My Issues With Physics Education

A 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.