When it comes to supercharging education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) at our nation’s colleges and universities, perhaps we should ask for help from America’s third-grade teachers.
While that’s not precisely what Dr. Robert Beichner, himself a STEM master educator, was advocating during the 2007 summer’s Cottrell Scholar Conference, he did make a figurative tip of the hat to fellow pedagogues toiling in the primary grades.
“Elementary schools are so far ahead of everybody else when it comes to how to teach,” he said in response to a colleague’s comment. “Those teachers are actually trained in how to teach.”
Compared to the average college science professor, that is.
Beichner outlined his own attempts to improve the process of learning science, an approach he’s dubbed SCALE-UP – “Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs.” He noted that educational research indicates students should collaborate on interesting tasks and be deeply involved with the material they’re studying.
So how does SCALE-UP keep a classroom of 100 undergraduates actively learning?
Beichner, a distinguished professor at North Carolina State University,
begins with round tables – seven feet in diameter, to be precise. “We
tried four different diameters,” he said. “It turns out it’s
a little better if the table is seven feet.”
(Did we mention he’s a physicist? Beichner certainly shows a physicist’s delight in detail, as well as a wry sense of humor. Part of his presentation consisted of a video clip of Fr. Guido Sarducci – comedian Don Novello -- touting his “Five Minute University,” an advanced curriculum designed to teach only what the average college graduate remembers five years after graduating. That two-year foreign language requirement? All you’re likely to remember, if you took Spanish, is “Como esta usted? Muy bien,” so that’s all you need to learn!)
While projecting a photo of a room full of round tables, Beichner observed, “Most elementary students would recognize this as their room. In most places there are six to nine students per table.”
And, the studies indicate, it’s best to have one computer for every three students.
“We certainly don’t want two computers for three students, because one person feels left out,” Beichner said. “And if you have three computers for three students, everybody’s working on their computer instead of paying attention to what’s going on.”
Collaboration is important, Beichner pointed out, because, “What matters in college are the qualities of the relationships between students and faculty, and between students and students. This has been very well documented. What matters is the connections people make with other people. So maybe there is a reason to go to a brick-and-mortar university after all.”
It’s certainly a good argument to bring up when someone points out that 230,000 students currently attend the University of Phoenix, the leader among the increasingly popular private “virtual” schools, Beichner noted, adding the real purpose of changing how science is taught, of course, is to more effectively teach students how to think like scientists – not necessarily what to think. The traditional instructional method involving a lecturer laboriously filling a student’s head with facts over the course of a semester seems a tad passe´ in a world of Google, Wikipedia and their equally instantaneous kin.
What’s more, the traditional, one-size-fits-all lecture certainly doesn’t encourage critical thinking skills, nor does it promote independent thought. But SCALE UP does – in one experiment that used exam problems written specifically for students in traditional classrooms, SCALE-UP students did better than their traditional counterparts, with a mean of 73 compared to 62, he said.
“What’s pretty impressive is that the SCALE-UP students could apply their knowledge to problems we hadn’t even had in class yet,” he said.
In lieu of constant lecturing, the SCALE UP teacher tends to move around a lot.
“All the students at a table can be working on the same task, and that frees the instructor to go roaming around,” Beichner said. The walls of the room – technically a “studio,” not a “classroom” – are lined with white boards to facilitate public discussion.
In addition, smaller whiteboards are available at each table when the instructor doesn’t want one group to broadcast its solution to a problem.
“Above all you don’t want them writing on paper, because it’s really hard to see when you’re walking around,” Beichner noted.
What’s the point of walking around?
“The students teach each other most of the time,” he says. “We (instructors) roam around and help, but most of the time we try to start arguments.”
Constructive arguments, one assumes. And while students in the heat of argument may not realize it, there’s another carefully researched dimension to their situation in the studio.
“We’re really careful how we assign seats,” Beichner said. “We make sure there’s someone from the top, middle and bottom thirds of the class in every group. We don’t tell the students that, or they’d spend a lot of time trying to figure out who’s who, but we actually have a software program we wrote that does this automatically for us.”
Weaker students get to see how stronger students work, of course, but what good does it do a top-tier scholar to hang out with a weaker colleague? Plenty, it turns out.
“Think back to the first time you taught a course,” Beichner told the Cottrell scholars.
“That’s when you really learned the material. You explain it to somebody, and when they don’t get it, you have to rethink it. So why not let students do that?”
Also, group members are forced to play musical chairs after every exam. “That’s also the result of an experiment,” Beichner added. “At first we didn’t change groups, and we found that about two thirds of the way through the semester students stopped talking about physics and they started talking about basketball. They became good friends.”
He’s developed a bag of management tricks to further tweak the learning environment:
“The tables are all numbered, so you can say all even-numbered tables do this, while all the odd-numbered tables do that. And there are also members of groups A, B and C at all the tables, so you can tell groups A to calculate the speed of sound in lead and all B groups to calculate it in aluminum, or whatever, and then compare results. We also use name tags, so you can’t hide.”
As a result of all this, Beichner said, some students are a bit peeved when they realize they’re expected to do more than just sit around taking lecture notes.
“I’m starting to get the sense that most of the burden is on me to learn the material,” one student wrote during an evaluation on the second day of a SCALE UP course.
Beichner put that quotation up for everyone to read. “I said this is the only student who understands how this class is working.”
He also took that opportunity to inform the class that the only reason he was still giving a few lectures at that point was to let people know what they needed to learn. “If you leave lecture completely confused and not understanding stuff, that’s normal,” he recalled telling them. “And it means we now need to use the rest of the class for you to figure it out and understand it, because you’re not going to learn anything more by listening to me.”
Welcome to 21st century science education. Ironically, Beichner observed, it’s really not that far from the groves of the original Academy, where Plato pestered his students into thinking for themselves.
