Let's Keep Moving Forward!

On Tuesday, March 10, 2015, my husband Art and I went on a date. We went to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus to hear a Center for Advanced Study MillerComm seminar presentation by Professor Carl Wieman from Stanford Univ. Professor Wieman received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. Based on this information, one might naturally assume that Professor Wieman was going to speak that evening about his award winning discoveries in physics. However, that was not the case. Rather, the title of the Nobel laureate's talk that attracted us to the auditorium that night was “Taking a Scientific Approach to Science Education!” What a delight it was to have such a highly decorated and esteemed faculty member come specifically to share his ideas about improving the effectiveness of higher education! And there is more good news – the auditorium was packed with folks from a wide array of disciplines from all across campus! The take home, bottom line message from the first part of Professor Wieman's talk, based on a good deal of science education research, as well as his experiences and research as a physics educator, was this: the traditional lecture method is a pretty ineffective tool for helping students learn. The second part of Professor Wieman's talk was what we, as front line educators, can do about it. In the next few paragraphs, let me try and share with you some of Professor Wieman's ideas and suggestions, based on his talk and some of his science education articles (for example, Wieman 2009a-2009e, Wieman and Gilbert 2014, and Wieman 2015). Professor Wieman's view is that successful science education should transform how students think, so that they can understand and use science more like scientists do (Wieman 2009a). Thus, our goal as science educators is to help our students learn to think like scientists. This means intentionally moving our students from novices to experts, where expert competence equals lots of factual knowledge about their subject, plus a mental organizational structure or framework that facilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge, plus the ability to monitor their own thinking and learning (metacognition). The traditional science lecture focuses on teaching lots of factual knowledge about the subject matter to students, but often falls considerably short in developing the additional two aspects of expert competence, mental organizational structures and metacognition. To become an expert takes countless1 hours of practice and experience. Learning to think like an expert takes extended, focused metal effort. Simply stated, “A person who does not go through this extended mental construction process simply cannot achieve mastery of a subject” (Wieman 2009c). The same principles that apply to athletic development and mastery apply to mental development and mastery: if you want to get really good at something you must practice, obtain feedback for improvement from someone who is really good at doing it, do more practice, gain more experience, think about what you are doing and how you are doing it, talk with other people about how they do it, watch other people do it, practice more, get more feedback, and so on. I am sure you get the picture! These principles of achieving mastery solved one of the puzzles that Professor Wieman shared with us that night. He wondered why his new graduate students knew so little about how to do physics after 17 years of education (K thru 12 plus 4 years of college), but became experts after a few years of doing research in his laboratory. It seems that the traditional science courses that the students had taken did little to develop expert-like thinking about physics. Whereas, when those same students were involved in doing laboratory research, intently focused for many hours a day on solving real physics problems, they became experts. The basic principle at work here is that to really learn something people must create their own understanding (Wieman 2009c). This understanding resides in a person's long-term memory and is developed physically via the construction and assembly of component proteins in the brain (Wieman 2009c, Zull 2002). Thus, a person MUST go through an extended mental construction process (aka brain change) to achieve mastery. In addition to participating in this extended mental construction process, the graduate students are given focused feedback and guidance about their thinking on a regular basis. They become experts the good old-fashioned way, and, as far as we now know, the only way… lots of hard work, determination, feedback, and passion! Realizing the missing pieces, Professor Wieman began thinking of how he could engage undergraduate students in science classes in the cognitive processes necessary for developing expert competence. Professor Wieman, as well a number of other science educators (for example, Bransford and others 2000, Ambrose and others 2010, Singer and others 2012, Weimer 2013, Brown and others 2014, and many others given in Wieman and Gilbert 2014), have developed and tested a number of pedagogical strategies that can be used to begin helping students think like scientists in classes. What follows are a couple of example strategies to get the ball rolling! I encourage you to delve into some of the references provided herein for more details and more strategies. Reducing cognitive load: The concept of cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the short-term working memory. Unfortunately, the short-term working memory has a limited capacity, so anything a teacher can do to reduce cognitive load improves learning. To illustrate this point, Wieman (2009c) uses the analogy that giving students material to master is the mental equivalent of giving students packages to carry. If we load our students down with too many “packages” to carry they will stagger around unable to get anywhere quickly, if at all. The result is poor to no real learning. There are a number of ways to decrease cognitive load, such as cover less material (but uncover material more deeply), use visual explanations rather than relying on word-heavy explanations (Schmidt 2009), minimize