Category Archives: Education

Science Education for Everyone: Why and What?

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Science Education for Everyone: Why and What? over at physics and physicists. A commentary on an article at redOrbit.

The original article makes several good points but, unfortunately, also build a strawman or two.

A common response to the notion of teaching all of the sciences is the claim that the standard type of courses really teach something called the “scientific method,” and that this will magically give students the background they need to read the newspaper on the day they graduate. This argument is so silly that I scarcely know where to start commenting on it. If it were applied to any other field, its vacuity would be obvious; after all, no one argues that someone who wants to learn Chinese should study French, acquire the “language method,” and learn Chinese on his or her own. If we expect our students to understand the basic principles of ecology or geology, we should teach those principles explicitly. To do otherwise is to indulge in what I call the “teach them relativity and they’ll work out molecular biology on the way home” school of thought. Incidentally, the notion that there is a magical “scientific method” explains a bizarre feature of the modern scientific community. I am referring to the fact that, outside of their fields of specialty, professional scientists, as a group, are probably the most scientifically illiterate group in the United States. The reason is simpie: scientists are never required to study science outside of their own fields. The last time a working physicist saw a biology textbook, for example, was probably in high school. If you do not believe me, ask one of your scientific colleagues how he or she deals with public issues outside of his or her field. Chances are you’ll get an answer like “I call a friend,” a technique I refer to as having recourse to the Golden Rolodex.

Zapperz critiques this, and I’ll add my two cents. That there is no single “scientific method” is one of the things that we should be teaching. One does not learn French to learn Chinese, but one can develop an appreciation of language by recognizing that there are differences (and similarities) in the structures of different languages. Likewise, a teacher can point out the was that the scientific method manifests itself in their particular discipline when teaching a physics/biology/geology for poets class. Expose them to the fact that “theory” does not mean “guess.” Make them recognize the interconnectedness of science so that when someone makes a statement that is too far advanced for their level of expertise, they understand that it’s not a scientist just making stuff up. Teach them some analytical thinking. Develop their bullshit detector a little bit. Make them learn something. This isn’t an either/or situation.

Grading Policy, Sir!

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Dr. Pion’s blurb about exam design and grading reminded me of a few things. I taught for the Navy in the nuclear power program, long ago, when the school was in Orlando, Fl; physics, which included applications to plant operations whenever possible, and a class on principles of reactor operation. There are some distinct differences between exams in this context, vs how they were graded when I was a TA. Being in the military means never having to say you’re sorry to students or even explain yourself to them, if you don’t want to. That translates into not having to post or explain the grading policy on exams; the students’ job is to ‘learn the material, dammit,’ not to haggle for points on exams. Students could still put in for regrades, but it had to be for an obvious grading error, rather than for a dispute about how many points should have been deducted for their mistakes. That didn’t stop all whining, but it’s certainly a bonus when you can tell the offender to shut up — in navy parlance, “Secure that!” (or, “Secure that shit!” Optional for officers, pretty much mandatory for senior enlisted)

Since the material had a definite application, answers to questions had to display an appropriate level of understanding, which was a factor that could supercede any other policy that had been set up. There was a shorthand for the various types of errors — the usual suspects, like math errors (ME) or sign errors (SE), and the big red X for anything wrong, but there were others, too, in part because there were always several “discussion” problems, even on physics exams:
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Maybe They'll Ask for Seconds

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Brian Greene Op-Ed in the NY Times, on science and science education. Put a Little Science in Your Life

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

Testing Your Ingenuity

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There’s the Batman problem, and “an Elephant is in the way” problem.

I have a contribution that I’ve recreated below. Back when I was teaching for the Navy, there were many opportunities to learn “new” physics and see interesting answers (one shipmate kept a list of the various spellings of “Bremsstrahlung” found on exams; he had over 35 by the time he left), and the occasional tactic, as shown in the above links, of a student realizing he can’t answer the exam question, so some other reply is needed. Sometimes you change the question (hoping for a Kobayshi Maru-esque commendation for original thinking), and sometimes you just write something down, hoping it’s correct and praying for the gods of partial credit to save you.

