As we wrap up this conference, I would like to talk briefly about what we can do when we go home to address what I see as a major impediment to changing research universities in the way that we would like. I am referring to the general lack of awareness among university science faculty and administrators that the present system is not working, that it is important to fix it, and that there are practical ways to go about doing so.

As Carl Wieman documented clearly on the first day, we are not doing a good job at teaching undergraduates, at least in our introductory and non-majors science courses. Students are still coming away with the view that science is primarily a collection of facts, and we are generally failing to help them progress from thinking as novices to thinking as experts. In these large courses, we do not engage our students actively; rather, we lecture to them. I liked the phrase that Nancy Cantor used to describe the ideal classroom as “an experience-oriented imaginative space.” Does that describe the typical science lecture for beginning students? I don’t think so – certainly not my own classes over the years, although they are now moving toward that ideal.

Probably all of us here would agree with the premise of the Boyer Commission report (1998), that research universities, with their well equipped laboratory facilities, their human resources of graduate students and post-doctoral associates, and their research-active faculty, have unique potential for educating undergraduates. But we would also agree about the need to change and improve current practices in order to reach that potential. In the breakout session I participated in yesterday, someone pointed out that change is likely to come only when and if there is widespread dissatisfaction with the present system. Unfortunately, this dissatisfaction does not exist among most of the faculty at our research universities, who regard their teaching as adequate given the constraints on their time and the large numbers of biology majors they must deal with. I submit that we must sow some seeds of dissatisfaction! We must raise faculty awareness of:

1. The results of recent research on learning, the evidence for inefficacy of current approaches, and the importance of improving on the current standard lecture course format.
2. Successful alternative teaching models in their disciplines.

We heard about the startling results from recent research in educational psychology at the second plenary session yesterday. Why have most of us not seen these results before: convincing data showing that many of our own and students’ perceptions of how best to learn new material are wrong? Carl Wieman presented some of the evidence from physicists (and there is much more: see for example Hake, 1998; Saal et al, 2000) that active engagement courses produce substantially higher normalized learning gains for students than do standard lecture courses. In other disciplines, we need validated tests for measuring conceptual learning gains such as those developed by the physicists, and we need examples of comparisons between standard and active-engagement courses. The physicists have shown clearly that the standard lecture format produces relatively poor results; presumably the same is true in other disciplines.

Regarding alternative teaching models, many faculty assume that the only practical way to teach a large course is through lectures, and that interactive engagement in class and individual attention from the teaching staff are impossible in classes larger than around 30 students. Carl Wieman, Eric Mazur and others in physics have shown that these assumptions are not true if current information technologies are exploited. Personal response systems (“clickers”) allow for active give- and-take between instructor and students in a large class (Wood, 2004). With clickers, student responses, for example to a multiple choice question posed by the instructor, are anonymous during the class, so that individuals are not afraid of giving what might be a “dumb” answer; however, the system records the responses of individual students if desired for record keeping. After students have voted on a question, the system displays the percentages of students who chose each answer. Immediately, the students see how their responses compared to those of the class as a whole, and, most important, the instructor obtains instant feedback on what fraction of the students are not understanding the topic at hand, and can do something about it on the spot. If only about half the class gets the right answer, the best thing to do may be to ask students to talk with their neighbors and try to convince each other about who is correct. After a few minutes of discussion, if a re-vote is taken, most of the students will choose correctly. This process is what Eric Mazur has called “peer instruction” (Mazur, 1996). It almost always works. Moreover, the students in such a classroom are not sitting passively taking notes, but are actively engaged in trying to solve a problem – a prerequisite to meaningful learning as we have heard at this conference. Again, we need to publicize examples of how such approaches work in other disciplines besides physics, to help persuade our colleagues to give them a try.

I am involved in two initiatives to help raise awareness about these issues, and I would like to mention them in hopes that others of you may wish to participate as well. One is a relatively new online educational journal called Cell Biology Education (http://www.cellbioed.org). Despite its title, CBE is becoming a general journal of education for the life sciences. It is sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology, and it is a good example of the important role that professional societies can play in raising awareness about the need for and the means toward reforms in undergraduate science education. Rather than being written by and for educators, like professional education journals, CBE is written by and for practicing life scientists like many of us here at this meeting, who are participating in educational innovations and reforms. This journal is relevant to a good question asked yesterday in the educational psychology plenary session: “How can we learn about these kinds of results from educational circles? We don’t see the education journals in which this research is published, and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to understand the jargon well enough to read them.” One answer is journals like CBE, of which there are now several in various disciplines. You will be able to read and understand it, and I hope that some of you may wish to contribute of articles to it in the future.

