Inside Higher Ed shares a ray of hope about the education system.
A Nobel-winning physicist has been appointed to help shape the teaching of sciences in the US.
The best approach to teaching science is to understand not education, but the scientific method, according to Carl Wieman. In a speech on this idea Friday night, he began with a hypothesis: “We should approach teaching like a scientist,” he said. The outcome will rely on data, not anecdote. “Teaching can be rigorous just like doing physics research."
He contends, with some authority, that the 'lecture/notes/test' system is flawed, because students don't retain what the teachers attempt to teach. He proposes an approach that improves retention, and teaches students how to think using the scientific process.
[The] problem with the current structure of science education is that teachers try to get students to learn “key concepts” from physics. “We think that physics has a few ideas that can be widely applied,” he said. “So people test for those few ideas.” Wieman says that students really only retain about 30 percent of those key concepts, so this approach simply does not work.
This is the approach of 'teach-to-the-test' now so prevalent in schools. Principals and faculties need those good scores, which are published, on upon which reputations are based. The temptation is huge to simply program children to perform for those standardized tests.
Here's wishing him well.
We need scientists, and lay people who understand what they do and how they do it.
Who knows, we may eventually be able to lower the temperature at local school board meetings when the teaching of sciences is discussed.
1 comment:
Well, that sounds just lovely! But did you notice that he did not say what is to be done, only that it is to be something different? Back at the original article he gives just a hair more information about making the lectures have less content (??) and be related to the world around us. (Duh!)
I think I see why he got all that money from the school in Canada to start the new teaching initiative. He sounds really trendy. In the end, I have serious doubts that he will produce anything of value.
From my own experience as a Mechanical Engineering Professor, I think one of the major problems is that we have come to this foolish idea that everyone should go to college. This is utter nonsense, and the result is that a college degree is nothing more than a glorified high school diploma today. If things worked properly, no more than about 10% of the population would go to college; that is all that is intellectually capable of doing the work that would be in a true college program of study. Instead, many colleges today are offering remedial high school work for credit. It is a complete disgrace.
It is all a part of the socialist program to homogenize the population at the lowest common denominator. True excellence it despised by the socialist, along with objective truth. Thus they have invested heavily in the destruction of our universities to make them nothing more than marxist indoctrination camps.
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