There was this one student who wins the gold star for this. He had been a decent student through the first several months of nuclear power school, but then something happened and he started to flame out, spectacularly. A student could be dropped from the training only after failing two courses, among other requirements, so the fact that he had completed several classes and passed exams in the current courses meant that the trajectory was visible for a relatively long time. Passing was set at 62.5%, and he failed a couple of exams (including what I was teaching) with scores of less than 50%. Most students who failed out would at least keep up the appearance of trying, lest he be found guilty of dereliction of duty, but it was clear that tis particular student just stopped caring. On an electrical systems exam, he answered only one question: “Draw a one-line diagram of the XXXX system” (a one-line diagram is a schematic) This is what his answer looked like

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He was given full points for the problem, and then booted out.

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Added 6/3: It’s not just physics. Check out this bio question

Grade Welfare

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Some schools would really make Ralph Wiggum failing English unpossible.

Minimum-50 grading scheme reported at USA Today

Any grade below 50 is recorded as a 50. And this idea is not brand spankin’ new.

Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

And so moving the finish line is the answer? Are these people daft? In a course with four exams counting equally toward the final grade, an unmotivated but smart student could ace one exam and then just not show up and still pass the course. This is symptomatic of never wanting to fail anyone for any reason, because it looks bad. Similar to my recent rant, here is another example of redefining “success.” Here, success is now having all the students pass, or minimizing the number of failing students, instead of maximizing the number of students learning material, and how much they learn. The administration is successful, and the students uneducated.

Why don’t we just hand them diplomas on the first day of school, and let the rest be optional?

The Illusion of Knowledge

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Over at Backreaction

Current illusions such as the idea that if it’s on the internet, and especially if it’s in an oft-visited location, then it must be true (argument from popularity), if it can’t be explained in a short presentation, it must be false (argument from incredulity), if it’s not on the internet then it must be false, newer information is always better, and others.

I think some of this is a remnant of the idea that if something appears in print, it must be true — print used to be instant credibility in part because print was relatively expensive. The cost aspect was especially true in the earliest days, and you wouldn’t bother to commit something to writing unless it was very important, but before mass-printing, that was often spiritual truth rather than scientific truth. But with the advent of printing, thanks to Gutenberg, more information could be shared at less cost, so knowledge was put down on paper and distributed.

But it’s still largely driven by economics, and the illusion was present even back in the day. As long as a lie is profitable, and this could mean power and control, as well as money, putting it in print has a payoff. And as the cost of print goes down, the wider the illusion spreads. Today, of course, electronic print is dirt cheap. There is almost no threshold at all to making misinformation available, and even sending it to you — hey, you’ve got spam! Every crank and their inbred cousin can have a web site that “teaches” us how relativity is a conspiracy, quantum mechanics has a connection to the mind and body, the earth is 6000 years old, etc.

One danger, to which Bee alludes, is that if you’ve been hoodwinked into thinking a solution has been achieved, you aren’t as likely to support further investigation — legitimate, scientific investigation — into the problem.

The problem is not lack of knowledge. The problem is the Illusion of Knowledge that comes with an overabundance of unstructured information. It fosters the public manifestation of unfounded believes, stalls scientific arguments, and hinders progress.

You'll Learn the Interesting Stuff Later

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Bait and Switch, and observation from Entropy Bound. Peter’s argument is in the context of “the lab” being more mysterious when you don’t know what’s going on (the bait) but by the time you get to work in one you’re doing actual science which is (one hopes) quite interesting, even if the apparati have lost their mystique.

But when you get down to it, it’s a bait-and-switch: when you are growing up, no-one ever tells you that things aren’t so colorful and mysterious, so by the time you finally realize that it’s not, you’ve found a much more interesting — albeit prosaic –real world to ponder.

