If test scores are anything to go by, Americans have long since recovered from Sputnik shock and the enthusiasm for science it engendered. Reports of lackluster scores on national and international tests of science literacy have become an annual ritual, depressing a generation of science teachers.
But many of these teachers never gave up. In the best traditions of their discipline, they continued to experiment with new ways of teaching science, founding their experiments in research about learning and measuring the results by the yardstick of effectiveness.
Enough has been done now that we have good data on many innovative teaching methods, says Barbara A. Schaal, Ph.D., the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, professor of genetics at the School of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Undergraduate Education in the Life Sciences. “The data show that some of these teaching methods are very effective: Students come to class more, retain more and learn more.”
To explore this body of research with the University community, the committee, together with the provost’s office and Arts & Sciences, are sponsoring a four-part seminar series on inquiry-based methods of teaching.
The speaker at the first seminar, to be held at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 30, will be Jay Labov, Ph.D., a senior staff member of the National Research Council’s Center for Education. His talk, titled “Science Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Evidence and National Needs,” will be held in the Whitaker Hall Auditorium.
The seminar series is free and open to the public.
“Education is a way of dealing with a lot of national issues,” said Schaal, who recently was re-elected vice president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and appointed a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an advisory group of 20 of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who advise the president on areas of science that are key to strengthening the nation’s economy and forming its policy.
“Almost everything we’re worried about as a nation,” Schaal said, “could be addressed by having better K-12 or college education.”
Labov, who began his career as a biology professor at Colby College in Maine, has served as study director for many National Research Council reports on education research, including “Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology,” and “Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools.”
He also oversees the NAS’ efforts to improve the teaching of evolution in public schools.
He worked closely with Bruce Alberts, Ph.D., the former president of the NAS, who made science education one of the academy’s top priorities, Schaal said.
“Change will not be appropriate for every department or for every course,” Schaal said. “But I think it is important for this community to look at the data coming from recent research on science teaching.”
All the more so, she said, because Washington University has always valued teaching as much as research.
“We’re not at all like some places where you have an elite cadre of researchers, and the teaching is left to lecturers. Washington University has many great scholars, scientists, humanists, social scientists — and they’re the ones standing in front of the students and teaching the introductory as well as the advanced courses,” Schaal said.
For more information, contact Kirsten Smith at 935-3359 or kirstensmith@artsci.wustl.edu.