Teaching Undergraduate Science

A Guide to Overcoming Obstacles to Student Learning

Linda C. Hodges

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781620361788
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book is written for all science or engineering faculty who have ever found themselves baffled and frustrated by their undergraduate students' lack of engagement and learning. The author, an experienced scientist, faculty member, and educational consultant, addresses these issues with the knowledge of faculty interests, constraints, and day-to-day concerns in mind. Drawing from the research on learning, she offers faculty new ways to think about the struggles their science students face. She then provides a range of evidence-based teaching strategies that can make the time faculty spend in the classroom more productive and satisfying.Linda Hodges reviews the various learning problems endemic to teaching science, explains why they are so common and persistent, and presents a digest of key ideas and strategies to address them, based on the research she has undertaken into the literature on the cognitive sciences and education. Recognizing that faculty have different views about teaching, different comfort levels with alternative teaching approaches, and are often pressed for time, Linda Hodges takes these constraints into account by first offering a framework for thinking purposefully about course design and teaching choices, and then providing a range of strategies to address very specific teaching barriers – whether it be students' motivation, engagement in class, ability to problem solve, their reading comprehension, or laboratory, research or writing skills.Except for the first and last chapters, the other chapters in this book stand on their own (i.e., can be read in any order) and address a specific challenge students have in learning and doing science. Each chapter summarizes the research explaining why students struggle and concludes by offering several teaching options categorized by how easy or difficult they are to implement. Some, for example, can work in a large lecture class without a great expenditure of time; others may require more preparation and a more adventurous approach to teaching. Each strategy is accompanied by a table categorizing its likely impact, how much time it will take in class or out, and how difficult it will be to implement.Like scientific research, teaching works best when faculty start with a goal in mind, plan an approach building on the literature, use well-tested methodologies, and analyze results for future trials. Linda Hodges' message is that with such intentional thought and a bit of effort faculty can succeed in helping many more students gain exciting new skills and abilities, whether those students are potential scientists or physicians or entrepreneurs. Her book serves as a mini compendium of current research as well as a protocol manual: a readily accessible guide to the literature, the best practices known to date, and a framework for thinking about teaching.

1

Introduction

Making the Most of the Time We Spend Teaching

In the movie Groundhog Day (Albert & Ramis, 1993), Phil, a Pittsburgh weatherman with delusions of grandeur, gets caught in a time warp, repeating one day of his life over and over and over—Groundhog Day. He is stuck in what he considers the ends of the earth, the little town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It’s cold, it’s dreary, and he hates covering the hokey story of whether the groundhog sees his shadow. He keeps running into an obnoxious former classmate, stepping in a mud puddle, and getting rejected in various ways by the woman he loves. Nothing he does allows him to break this cycle. Although he can’t change the initial events each day, he can change the outcome of each encounter through his response to it. Time moves on only when he accepts his condition, reenvisions what he wants out of life, and changes the choices he makes.

What does this story have to do with a book on teaching college science? Science and math can be demanding topics to teach—topics that students may find uninteresting and difficult. As science and engineering faculty, we also may sometimes feel caught in a frustrating cycle, one in which the hours we spend teaching do not translate into the kind of learning we want from our students. According to a 2012 study, faculty spend an average of 50 hours per week working and, of that time, about 20 hours are spent on teaching-related activities (Bentley & Kyvik, 2012). For faculty at certain kinds of institutions or at certain stages of their career, that number can be much higher. Yet most of us don’t want to just clock time when we are teaching. We want to enjoy what we do and feel that it matters. Although we may enjoy many aspects of our teaching, all of us have days when we feel that the time we spent in the classroom could have been spent more productively elsewhere. We can sometimes feel stuck, like Phil, spending day after day on activities that produce the same unsatisfactory results.

So how do we break out of this cycle and get more out of the time we spend teaching? One important step is to figure out what we want to accomplish as teachers. Then we can intentionally plan ways to accomplish it. As we strive to make our teaching more productive, we will encounter some roadblocks based on common problems that students have in learning science. In the following chapters I discuss various learning problems endemic to teaching science and engineering and propose strategies to address them based on research studies in the cognitive sciences and education. I calibrate the suggestions I offer to recognize individual preferences in teaching styles. In the last chapter I extend these ideas to provide a framework for thinking about our course design and teaching choices to direct our teaching energies more purposely. In this chapter I elaborate on how a teaching perspective common among scientists connects our research to our teaching.