the use of technical jargon and acronyms, provide the student with an explicit organizational structure or outline and tie concepts back to the organizational structure or outline within a topic and across topics, link new material to prior knowledge and prior topics, and arrange topics into chunks with breaks (such as problems or activities designed to use or solidify information just presented) between chunks, just to name a few strategies. These latter strategies also help students create the knowledge organization of experts. Stimulating and guiding thinking: Teaching and learning can be improved by implementing practices that engage students, monitor their thinking, and provide them with feedback. These practices don't happen by accident, but rather take careful and intentional planning and implementation by the teacher. And they don't stop with the teacher, but must be “followed up with extended effortful study, where the student spends considerably more time than is possible in the classroom developing expert-like thinking and skills” (Weimen 2009d). Thoughtfully designed out-of-class assignments, activities, and projects, as well as timely and appropriate feedback are necessary in order to assist students in developing long-term memory structures required for subject matter mastery. Both teacher and student must work hard and purposefully for expert-like thinking to occur. To conclude his talk, Professor Wieman called for institutional change, specifically, changing the teaching of science at the major research universities. There is now ample evidence showing that the traditional approaches to teaching science are not successful for many of our students and are not really optimum for any of our students, and that a few research-based approaches achieve much better learning results (Wieman 2009e). Professor Wieman readily acknowledges that for change to take place, we face several major challenges, including, but not limited to, incentives and resources. First, a quantifiable connection needs to be established between incentives in the system and student learning. This, in turn, requires an authentic means of assessing what students have actually learned. The tools for assessing student learning and teaching quality are still emerging. In their recent article, Wieman and Gilbert (2014) propose a new method for gauging teaching effectiveness called the Teaching Practices Inventory. The inventory quantitatively determines the full range of teaching practices used in a course. Teaching quality is then assessed by determining how often practices that research has shown to consistently produce improvements in student outcomes are used, compared to alternative practices. Wieman (2015) acknowledges that it may seem surprising to evaluate the quality of teaching by looking only at the practices used by an instructor. However, Wieman (2015) makes a case that this type of approach is currently being used to assess research quality. While grant support and number of publications do not guarantee substantial research contributions, they tend to be well correlated. Thus, in turn, the substantial use of research-based teaching practices has been strongly correlated to both the amount of student learning achieved and course completion rates (Wieman 2015). Another piece of good news is that these correlations were shown to hold across a large range of different disciplines, instructors, and institutions. Second, introducing effective, wide spread implementation of research-based teaching practices in all higher education science courses would require significant resources and ongoing support. Research has shown that effective teaching involves complex expertise, just as does scientific research and so many faculty would need assistance to acquire this expertise quickly and efficiently. Even though resources at many colleges and universities are already scarce, if there is significant grassroots support on campus to take meaningful, concrete steps to bring about the needed cultural changes, resources will follow. There is no simple solution to such a complex challenge as changing science education, but Professor Wieman did offer a critical first step that can be carried out relatively quickly without the need for significant resources (Weimer 2009e): “…the most effective first step will be to provide sufficient carrots and sticks to convince the faculty members within each department or program to come to a consensus as to their desired learning outcomes at each level (course, program, etc.) and to create rigorous means to measure the actual outcomes.” As a member of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), I am excited and proud to say that what Professor Wieman suggests as a first step to changing science education is exactly what is being required by IFT, via the Higher Education Review Board (HERB), of all food science programs seeking IFT approval or reapproval [see details in the JFSE article by Iwaoka (2011) entitled “IFT 2011 Resource Guide for Approval and Re-Approval of Undergraduate Food Science Programs”]! All IFT-approved programs are required to have in place program- and course-level learning outcomes for all core food science courses and an ongoing yearly assessment plan of a subset of those learning outcomes. The importance of both the development and assessment of these program- and course-level learning outcomes cannot be overstated, since in actuality they define the thinking and tasks students need to do (practice) to become expert food scientists! Given our significant progress on this first step, my encouragement is for us to keep moving forward, taking the best and wisest next steps as individuals and as a scientific society, to enhance the teaching and learning in food science programs around the world. And let‘s keep using the Journal of Food Science Education to share with others what we are learning and doing in our classrooms to achieve the goal of helping our students learn to think like scientists. Many thanks to Professor Wieman for his helpful feedback and suggestions on this editorial and many thanks to Dr. Faye Dong for her helpful, ongoing feedback and suggestions on all my editorials!