How teaching should change, according to a Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Argues that the traditional lecture method of teaching physics and other STEM fields has proven ineffective, and that changes to more active methods can greatly improve learning outcomes to ensure that the next generation of researchers can achieve the next worthy breakthroughs. of the Nobel Prize.

Wieman has led efforts to improve science education. He wrote the book “Improve the way universities teach science.” And she won the world’s largest teaching prize in 2020, $4 million. Yidan Award.

So what have you learned in more than 20 years by applying your persistence (and much of your Nobel money) to studying pedagogy?

EdSurge connected with Wieman to discover and hear about her latest efforts to improve the way teaching evaluations are conducted at universities to make them more useful and more equitable.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Seamstress or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: What prompted you to start researching effective teaching?

Carl Wieman: It really started with a kind of conundrum that I saw: these graduate students came to work in my research lab doing physics and they had had many years of great success in physics courses, but they really didn’t seem to know how to do physics when they came to work for me.

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with them, because after working for me for a couple of years, they became expert physicists. And so, after seeing this happen over and over again, and actually seeing a kind of correlation, that the best students in the courses never turned out to be the best physicists, I decided that there was a fundamental question here about learning and thinking. .

So I approached this as a scientific question and started reading the research on how people learn, how physical people learn. …And he showed me that there were much better ways of teaching than what was used in most of our courses.

Did you feel that something was missing from the teaching you had in physics when you were a student?

Well, I always hesitate to use myself as data. But in fact, there were some pretty unique aspects to my education that are in the back of my mind when I look at what’s going on with other students. And in my case, I actually got involved in physics research very early in my first year at university, and I got very involved in it and decided that this was much more interesting and valuable than taking courses.

And so I really spent my entire college career dedicated to research and taking the minimal courses I could, essentially. And I managed to find a lot of loopholes, get away with a lot of things. So for me, my education overwhelmingly consisted of doing research, interacting with other research students and graduate students in the lab. And as for coursework, I never felt like I learned much from any of my classes, but it was very secondary.

You talk about the need to change the paradigm of teaching physics and other STEM fields. Generally speaking, what do you think should change?

So the norm is really this paradigm that you have a brain, and it’s kind of a fixed thing, and you fill it with knowledge. And how well you can absorb that knowledge is determined simply by the characteristics of that brain. And so universities spend a lot of time focusing on, ‘Okay, how do we select the brains that are going to absorb the most in admissions and exams and so on?’ And then, ‘What material are we going to try to pour into them? What things do we cover? That is the old and still predominant paradigm.

But I would say that what the research shows us is a very different picture, and that is that the brain is very, what we call plastic, it changes. So you really need to think about these students’ brains coming to the classroom ready to be transformed by their educational experience. And the better their educational experience, the more their brains change. And what’s really happening is that the way neurons connect is being reconfigured, and that’s developing new capabilities in those brains. And so it is largely not an idea of ​​a fixed brain with its capacity, but rather how much new capacity can be developed in a brain through proper education.

And the best form of that education that essentially achieves the best transformation of the brain is to actually get the brain to practice the thinking that you want it to learn. And so instead of sitting, listening to someone, getting distracted, giving information when the brain does very little (essentially just taking in sounds), you need to actively think about ideas, solve problems, figure things out with feedback and guidance as you go. practicing. Which is strengthened, essentially, through the right kind of mental exercise. And that’s really the different paradigm: how to exercise the brain in the right way to better develop new capabilities in it.

You have compared conferences to bloodshed. It sounds like you support that pretty harsh criticism.

Yes. This was my comment, but it was effective: lectures are the pedagogical equivalent of bloodshed. And this is not just frivolous. I mean, if you look at it, for 2,000 years people felt that bleeding was the treatment of choice and it could be justified because, well, you let people bleed and, look, they got better. And it was obviously working.

And much of the same is happening with conferences. You give lectures to a group of students and some of those students turn out to be pretty good. And obviously that means that the lecture was effective and that the brains of the students who were not successful were not very good. And this is how you can continue to justify that sermons are effective in much the same way that you justified that bloodshed was good. Yes, it didn’t work for all people, but that was only the fault of those people who had poor systems.

I’ve heard that you even proved the value of your own lectures with students to demonstrate this.

One small study I did was that I picked some important but not obvious fact, gave a lecture about it, and then tested the students half an hour later. And 10 percent of them actually remembered it. So 90 percent didn’t understand this.

And then, in fact, later I repeated this, but I presented this material in what we call an active learning environment, where instead of just telling students that they had to answer a question, they had to solve a question about how they behaved. something and then get feedback on it. And then I put them to the test and, overwhelmingly, they all remembered it. That was just a very simple but clear demonstration of what I thought a pretty good lecture was not very effective.

You have led many efforts to reform university education and have written a book about it. Are you frustrated that it hasn’t led to more change than it has?

I always feel frustrated because I am an impatient person. But at the same time, I have to admit that you’re dealing with something that’s very culturally and historically ingrained, and it’s hard to make big changes to things like that.

And there really have been quite a few changes. I mean, you see things like (the Association of American Universities) launched a great program and their STEM Education Initiative For six or seven years he has been dedicated to changing the teaching of introductory science courses. It represents the approximately 60 leading research universities in North America and calls on its members to change the way they teach. Something like this would have been unheard of not long ago.

One thing he has focused on more recently is teaching assessment in universities. Why that topic?

We are trying to solve what I consider to be a really fundamental issue in improving education. And those are the methods for evaluating teaching, particularly at the university level, where I think everyone realizes that we don’t have good ways of doing it.

What almost all universities use are student evaluations. And those have tremendous flaws. They are very partial and do not reflect effective teaching practices at all. And everyone knows that they are so flawed and will probably be illegal because there is such compelling evidence that they are so biased against them, for example, if you are an underrepresented minority or an instructor in a white-dominated field. , you just get lower evaluations even if you do this exactly the same as a white guy does. Anyway, it’s a real problem.

People always say you can’t tell (teachers) what to do. I am convinced that they are really doing what they are rewarded for. And right now teacher evaluations are meaningless. They are really counted adequately, they are counted very little in the incentive and reward promotion system. So what you need is something that is a good, meaningful assessment that you can then take seriously in how you hire and promote people, and then it will make a big difference.

AAU has held a competition which then gave grants to, I think, five or six departments to develop demonstration projects for better evaluation systems. Then we’ll see how it works.

Listen to the full discussion, including examples of active learning methods that have been proven to work and how Wieman believes the pandemic has impacted teaching. on the EdSurge podcast.