Category Archives: Education

New Model for Science Education

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New University Education Model Needed by Carl Wieman

As knowledge and population grew, the apprentice model expanded into the university with an increasing number of students for each expert, in order to pass along information more efficiently. The lecture format predominant today began long ago, before the invention of the printing press, as an efficient way to pass along information and basic skills such as writing and arithmetic in the absence of written texts. The economies of scale led to this expanding to the current situation of a remote lecturer often addressing hundreds of largely passive students.

It’s unclear that this model was ever truly effective for science education and vast societal and technological changes over the past several decades make it clearly unsuitable for science education today.

Geeks Anonymous

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Chad was wondering what to blog about, and then tapped into the mother lode, judging by the number of responses. The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

I’m a professor at a liberal arts college, putting me solidly in the “Intellectual” class, and there’s a background assumption that anyone with as much education as I have will know something about history and philosophy and literature and art and classical music. I read enough to have literature covered, even if my knowledge is a little patchy, and I took enough classes in college to have a rough grasp of history and philosophy, but art and music are hopeless.

I admit it: I share similar characteristics with Chad. Even though I’m not awash in liberal-arts faculty, I think it’s support-group time.

Hi, I’m Tom, and I’m not a ‘real’ intellectual.

Hi, Tom.

I didn’t take art history or music appreciation in college. I like a few classical pieces of music, but my favorites came from watching Bugs Bunny — not exactly the intellectual pedigree. I tried defending my lack of classical music in my collection in college by pointing out that I liked Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture — the response was “Who doesn’t?”

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Faith and Ignorance

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Interesting link over at physics and physicists (rather than the title being a misquote from “Bull Durham.”) Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?

Richard MacKenzie of the University of Montreal has written a rather thought-provoking and lengthy article as a rebuttal to a talk given by Lawrence Krauss. In it, he is disputing Krauss’s assertion that:

Faith is not the enemy.
Ignorance is the enemy.

The linked article is pretty good.

The bottom line is that direct observation shows that faith does not obstruct scientists from
doing science. That said, there are many who portray themselves as scientists who, due to
their faith, are doing a brand of science which is an indignity to the word. I have in mind
particularly those whose principal goal in science is to advance a faith-based agenda. One
must wonder whether these individuals, who probably have a reasonable amount of scientific
talent, might not be doing respectable science if their scientificity had not been stronger, or
their religiosity weaker.

Does faith obstruct non-scientists from learning science? I would argue that it does, for
several reasons.

On that point I quite agree. Anyone who uses their ideology to dictate what answers are acceptable isn’t doing science. Ignorance isn’t the enemy, in the sense that it is an opposing entity; the goal of teaching science (and education in general) is the eradication of ignorance. Ignorance can be fixed as long as there is no active plan to preserve it. Faith, the unsubstantiated belief in something, does indeed preserve ignorance if it prevents you from considering evidence and scientific explanations.

Well worth a read.

Schrodinger's Cat's Exam Score

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I was attempting to collapse a wave function Thursday — the A/C for the office has been taking much of the past week off, with promises of its imminent repair since Monday. The one working chiller has the capacity to cool the building only a few degrees below ambient, which was nowhere near adequate with the thermometer reading in the mid-90s (ºF). So rather than continue to self-baste at my desk, I wore shorts, hoping that this action would induce the chiller to be fixed, via a combination of superposition, Murphy’s law and passive resistance: a working chiller makes shorts both superfluous and marginally inappropriate, and all will subjected to my pasty-white legs until the system is fixed (and they are quite distracting, though I am informed that “running away screaming” does not count as swooning). Alas, the wave function did not collapse to the desired state, though it was a much more pleasant day yesterday, so my office was more-or-less tolerable.

But the thought of collapsing wave functions reminded me of a phenomenon I observed many times during the years I spent as an undergrad and grad student: the student who doesn’t show up to class when the exams are handed out. The professor will usually tell the class when the exams will be returned, and it’s often delayed one or two class sessions. In a small school, that’s because the professor is grading them him- or herself, and it takes time, and in a large university it’s often because they will be graded by the TAs, and most of them won’t do it until the night before (or wee hours of the morning of) the deadline. But there’s always that handful of students who don’t go to pick up the bad news, and it’s almost always bad news — from what I observed, the correlation is pretty strong between poor performance and not showing up to face the reality. For a long while I did not understand this, as it required going to the professor directly and asking for the exam, rather than being a momentary “Bueller” on the lips, though the propensity for the student to sit in the back of the class would add some time and attention to this evolution. Still, I don’t see that comparing to the one-on-one in the professor’s office.

