­ing a lec­ture given by a fel­low named Dan Schwartz (she has another post about his work here). Appar­ently he is also an edu­ca­tion researcher and his find­ings point in favor of allow­ing stu­dents to play around with ideas and prob­lems first, and then teach­ing them the mate­r­ial required to bet­ter under­stand the solutions.

[…] We train peo­ple to become expert at rou­tine tasks, but what we need to empha­size instead is inno­v­a­tive expe­ri­ences. Let go of what you’re told, and try some­thing new. For one, when stu­dents inno­vate a solu­tion first, then they have a con­text for what they’re learn­ing. When given the solu­tion first, they don’t have a con­text for it. […]

A sense of play seems to have a strong link to cre­ativ­ity and learn­ing. Run­ning with that theme is Zap­perZ who has been writ­ing won­der­ful posts about how to revamp intro­duc­tory physics lab­o­ra­tory courses (Here’s his most recent install­ment). He explains why intro physics labs are impor­tant for devel­op­ing con­cep­tual skills (like crit­i­cal think­ing) that can be car­ried well beyond a physics set­ting, why he thinks the cur­rent lab exper­i­ments are inad­e­quate, and he also comes up with inter­est­ing ideas for exper­i­ments that engage stu­dent curios­ity and cre­ativ­ity, like this one from his third installment:

Con­struct a pen­du­lum clock. To make this clock use­ful, it would be help­ful if the pen­du­lum can swing back and forth once as close to 1 sec­ond as pos­si­ble. Then each com­plete oscil­la­tion will take just one sec­ond. That way, this clock [can] mea­sure time in incre­ments of one sec­ond. You may use a stop watch to cal­i­brate your pen­du­lum to ver­ify that it makes a one-second swing. Try to build this as accu­rately as pos­si­ble. You must describe in detail in your lab report how you accom­plish this task and why you chose to do it this way.

In addi­tion to all of these points I’d like to men­tion that despite the fact that cur­rent physics cur­ric­ula seem to be set up to mostly ben­e­fit future physi­cists and engi­neers4, most stu­dents forced to take high-school physics won’t even go on to pur­sue careers in sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Most will, how­ever, go on to become active cit­i­zens in a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety. With prob­lems like global warm­ing grow­ing in urgency, and as tech­nol­ogy becomes more and more inte­grated into soci­ety, wide­spread sci­en­tific lit­er­acy will (and has already) become over­whelm­ingly impor­tant for well informed polit­i­cal and social deci­sions! (And yet, stud­ies in the U.S. show that only 55% of peo­ple tested know that the Earth requires one year to com­plete an orbit around the Sun. Good grief!)

…but that’s just the way I see it. What do you think? I’d love to hear your expe­ri­ences with the edu­ca­tion sys­tem regard­less of your spe­cial­iza­tion (or the age of this post)!

____

1. Unfor­tu­nately, as I dis­cov­ered after grad­u­at­ing from high-school, and after the high-school obtained a new prin­ci­pal, my teacher had been restricted to teach­ing math on the grounds that he wasn’t stick­ing to the approved physics cur­ricu­lum!
2. Actu­ally I had no idea what “physi­cists” did and why they were dif­fer­ent from engi­neers until the first year of my B.Sc. began. I just knew I wanted to under­stand the strange things about the world I heard about in books…
3. I actu­ally wasn’t for­mally intro­duced to the sci­en­tific method until I hap­pened to take a com­ple­men­tary course in psy­chol­ogy… and that’s where I learned it!
4. I actu­ally don’t think the cur­rent edu­ca­tion sys­tem, even above high-school level actu­ally ben­e­fits future sci­en­tists and engi­neers much. I think cre­ative, knowl­edge­able and com­pe­tent researchers are pro­duced at most edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions in spite of, rather than because of the edu­ca­tion system.

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