Common Teaching Perspectives in Science

When I began teaching, I did not think particularly about what I wanted to accomplish as a teacher. Rather, I thought about what I was supposed to do. My perception of my job was that I needed to prepare clear, organized lectures and deliver them to students. I needed to be willing and able to answer their questions and provide some extra help with explanations for those industrious students who hit a snag. My students’ jobs were to learn what I was teaching. This view is a common one among teachers and has been called the “transmission perspective” (Pratt, 1998). Daniel Pratt recognized and described five distinct perspectives of teaching from his work with faculty: transmission, apprenticeship, developmental, nurturing, and social reform. Faculty may mix and match these approaches depending on the varied content or contexts of our teaching, and our views of teaching may change over time. Not surprisingly, new faculty often initially adopt the teaching ­perspectives that they experienced as students in their disciplinary fields. Given the nature of science, the transmission perspective is especially common. After all, science changes very rapidly, and math and science concepts and relationships are often abstract or nonintuitive (or both), thus making it difficult for students to understand them on their own. Fewer science faculty overtly adopt the developmental, nurturing, or social reform perspectives. Aspects of these approaches, however, may be represented in another very popular teaching perspective in science: the “apprenticeship perspective.”

The apprenticeship approach of teaching is a powerful one for promoting students’ intellectual growth. In this approach we work closely with our students as we engage them in our research, often working side by side with them in the laboratory or field. We model scientific thinking, guide their learning of process, provide an opportunity for them to practice the discipline, and give them feedback on their efforts. We also let them take some initiative that can lead to exciting results. As physicist and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman points out, the few years of the apprenticeship of graduate work produce miraculous student development that all of a student’s prior years of education do not (2007). Cultivating learning through research is not automatic, of course, and some experiences work more positively than others. I discuss ways to help undergraduate students get the most out of research and laboratory classes in chapter 7. That said, however, faculty often have the most satisfying teaching experiences in these apprenticeship encounters with students. For many of us, this perspective captures our highest aspirations for our teaching and our students’ learning.

How can we realize the advantages of the apprenticeship perspective in our teaching more generally? Research in cognitive psychology and related fields has identified some of the key features of the apprenticeship model that work to foster human learning so successfully. Specifically, the apprenticeship model involves students in deliberate practice, or activities essential to the development of elite expertise in a field (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Deliberate practice refers to engaging students in the demanding activities or problems or ways of thinking relevant to developing expertise in a discipline. Essential to this process are graduating these activities according to the learner’s stage of development and providing expert guidance and feedback. The amount of time spent in deliberate practice may well turn out to be one of the most essential factors in achievement in any field. Fortunately, the concepts inherent in deliberate practice can be adapted to work in the classroom and teaching laboratory (Wieman, 2012). Thus, we do not have to reserve the power of the apprenticeship approach just for our research students; we can also leverage it in our daily teaching encounters with students. The research and strategies I provide in this book are designed to help you do just that.

Although there is no magic pedagogical bullet when it comes to teaching, a number of evidence-based strategies can more often promote the kind of learning we want in our students. In subsequent chapters I describe what we know about the specific cognitive challenges inherent in the particular tasks that we ask students to undertake in science classes. I also explore how we can capitalize on that research to use more effective, efficient teaching approaches. In this introductory chapter I link some of these key ideas to the apprenticeship model of teaching, a model that most of us find natural and effective. In this way, we may see more easily why some of the teaching strategies I describe throughout this book can help us achieve the kind of learning we want for our students with the least amount of wasted time and effort on our part.

Connecting Key Ideas About Learning With Apprenticeship

Research in the cognitive and learning sciences suggests a number of ideas that are especially key as we seek to promote learning in students. These include the need to

• • Uncover and capitalize on students’ prior knowledge
• • Provide practice and feedback, not just assessment
• • Motivate students
• • Help students think about their thinking
• • Create positive beliefs about learning
• • Cultivate self-regulated learners

Next, I discuss how each of these ideas typically manifests in the apprenticeship model and how we can adapt these approaches for our classroom teaching.

Uncovering Prior Knowledge

One of the most important facts about human cognition is that our prior knowledge is instrumental in either helping or hindering our learning. As we are exposed to new ideas, we test them against our prior understandings, trying to fit them within preexisting mental structures if we can. If new ideas fit logically within prior understandings, then they deepen or broaden our learning. If they do not fit, then we either discard them or tuck them away in some other part of our brain where we may or may not find them again. If students have accurate foundational knowledge, they can incorporate new, related concepts much more easily. On the other hand, we all know that student misconceptions are common in science. These naïve understandings inhibit the incorporation of new, accurate knowledge and are extremely hard to unseat. As faculty, it is very important for us to know what students know, or think they know, as we introduce a topic.