I can certainly identify with this, and also see a related effect along another tangent: are we using the right bait? You take physics classes (and this probably holds true for other disciplines, though I have little empirical data for comparison) and there is this sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken promise of “I know this is basic stuff and may seem boring, but I promise if you learn this, we’ll get to some interesting stuff later on.” Whether that holds true or not depends on what you’re doing, who’s teaching and what your threshold of “interesting” is. I now wonder if this is part of the hurdle to get more students interested in physics — do we bore them to death learning basic kinematics, thermodynamics and E&M? Does this drive some students away who might otherwise be interested if they were doing physics discovered after 1900? At least in biology there is the prospect of dissecting something even in introductory courses (which is why I shied away from biology. Dissection, moi? Not only no, but fuck no). In chemistry you play with chemicals. In physics we’re sliding blocks down an incline. (My undergraduate experience did have one bonus, though. Since we were a small school and could only support one sequence per year in general physics, it was designated a sophomore-level course, so that everyone taking it could have calculus as a pre- or co-requisite. In order to make sure they physics majors had something to do, we had a course in basic optics and relativity and another in electronics that were engaging, but then anyone following the normal sequence regressed to the yawn-fest)

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The Peter Gabriel Operator

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There’s an article in Seed entitled “So” and subtitled “The anatomy of a scientific staple” which purports to discuss the use of the word as a preface to scientific pronouncements in the classroom and, I presume, in conference talks as well. I thought perhaps the author was overanalyzing things, but there is this observation:

In the 1990s, Columbia University psychologist Stanley Schachter counted how often professors said “uh” and “um” in lectures and found that humanists said them more than social scientists, and natural scientists said them less frequently of all. Because such words mark places where a speaker is choosing what to say next, Schachter argued, natural scientists’ low hesitation rate underscored the hard facts they were communicating. “So” can be said to have the inverse relation for exactly the same reason. It relays a sense of accuracy and rigor. One doesn’t have to worry about what to say as much as when to say it. “So” is the organizing device for a logic-driven thought process.

I don’t fully agree with this. The delay does help you organize your thoughts; I’m not sure if the observation from the article is necessarily a fair comparison. Does a scientist use “um” rather than “so” when discussing topics in the humanities or social sciences?

Anyway, just a few days ago the Quantum Pontiff gave some empirical data on this; I had been tempted to comment on that but it kinda slipped away from me, but now I shall do so. It was my favorite word as well, when I started teaching. My experience lecturing was in the navy, and since the military is all about training, I was afforded the opportunity (if mandatory training can be considered an opportunity) to acquire and then improve my lecturing technique.

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The Strange-ness Attractor

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Female Science Professor makes an observation about random scientific inquiries made to universities

In some cases, the questions are easy and quick to answer — for example, some people call with a question about something they heard on the news. In some cases, people stop by the department (with or without calling first) and expect assistance. At least 62%* of these people are very strange. On several occasions, I have had random people call me and tell me what I should study in my research. Apparently I have been studying the wrong things. I have not yet, however, been tempted by any of these new and creative ideas, 100% of which have been bizarre.

[…]

Do some departments attract more wackos than others, or do all/most academic departments have their own special kind? Someone should study this

I know that in grad school, we had a folder of crank inquiries kept in the department’s main office, and one of my fellow students was once tasked to inspect some gizmo a random person had brought in to show one of the professors (I suspect at that point it’s better to do this than simply send the person away) because he was convinced it was an over-unity device. It wasn’t, BTW. In physics, most of the crackpots fall into three main categories: perpetual motion, anti-relativity, and anti-quantum mechanics. There are other meta-crackpots that just rail against the whole process of doing physics, claiming it’s flawed.

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A Paper From Professor Obvious?

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Using examples to teach math

[C]ollege students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn’t apply that knowledge to new situations. But when students first learned the concept with abstract symbols, they were much more likely to transfer that knowledge

In a third experiment, the researchers presented 20 students with two concrete examples and then asked them to compare the two examples and write down any similarities they saw. After this experiment, about 44 percent of the students performed well on the test concerning the children’s game, while the remainder still did not perform better than chance.

If I’m reading this correctly, my response is, “Duh!” Maybe it’s just a bad press release, but it sounds like teaching by giving an example isn’t as good as teaching by giving the general concept, and then perhaps reinforcing it with an example. So we look at the paper

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