Presentation:

This session focused on incorporating research into undergraduate education. The context of this conversation was the experience of Drs. David Helfand & Darcy Kelley in creating the latest addition to Columbia University’s core curriculum, Frontiers of Science (FOS). Columbia’s core curriculum is a required set of courses for all undergraduates. Thus all incoming Columbia College students, intended science and non-science majors alike, are required to take FOS (half in the Fall and half in the Spring). While integrating research into the undergraduate experience will differ at each University, the story of the creation and function of FOS will no doubt touch on general issues relevant to attempts at including research in undergraduate programs.

FOS is committed to integrating frontiers research into the undergraduate experience. FOS is not a history of science, philosophy of science, or a science and society course. Its concern is exposing students to the science that is taking place today. FOS focuses on 21st century science taught by 21st century scientists. With that clear objective, the natural starting point for FOS is interesting questions that excite and motivate scientists. Shirley Tilghman wonderfully articulated this starting point through the imagery of a pyramid. Traditionally these ‘interesting questions’ represent the peak of a pyramid, which sits upon numerous prerequisites. To reach the peak the student must climb through the many supporting levels. For example, to study the relations between language and the brain a student would traditionally take Chemistry, then Introductory Biology, then Molecular & Cell neurobiology, then Systems neurology, and finally Brain and Language (if such a course was offered at all). Tilghman’s insight was to ‘break the pyramid’ and begin with the interesting questions, such as “what role has language played in the formation of the mind?” Starting with questions immediately captures students’ imagination rather than losing them as they wade through the demands of a series of uninspiring requirements. This ambitious paradigm guides FOS.

Functionally, a FOS semester is organized into four units: two units of physical sciences and two units of life sciences. Each unit is three weeks long and is framed by a central compelling question at the frontiers of science. For example, from fall 2006 Frontiers:

Unit 1: Astronomy: “What is our place in the Universe and is it unique?”
Unit 2: Climate system: “Are humans changing the Earth’s climate?”
Unit 3: Evolution: “How has DNA based information led to the emergence of life and thought?”
Unit 4: Biodiversity: “How will biodiversity loss affect life?”

While the specific ‘frontier of science’ provides the context for the course, the central emphasis of the course is the quantitative reasoning skills that scientists employ to explore the frontiers. To that end Prof. Helfand’s online text, Scientific Habits of Mind, supports the teaching of these skills. While the frontiers of science that provide the content for the course are always changing, the set of scientific habits remains invariant.

During a semester, each week begins with a lecture by a senior tenured faculty member. This weekly lecture provides the text for the course addressing a central question with scientific data. Supporting the lecture are weekly readings from the primary literature (i.e. Nature & Science), Scientific American reviews, and articles from the science press. The heart of the course for the students is the weekly seminar. While the lectures provide the text for the course, the seminars provide an intimate environment (twenty students) to digest the lecture, the weekly readings, and to practice ‘scientific habits of mind’. These seminars are taught by senior Professors and Columbia Science Fellows, postdoctoral researchers who are passionate about undergraduate education.

Though the seminars are very diverse in form, they generally begin with a recapping of the bottom-line-points of the lecture through a discussion, then follow by reinforcing those ideas and the ideas in Scientific Habits of Mind through the use of activities and case studies. Case studies have been a very successful tool to engage the students, and to teach the important scientific concepts and ‘scientific habits of mind’. Some examples of seminar activities are: a debate on climate change, where the students use the current scientific data to defend a country’s stance on global warming; or a case study where students devise an experiment to explore the vocal learning abilities of African elephants. Other successful seminar activities include critiquing news articles, such as those in the New York Times, and contrasting these media reporting with actual scientific paper on which the article is based.

Seminar materials are developed by Columbia Science Fellows. Teaching materials including: lecture videos; visual media including images, graphs, and animations; readings from the scientific and popular media; problem sets, activities, and discussion guides; examinations; and Columbia’s original online textbook, Scientific Habits of Mind will be available online as of Spring 2007 at Frontiers of Science Online, a collaboration with Columbia’s Digital Knowledge Ventures supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Materials will be fully searchable and organized in multiple ways, so that instructors can find resources by keyword or discipline, by resource type (such as “activities”), or as complete “units” of materials on a single topic. The biggest challenge of the course is the diversity of scientific literacy among first-year students, all of whom are required to take the course. At one end of the spectrum of students you have the winner of the Intel Science Talent Search; at the other you have the student who struggles with arithmetic. The challenge is to excite and engage students across this whole spectrum of ability. This issue continues to be the most challenging aspect of the course.