The research setting naturally provides a powerful environment for uncovering students’ prior knowledge. In research settings, we can readily see when students do not know how to do a procedure or how to interpret data. We do not have to probe too deeply to discover that this lack of understanding often goes beyond just the mechanics of the process to a fundamental gap in their conceptual understanding. This discovery can in fact be illuminating for us, because as experienced scientists we have usually forgotten our own struggles with understanding—a phenomenon termed expert blind spot (Nathan, Koedinger, & Alibali, 2001). I remember being a bit confounded during an organic chemistry laboratory when a student asked me how she would know when all the liquid had evaporated from her sample. To her credit, as I stared blankly at her, she asked, “Is that a dumb question?” In one sense, no, it wasn’t. She did not know enough (or had not put all the ideas together) to realize that her product was a solid, and thus she would know when the liquid was gone because it was gone. To an expert, however, her question seemed as silly as asking when we would know it was raining as we stood outside.

Students’ gaps in prior understanding may show up in their lack of prerequisite background information or experience, such as my example in the preceding paragraph. More problematic, however, are the cases in which students have background knowledge and think they understand something, but they don’t. Science students’ misconceptions can be extreme and persistent. Common examples include those in the famous educational video A Private Universe (Pyramid Film & Video, 1988), in which undergraduates graduating from Harvard were asked about the causes of the seasons. The explanations of the students, including physics majors, overwhelmingly cited the earth’s distance from the sun as the underlying cause—a commonsense, albeit erroneous, rationalization. Likewise, undergraduates including biology majors typically overlook the role of carbon dioxide in contributing to plant growth weight (Eisen & Stavy, 1988). After all, the water and soil are visible, but carbon dioxide is not.

The naïve explanations that students carry over from childhood observations cannot be overturned simply by lecturing to them. Working in a research setting often provides opportunities for students to make predictions and experience cognitive conflict when results do not fit their expectations. This overt confrontation of fancy with fact can help students start to dismantle their prior mental models and construct them anew with more accurate explanations. The critical piece of this process, however, is that students must articulate their predictions or expectations prior to their observations. Research on the use of demonstrations in lectures, for example, has shown that students are perfectly capable of seeing what they expect to see rather than what actually occurs (Crouch, Fagen, Callan, & Mazur, 2004; Milner-Bolotin, Kotlicki, & Rieger, 2007). Thus, a key advantage of the research experience over passive observation of phenomena is the student’s active involvement in all aspects of hypothesis posing and testing.

So how do we draw on the strengths of the research environment to uncover students’ prior understandings and revise their pre- or misconceptions in our other teaching settings? Research activities are not unique, obviously, in providing opportunities to expose one’s ignorance. What is perhaps different is that in research situations we typically provide students with regular opportunities to demonstrate their understanding or lack thereof in a practice or low-stakes circumstance before they participate in an expensive, decisive procedure. There are also more opportunities for discussion of the ideas in the experiment. In our courses, students often only demonstrate what they know in high-stakes testing situations, or on homework where relying on the text or one’s friends to provide answers is all too easy. And common experiments in teaching laboratories may simply involve rote activities with very little active reflection by students. If we interrupt our lectures with chances for students to answer challenging questions or work on problems, either alone or in groups, we can learn a lot about what students are thinking, as I discuss more fully in the following sections. And if we provide specific time in teaching laboratories for students to talk together about what they know about the phenomena and what they expect to find out, we can uncover their naïve understandings. Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 7 provide a variety of suggestions of ways to conduct these activities productively.

Providing Practice and Feedback

Learning is in many ways an iterative process of first exposure, processing, and feedback (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998). Typically, faculty provide first exposure to content through lectures, assign homework for students to process ideas on their own, and give feedback through grading. Elsewhere in this book (chapters 2, 4, and 5) I present some arguments that this model may not be the most time-efficient or effective division of labor for us or our students. At this point, however, let me tie this model to the ideas of deliberate practice we see in the apprenticeship activities of research. Research experiences often provide an ongoing and almost synchronous process of testing ideas, trying out procedures, collecting data, and receiving feedback to inform future choices. Research is an active process, whereas class time al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Making the Most of the Time We Spend Teaching
• 2. Helping Students Learn During Class
• 3. Helping Students Learn From Text
• 4. Helping Students Learn, and Learn From, Problem Solving
• 5. Motivating and Helping Students Learn on Their Own
• 6. Helping Students Learn From Tests and Assignments
• 7. Helping Students Learn From Laboratory Work and Research
• 8. Helping Students Learn to Write Like Scientists
• 9. Making Choices About What and How to Teach in Science
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Ad Page
• Back Cover