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Conference: Undergraduate
Research and Scholarship and the Mission of the Research University | ||
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"Education
Through Guided Inquiry:
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Summary of Presentation It is important to engage students in meaningful and interesting research. When he was in high school, Dr. Alberts loved chemistry, especially because his homeroom was in the chemistry laboratory, where there were all kinds of highly reactive materials with which to play. When he went on to college at Harvard, he decided on a pre-med course of study. After two years of awful, boring labs, in which all the students did was follow instructions, he asked a professor if he could be excused from the lab requirement of the third-year physical chemistry course. Instead, he was allowed to work in a research lab, where he investigated real questions and finally "learned what science actually was." Later, as a faculty member at Princeton where he supervised many undergraduates who were preparing to write their senior theses, he again saw the value of research experiences. He observed that, whether or not their projects were successful, his students almost always ranked their thesis research as the highlight of their undergraduate careers. Dr. Alberts emphasized that the first year of college should be different from high school. It should provide new stimulation and an exposure to inquiry. One challenge for universities is to provide all students with inquiry-based teaching of science and its relation to society, and to develop inquiry-based, non-cookbook laboratory experiences for their introductory science courses. All too often, introductory science courses only succeed in "turning the Trent Lotts of the world off to science, which is very bad for the nation, as well as for science itself." "When we teach," he asked, "how many of us have the primary aim of giving students enough exposure to scientific reasoning and scientific culture to enable them to appreciate science as a very special, evidence-based way of knowing about the natural world? And yet, without this appreciation, we have no right to expect that our democracy can continue to prosper in a world, that is becoming ever more complicated due to the accelerating advances in science and technology. It is science, through its discoveries of the regularities of the natural world, that allows us to reliably predict the future consequences of current actions. It is giving all students confidence in this assertion, and a deep understanding of why it is true, that should become the central focus of every introductory science course that is taught to undergraduates." It is also important to bring an understanding of science to third-world countries, where fears and misunderstandings often limit people's access to scientific advances. In Zambia, for instance, the government is currently not allowing its starving citizens to eat the same genetically-modified corn that Americans have been eating for many years. Several recent initiatives of the National Academies are aimed at making the teaching of science more inquiry-based at all levels of education. Most current high school teachers have never experienced science as inquiry themselves. This needs to change. The National Science Education Standards, created by the National Academies in 1996, emphasize science as a core subject for all students, in every year of school, starting in kindergarten. Further, science is to be taught in a way that emphasizes inquiry rather than memorization. Students should be engaged in attempting to answer scientifically-oriented questions. And they must learn to give priority to evidence, which allows them to develop and evaluate explanations that address these questions. Other valuable skills to be learned include the ability to evaluate alternative explanations in ways that reflect scientific understanding; and to communicate clearly and use logic to justify proposed explanations. The National Academies have also published a series of supplements to the Standards, including Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning, which gives specific examples of how the Standards can be implemented. The National Academies have established a Committee on Undergraduate Science Education. Charged with "improving science literacy for all undergraduates," the Committee is led by Richard McCray, Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and composed of twelve distinguished individuals from institutions across the country. Its current projects are: To develop criteria and benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of undergraduate instruction in science and technology; to develop a framework for an instructional handbook to help undergraduate faculty employ inquiry-based pedagogical approaches; and to explore means of improving the teaching skills of science graduate students during their training and transition to faculty positions. The National Academies' broader mission is to make a science out of education. This will require a greatly increased focus of educational research on real classrooms. Schools can then use the available knowledge of what does and does not improve student learning to continually improve the way they teach their students, rather than being propelled from one fad to another. The National Academies' publication How People Learn provides a good example, showing how recent discoveries about cognitive development can translate into actual practice in the classroom and beyond. In concluding, Dr. Alberts reiterated that education through guided inquiry can and should begin not merely in the freshman year, but much earlier. In this respect, an added advantage of successfully introducing science as inquiry into the freshman year of college is that it will help to redefine what is meant by science education at all lower levels, through the example set for future parents and teachers. References Web sites: Publications:
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