Tuesday, August 23rd 2011
Last week, I polled my readers to find out what they thought were the best ways to reach non-science majors to get them to appreciate, even fall in love with, science. Here are a few things they had to say:
From Momma, PhD:
To be successful in a 100-level course, you have to be prepared to work hard (perhaps harder than in your non-science classes). You have to be willing to get into a different mind-set where partial credit isn’t given for well-argued answers if the answer is wrong. You have to take lots of notes, you have to do the reading.…
To find your passion in science, think about the way the world works and ask yourself why. It could be anything. Why are there different races? Is race real- as in is it just a social construct or is there a biological basis for it? Why do you pee a lot when you drink alcohol? How does a computer store data? How does a touch screen work? What are seashells made of? How are they made? If you look critically at everything in your daily life, you’ll realize it’s all science. Recapture the child-like habit of always asking how and why.
Good enough cook writes:
The first time through college I was a total science-phobe….
I’m now much better able to recognize the underlying assumptions that are distorting my understanding. When I came to chemistry again as an adult, I realized that one of the things that had gotten in the way of my ability to learn chemistry earlier was my completely unreflective assumption that chemistry was basically about the physical properties of liquids, and physics was basically about the physical properties of solids…. Realizing that there were different sorts of distinction in play was key to my grasping what exactly a chemistry class was trying to teach me and to adjust my big picture accordingly, which made it a lot easier to slot into place the subject matter of the course as I went through the semester….
The point an earlier commenter made about making students comfortable with the fact that the material is hard is also key. As an adult, I’m a lot more open to being wrong. I understand, at the core of my being, that a string of wrong answers is often a necessary stage for arriving at the right answer—in a way that I didn’t in high school and college. I fear that students now are even LESS prepared to cope with wrong answers than I was—test-based education has eroded their capacity to see learning as an ongoing process, not a series of predetermined outcomes. Anything that you can do to impress upon students that it’s okay—even helpful!–to be wrong (and to model for them how to use wrong answers as a pathway to better understanding) will help make them more confident.
From zfaulkes:
“What do you think it takes to become science literate?”…
Understanding something about the process of science. I don’t mean the cookbook “scientific method” that shows up in textbooks, but the actual messy reality that professional scientists deal with, like the variety of evidence, something about how science is funded, and why we’re always asking, “Was that in a peer-reviewed paper?”
DrLPalmer writes:
College assumes the ability to study independently and read not only the textbook but looking at other sources (yes, wiki can help) that give overviews and different presentations on the same topics as presented in class. A great help is to immediately review briefly the content of the class following the class session (content goes to long-term memory with review within 24 hours). Taking courses is a job, an investment in the future. We cannot predict when and where bits and pieces of the class will become relevant in whatever work we do later.
But this is just a sampling – you need to read the comment section to see the whole thing.
What I found useful about this exercise was that it gave me space to step back and think about my class. How am I supporting my students, how am I enabling good or bad behaviors? But I also wanted to think about what my students can teach me.
So, now it’s up to you, Anth 143 students. Does their advice resonate? What does it take to grab your attention, to make you trust us? How did your earlier experiences of science influence how you feel about it today? And what will it take to build a true appreciation of science in you?
Tuesday, August 16th 2011
This fall I teach Anth 143: Biology of human behavior for the fourth time here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The difference is that most of the time I will be teaching I will be behind a computer or camera lens. Undergraduates will lead in-person sections designed to help students gain the skills they need in college science courses and beyond, where the TAs and I will handle the content and assignments online. I am even creating some videos to replace lectures, and what’s exciting is that this has opened up a whole new way for me to share science with my students. I can do woman-on-the-street interviews, I can interview colleagues, I can do demonstrations or explain graphs (and yes, I’ll share some of these on the blog as well). Producing a hybrid face-to-face/online course is allowing me to make some materials more intimate and interesting than I could have produced before, back when this was a giant lecture of 750 students at once.
In the past, I have written a Frequently Asked Questions page to divert some of the hundreds of emails I receive at the start of the semester. The first question is this:
1) Q: Should I really be sending this email to my TA or professor?
A: Probably not. Go here to figure it out.
