Date:
Location:
Taking a Scientific Approach to Science and Engineering Education
Carl Wieman, PhD
Professor of Physics and of the Graduate School of Education
Stanford University
Nobel Laureate, Physics
RSVP
Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science and engineering education meanwhile has remained largely medieval. Research on how people learn is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than what is in use in the traditional science or engineering class. It makes more use of the instructor’s expertise, and it also shows students how to learn most effectively. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching and learning that can provide the relevant and effective STEM education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. I will discuss basic principles, classroom research results, and how the science of learning reveals counterintuitive deficiencies in several extremely common teaching practices. Although the focus of the talk is on undergraduate science and engineering teaching, where the data is the most compelling, the underlying principles come from studies of the general development of expertise and apply widely.
RESOURCES:
Wieman C. Improving how universities teach science: lessons from the science education initiative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2017.