A second initiative I am involved with is the National Academies Summer Institutes in Undergraduate Education in Biology (http://academiessummerinstitute.org). Created in response to the recent National Research Council (NRC) report Bio 2010 (2003), the Institutes are designed on the principle of the well-known Cold Spring Harbor Research Courses: bring as instructors a few dedicated researchers in some ground-breaking area of biology together with a group of highly motivated student- and faculty-level trainees who want to learn about this topic, and spend several intensive days in presentations, discussions, and hands-on laboratory research projects. The first Institute, sponsored by the NRC and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), was held in summer 2003 as a pilot (in that almost all the participants were faculty members and educators already involved in teaching innovation and reform), to see if such a meeting could be engaging and worthwhile (Wood and Gentile, 2003; Wood and Gentile, 2003a). The participants judged it a spectacular success, several writing that it was as exciting as any scientific meeting they had ever attended. A second Institute was held in August 2004, again funded largely by HHMI with help from the National Academies. The facilitators were again biology educators and faculty teaching innovators (several of them graduates of the pilot Institute), and the “students” were chosen from a pool of about 35 applicant teams. The teams consisted of two or three instructors from the same institution, including at least one junior and one senior faculty member involved in introductory biology teaching. Preference in admission was given to teams from large research universities, where the organizers felt teaching problems at the introductory level are generally most acute. Teams from 19 institutions were invited to attend. The Institute again involved four days of intensive presentations, workshops, and discussions on several problem areas in teaching large introductory undergraduate courses. As part of the program of hands-on activities, each team worked to develop a one-week “teachable unit” featuring active student engagement, which was demonstrated at the end of the meeting and made available for use by others in their courses during the 2004-2005 academic year. Each team was sent home with a small stipend for facilitating educational improvements at their universities, in their own courses and those of their colleagues. Again, the students rated their experience at the Institute as tremendously valuable (Wood and Handelsman, 2004).

Although only 39 faculty were present as students, we estimated that they would be teaching more than 20,000 undergraduates during the coming year. We anticipate that the Institute, which plans to continue with one or two workshops annually, will have a ripple effect, helping to spread better teaching practices among life scientists in university communities across the country. Staff at the National Academies and the NRC are hopeful that similar Institutes can be established in chemistry, physics, and other disciplines.

So what can each of us do when we return home, to help spread the lessons we have learned at this conference to our colleagues? First, we can learn more ourselves about research on and practice of effective teaching approaches. A good place to start, with many useful resources listed in an online supplement, is a recent Science article entitled “Scientific Teaching” by Handelsman et al. (2004). Then we can start working on our colleagues! Below are a few suggestions for “subversive” action.

• Change is threatening to many faculty. Don’t scare them! Present teaching reform as an incremental process, not a revolution. Lecture courses do not have to be reworked all at once; they can evolve in small steps toward incorporating more active-engagement activities.
• Clickers: Let faculty colleagues experience use of a Personal Response System (clickers) and encourage them to adopt clickers for their teaching. They are a catalyst for change; anyone who uses them at all intelligently will not be able to ignore the evidence that many students are not learning much in their lectures. Small portable wireless receivers are now available that can handle a class of up to 1,000 students for as little as $350.
• Find out if there are reform-minded colleagues in other departments, and partner with them on interdisciplinary educational initiatives. They will be especially helpful if they also have strong research reputations.
• Bring outside speakers on pedagogy into the departmental seminar program to introduce examples of transformed courses and how to assess their effectiveness.
• Start an in-house pedagogy discussion group that includes faculty if possible, also postdocs and graduate students, and undergraduates as well. Many young faculty and future faculty are eager to learn more about teaching, what works and what does not.
• If your university has a School of Education, invite some of its faculty to your department to inform you and your colleagues, consult, or collaborate in new course development and assessment.
• Encourage your colleagues to participate in the growing number of education sessions at meetings of their professional societies. Encourage societies in which you are a member to improve and give more visibility to these sessions.
• Administrators, you have the most power to bring about changes! Reward faculty who develop innovative and successful inquiry-based courses, not just those who receive good student evaluations. As presently used, student evaluations are an institutional impediment to applying effective learning strategies! Reward faculty for appropriately assessing conceptual learning in their courses, and for publishing the results of their teaching reforms in respected educational journals like CBE.

Clearly, there is considerable inertia among university faculty, but these are some small ways to begin overcoming it. Let’s go home and try them!

Resources/References:

Websites

Cell Biology Education: A Journal of Life Science Education http://www.cellbioed.org
The National Academies Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology http://academiessummerinstitute.org

Publications

1. The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University (1998), Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, NY.
2. Hake, R. R. (1998). Interactive-engagement vs. traditional methods: a six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. Am. J. Phys. 66, 64-74.
3. Evaluating introductory physics classes in light of ABET criteria : An Example of SCALE-UP Project, (2000). Jeffrey M. Saul, Duane L. Deardorff, David S. Abbott, Rhett J. Allain, and Robert J. Beichner, Proceedings of the 2000 Annual meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, Session 2380.
4. Wood, W. B. (2004). Clickers: a teaching gimmick that works. Dev Cell 7, 796-798.
5. Mazur, E. (1996). Peer Instruction: a User's Manual. New York: Pearson Education. (http://webphysics.iupui.edu/jitt/jitt.html)
6. National Research Council (2003). Bio2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists. National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
7. Wood, W. B. and Gentile, J. M. (2003). Teaching in a research context. Science 302, 1510.
8. Wood, W. B. and Gentile, J. M. (2003a). The First National Academies Summer Institute for Undergraduate Education in Biology. Cell Biol Educ 2, 207-209.
9. Wood, W. B. and Handelsman, J. (2004). The 2004 National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology. Cell Biol Educ 3, 215-217.
10. Handelsman, J., Ebert-May, D., Beichner, R., Bruns, P., Chang, A., DeHaan, R., Gentile, J., Lauffer, S., Stewart, J., Tilghman, S. M. et al. (2004). Scientific teaching. Science 304, 521-522.