A bit harsh, perhaps, but without a firm policy I get deluged with emails from non-student accounts that look like this:
Hey, whats the textboooook
-Sent from my iPhone
Unfortunately, my unwillingness to engage with over a hundred of these emails every single week for the first three weeks leads to the following sorts of student evaluations:
This prof was a bitch. Refused to answer email. Totally cared more about her research than this class.
I can’t totally disown the first sentence, though I leave this attitude at the skating rink. But the second sentence is untrue – I do occasionally miss or forget an email, but that only happens with students from my lab who can come and find me, not those in this course. And the last comment cannot be true, because I have put my professional interests aside again and again to devote time to revamping this course, when I full well know that to get tenure I need to do more research.
So, I have been thinking a bit more about how I can balance generosity of spirit with sanity of mind. How can I convey the reality of my expectations for students in my course without their chafing at the idea that I cannot answer questions that I know they can look up?
How can I teach them to do the work I know they can do?
I don’t want to have a conversation about “kids these days,” or the problems of helicopter parents, or cell phones (or sexism in teaching, which could be another entire thread). The reality is that my students are bright, they are talented, and they are interesting. I’m sure I would enjoy getting to know them all if given half the chance.
They just happen to be non-science majors taking an enormous science course as part of their general education requirements. This is what I have come up against, again and again. Many of them are terrified and think they will fail, and they are emailing me mundane questions I know they can answer because they just want to make a connection. Many have already been convinced by someone earlier in their lives that they aren’t good at science. Many went to schools with struggling science programs, or they were taught only enough to pass placement tests. It’s not their fault that we don’t invest enough as a culture or country in science education to give teachers the tools they need to excite students about science and give them confidence in it.
There are a few big changes we’re rolling out this semester that should give the students a helping hand – the face to face sections replacing lecture will put students in rooms of 30 rather than one room of 750. I will probably hold a series of brown bag lunches through the semester where students can just sign up to come hang out with me too.
But I know these students could still use more help. And that’s where you come in.
Some of you reading are current or former students. Some are scientists by trade, and some just love to read science. What is your advice for my students? What do you think it takes to become science literate, to have success in a 100-level science course, or to find your passion in science? What would you do to convey to these students that they know and understand far more than they realize?
I want to use this post as a chance to start a real discussion – you all get the first stab at these questions, but then I’m going to invite my students over to my next post in this series. Let’s see if we can get students and SciAm readers together talking about why science is cool, and to foster a community that appreciates science.
Friday, August 12th 2011
I am starting to incorporate video in my large enrollment course for the fall, Anth 143: Biology and Human Behavior (more on that another time, and yes, I will share at least some of them with you). The video expert on campus that I met with today pointed me to this talk by Theo Gray (Ig Nobel prize winner, founder of Wolfram Research).
The video quality isn’t great, but the topic is, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing. Gray makes a number of interesting and important points about how people understand and assess risk, and how we appreciate science education and research.
At about the twelve minute point, he refers back to an amusing quote about how science is most exciting to the student when he thinks the teacher may die. He says that boys in particular are drawn to science when there are explosions (he was absolutely not saying anything about differences in abilities, or making value statements on men and women in science – this was a benign side comment within an excellent talk).
It got me thinking, and I wanted to interrogate this for two reasons. First, I imagine there are many girls who are also drawn into science with explosions. And second, I wonder for those girls (and boys) who aren’t drawn to science with explosions, what would draw them into science?
My hope is that this series of videos I am starting to make for my 100-level, general education core requirement class will draw the student in with stories, interviews, and ways where I test assumptions that students hold about the nature of being human. I wonder, is this one of the other ways we can draw non-scientists into science?
But what are other ways? Those of us who are faculty and grad students are about to return to the classroom for the fall. What would you have us do this semester to do a better job exciting men and women, people of different ethnicities, class backgrounds and sexualities?
(Also check out a few of the other TEDxUIllinois talks from last year: May Berenbaum, famous entymologist; 90s rockers Rose Marshack & Rick Valentin; Leon Dash, college of media professor, Pulitzer Prize winner and wartime correspondent.)