But then I learned of coherent superpositions in quantum mechanics and it all began to make sense. One has not failed (or done poorly) on an exam until one has been handed the papers with all the red marks. Aha! By failing to retrieve the exam, all grades are still possible, and a poor one has not yet been earned. (Though that’s not quite right, either. Good grades are earned, poor grades are given. i.e. “I earned a ‘A,'” as opposed to ” the teacher gave me a ‘D'”).

(Update: Paraphrase: “Tom, it’s fixed. Put your damn pants back on”)

Plan IX from Outer Space

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Title IX Takes on Science

Men once greatly outnumbered women in collegiate athletics—Title IX brought equality. Men currently outnumber women in science—could Title IX have the same effect? Associated primarily with sports since its inception 26 years ago, Title IX actually applies to sexual discrimination throughout education. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the National Science Foundation and NASA, at the behest of Congress, are quietly investigating whether the science departments of universities might be in violation of Title IX.

Yes, gender discrimination is a problem in science, when one is addressing the lack of equal participation and representation. Of this I have no doubt. The question is whether it is the only problem, or just one of many. (It is ironic that many of the discussions about this topic are so unscientific, because they assume that other factors play no role without having adequately established this) The issue here, though, is whether the comparison to sports is an appropriate one to make. It’s not.

Men and women don’t compete with and against each other in these sporting events. Title IX has been very successful at expanding womens’ participation in sports, because it focused on equality of opportunity and did not assume equality of ability — women are not fighting for a roster spot on a single football, soccer or baseball team, etc. Title IX did not require adopting direct competition between the sexes; there are obvious physiological differences that make this impractical. Certainly there are situations where the women would do better (the uneven parallel bars in gymnastics springs painfully to mind), but would have anywhere close to a 50-50 mix in most sports, if we had mixed-gender teams and ability were the only metric? The lack of opportunity for women that prompted Title IX was the lack of teams on which they could compete, and one could (and did) create and fund these teams. The situation in science is very much different in the difficulties that exist and the solutions that can be proffered.

It's Even Better Than the 'Clapper'

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Students Who Use ‘Clickers’ Score Better On Physics Tests

If, like me, you don’t already know what a clicker is and how it’s used, read this (buried nine paragraphs in) first:

In clicker classes, multiple choice questions appear on a large computer screen at the front of the lecture hall. Students hold the wireless devices, which resemble small calculators. They cast their votes for the correct answer based on their understanding of the part of the lecture that was just given. A bar graph shows the percentage of students voting for each answer.

The first third of the story will make more sense once you have this information.

Game Theory

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A side comment by Matt about quizzes triggered a thought (so many of these interactions are induced rather than spontaneous)

I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice repeated quizzes pretty quickly.

When I TA’d I did labs, but the same idea applied. It was assumed that the students had access to old lab reports and exams (especially if they were in a fraternity or sorority) so the one thing we could make different was a question or two tacked on to the end of the calculations. And that did trip up a couple of students, who had obviously just copied from some old report to which they had access. Professors had various strategies about re-using questions, but I think the use of computers has made it far easier to keep a large database and mix-and-match questions that simple memorization of old exams prohibitive for introductory classes.

When I was teaching in the navy it wasn’t an issue. Quizzes didn’t count toward your grade, so there was no real incentive to cheat, other than trying to get out of some extra problems to be worked because the instructor might assign them to people who failed several quizzes. There was no master file of exam questions because they were treated as restricted material — the students did not keep them, and they were strictly accounted for. But to cut down on the possibility of some “oral tradition” information flow between the different classes in session, questions were not re-used until the class that had taken that exam had graduated.

