EDUC 6470 Week 7

Week 7 of EDUC 6470.

Readings

They're Not Dumb, They're Different by Sheila Tobias

In the preface, John Schaefer interprets this essay as a call to incremental work in several areas on the leaky pipeline of the path to careers in science.

In the first paragraph, Tobias mentions the work that I would like to do, "not just more tutoring, but more meaningful and appealing introductory courses." (p. 7)

Tobias was prescient in claiming that the content standards of the 1990s would "take much longer than anticipated to achieve." (p. 7)

How do college professors (or high school science teachers) produce students who are not just "younger versions of themselves"? (p. 9) Perhaps we identify that part of education that is most like indoctrination, and start chopping. The irony of our technically oriented physical science curricula might be that it dissuades those who might become good technicians because the there's no pleasure in introductory physical science courses. (p. 17)

I'll use "Eric's" quote about indoctrination.

Tobias quotes Francis Bacon as promoting science as an endeavor open to "conventional minds," but I think she strays from her point in invoking Bacon, because Bacon was writing to say that science could be checked and forwarded by repetition and redundancy, rather than by intellectual strength. Eric's course was just the near-mindless chore that Bacon proposed. (p. 32)

"Tom" echoes so much of my diatribe:

I would much rather be asked to attend a formal, inspirational lecture once every week or two and spend the rest of my time with a TA or a Macintosh solving sample problems. There would be at least some degree of interaction with a machine. We spend much too much time gaining technical knowledge of chemistry, necessary to be sure, but there is formal and even informal information which could be presented to us without numbers and details whereby we might learn what chemistry is doing on the cutting edge, what are its various subfields, and more of its history.(p. 47)

But isn't that just what the "chemistry for poets" course does? According to science departments, such courses don't satisfy requirements for the major, nor for pre-med, biology, etc.

"Laura" reflected that maybe the content of chemistry disallowed compelling introductory courses. One of the professors, in admitting that basics were dull but necessary, echoes this. Must the course of science then change, be more responsive? Is environmental science better attuned to the needs of students than physical science? And what about introductory chemistry is really helpful to the doctor or the biologist?

Active Learning in the College Science Classroom by Catherine Ueckert and Julie Gess-Newsome

I wish the authors clarified "our goals for science learning have changed." What were the goals before? Was factual knowledge in isolation ever sufficient for anything?

Their third reason for an emphasis on active learning is that students allegedly need to apply knowledge to understand it, to retain it. This argument might support a basics-first kind of learning, just the trap that we saw in physics introductory classes in Dumb-Different.

I don't see why the article begins with a description of the valuable way teachers re-learn material in order to facilitate learning it, then discards that type of learning when describing "Active learning" on page 148. Much of the active learning is centered on multi-person communications, and the picture of the teacher sitting alone at a desk preparing a lesson doesn't sound similar.

I appreciated the note on when peer discussions work. (p. 152) I also appreciated the references to studies that support the positions of the article. (esp. see p.154)

I and my students really enjoy making whole-class concept maps.

Like Druger's list, the authors' items aren't specific to content, but rather enhancements to lectures. This worries me.