We had one incident that occurred just before I had transferred into one division — an exam went missing. The most likely explanation is someone miscounted, but what was recorded was that there were 126 exams (and they were numbered) and after the exam was administered #126 was nowhere to be found. So the exam was assumed to have been compromised for future tests, and all of the questions on the exam had to be removed from the exam bank. As it turned out, I inherited the job of writing that particular exam, so it fell to me to repopulate the stockpile — two brand spankin’ new questions per exam for the next year, so I got a lot of practice coming up with new material. Which isn’t that hard, because an old question with new numbers and solving for a different variable is a “new” question. The use of old questions wasn’t laziness, though — we didn’t grade on a curve, and the goal was to test each class the same, so you kept statistics, and made tests that had a predicted result of between a 3.1 and 3.2 on a 4.0 scale. A venerable question was well-trusted, and a new or changed question could throw the result off. If a class got an unexpectedly high or low score (usually low), an audit was initiated to try and ensure that there was nothing hinky going on. This was especially odious for the early exams, before the class had a chance establish itself as being above- or below-average. If a class had underperformed on earlier exams, tanking a later exam didn’t raise eyebrows. But at least once the conclusion was that it was the Russian judge a new question or two were harder than had been predicted, and had shaved a few tenths off the score.

But even within that strict paradigm, an exam-writer could game the system a little. No matter how much you’d drill it into the students’ heads to skip a tough question and go back to it later, there were those who didn’t. They’d invariably leave an easy question or two blank because they took too much time on another question that they still got mostly wrong. So putting tougher questions toward the front would tend to lower scores a little bit.

Expert Texpert

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Don’t you see the joker laughs at you?

Over at Physics and Physicists, a followup to an earlier post, to which I had added my two cents.

In an earlier post, I responded to a writer who called professional scientists the “most scientifically illiterate group in the US” and pointed out several fallacies of that statement. The problem here is that the level of expert knowledge that scientists consider themselves to have. We know what it means and how it feels to know something very well. This is why when we read other area of studies, we know we do not have the same level of expertise and would rather be inclined to refer to a true expert in such a field.

Once again I find myself agreeing, and wanting to add a little more than would comfortably fit in the comments.

What is it to be scientifically literate? We really have to define the term before deciding whether scientists are or are not. When stories surface about scientific illiteracy, it seems that they are pretty basic science questions that are being asked, not in-depth inquiries that require an advanced degree to answer. If we’re going to set the bar that high, then virtually everyone is scientifically illiterate, but that means that “literacy” is the wrong word. “Literacy” is being able to read at an nth grade level or college level (argue amongst yourselves, both of you, as to what that means), but it doesn’t require that you be a literature major, capable of dissecting the works of Hemingway in great detail. But there is a continuum of ability above the threshold of “literate” in terms of what you can get out of the material. Being literate means you can read “An Old Man and the Sea” and understand it. If you think you have to be able to discuss the imagery in it to be considered literate, you’re just making it up.

So scientific literacy has to be the ability to understand the basics of science in general, and some of the major tenets of various disciplines. i.e. how is science conducted, and what’s important about physics and stamp collecting biology, chemistry geology, etc. Do you possess some knowledge, and can you apply it?

I think it boils down to how good your bullshit detector is.
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The Necessity of Mathematics

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Awesome megapost over at Science after Sunclipse, covering many overlapping issues on the topic.

To use mathematics in the natural sciences, we first decide how we wish to represent some aspect of the world in mathematical form. We then take the diagrams and equations we’ve written and manipulate them according to logical rules, and in so doing, we try to make predictions about Nature, to anticipate what we’ll see in places we have not yet looked. If additional observations corroborate our expectations, then we’re on the right track. (It’s rarely so clean-cut as that — the process can spread across thousands of people and multiple generations of activity — but that’s the gist of it.) Several skill sets are involved: one must know how to idealize the world, and then how to work with that idealization. Remarkably enough, our schools fail to teach either skill.

A for Effort. C for Content.

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Via Talk Like a Physicist, an ad campaign by Science World in Vancouver BC. (and I have a vague recollection of visiting it back when I lived slaved there as a postdoc)

science_world_scale.jpg

I can’t find any link to this at the Science World web site but then this is apparently from a little while ago (other ads I found are dated 2006). So I can’t verify what was said in the pamphlet that was supposed to be included with the scale, because, of course, you only “weigh less” as long as the elevator is accelerating down. After it reaches “cruising speed” you weigh the same, and when it accelerates in the upward direction to bring you to rest, you “weigh” more, all happening on the way down. This reminds us that the scale is measuring the normal force, and not the weight, which is what I hope the pamphlet pointed out.

Another way to test this is to jump right as the accelerator starts down. In the ones that really zip, you can hit your head on the ceiling as the elevator accelerates while you are in a ballistic trajectory.