One way that Frontiers addresses this challenge is via an optional journal club. The weekly journal club is designed to engage advanced students at a deeper level not possible in seminars and to provide additional resources on a given topic to all. The journal club covers one exciting discovery announced that week. For example, a recent journal club was given by Professor vanGorkom on the evidence for the existence of dark matter provided by the collision of two galaxy clusters.

Like the scientific process, FOS continues to innovate and change as the data show a more fruitful path to integrate frontier research into the undergraduate experience.

Discussion:

Q: What are the objectives of FOS?
A: FOS has two simple objectives. Firstly, it aims to disabuse students of the view that science is something that is simply memorized rather than a dynamic intellectual activity. Secondly, it aims to upgrade students’ basic quantitative reasoning skills. This is achieved by weaving the scientific habits of mind through the course.

Q: After the creative and inspiring encounter with FOS, what happens when the students go to their next ‘normal’ class?
A: FOS is just the first step in changing the culture at Columbia University in regard to teaching science and intrinsically valuing teaching. One way FOS is transforming teaching at Columbia is that faculty who teach in FOS take what they learn from their time with the program and integrate the lessons into their own courses. Hence, it has become a faculty training ground. FOS, however, is not the only step that has been taken to transform the teaching culture at Columbia. Another simple and effective example is the creation of a brownbag lunch on teaching. These lunches serve as opportunities for faculty to meet to discuss teaching issues and to learn from each other’s experience.

Q: How often does the FOS material change? How is that material spread throughout the community?
A: In order to be at the frontiers of science, the lecture material must change relatively frequently. Small changes are made to lectures from year to year, and the three-week units are rotated on a three-year time scale i.e. after three years of an Astronomy unit, you could substitute a Quantum Mechanics unit. These changes, however, maintain the division of material into half physical sciences and half life sciences. All the lectures are recorded and available as podcasts and video-podcasts. FOS is also developing a series of process videos. For example, master teacher Deborah Mowshowitz teaches a seminar on how to teach a seminar. These kinds of materials will be freely available at Frontiers of Science Online (FoSO). Material that will be provided on the FoSO Website will include podcasts, seminar activities and an overall user’s guide. We are also creating a discussion board for interested faculty to discuss their experience with the FOS material and provide feedback, modifications and suggestions for alternative uses. The use of internal faculty discussion boards for the same purpose has been very successful at Columbia. We expect that the utility of the discussion boards will scale to the larger community addressed through FoSO.

Q: What is the philosophy behind the Columbia science fellows? Are they future high-level researchers?
A: While the ‘Columbia Science Fellows’ are teaching fellows, they are also researchers. Two-thirds of their financial support comes from the FOS program; one-third comes from research departments. As the departments or individual faculty members must be willing to financially sponsor the teaching fellows, the fellows, while committed to teaching interdisciplinary science, must also be strong candidates for research support. The central point of FOS is that all the teachers do research. The program wants to bring that love and spark provided by research into the classroom. Previous fellows have been very successful in finding teaching and research positions. So far we have placed four Columbia Science Fellows into tenure-track faculty positions, and FOS is only in its third year. That said, the fellows have taken very different paths, from pure research to pure teaching positions. Regardless of the path, at the end of their three years with FOS, fellows have a wonderful teaching credential, not only having taught, but also having created new and innovative curricula.

Q: What does sustainability look like for FOS?
A: FOS is in a unique position because it is part of the University’s core curriculum, and as such the University has a large buy in, and therefore is supportive of the program. With specific reference to sustainability, the course was purposefully designed to require the participation of only a small percentage of the science faculty. The course is sustainable even if only 15% of the science faculty ever teach in it, since it only requires about a dozen senior faculty per year. The goal is to recruit one new senior faculty each semester so in four years there will be an entirely new group of people running that semester. Regarding Science Fellows, eleven are required to staff the seminars.

Q: How did you get the University to buy in?
A: The key to University buy in was to find a group of faculty, including top researchers (i.e. Nobel Laureates and National Medal of Science winners), who were willing to commit to the idea. Additionally, one or two key administrators were strongly convinced that this was worth doing. These people were approached on a personal level. Talking to department heads together was regarded as less productive and potentially obstructive. When faculty members realize the endeavor is fun and intellectually stimulating, they will buy in. One thing that specifically helped the implementation of FOS was the creation of a pilot course. The pilot experience provided evidence that Frontiers of Science could work as a required course.

Q: How do you deal with the students who think they know everything?
A: You have them undertake a simple quantitative task that they flub. An example of this approach from the current semester was the complete inability of first-year students to plot points on a log-log graph. These students often exhibit a stunning lack of intellectual curiosity, and an inability to integrate the knowledge that they supposedly have in a way that allows them to respond to different situations.

Q: What are the learning outcomes that you aim for and how are they assessed?
A: The number one learning outcome is for students to think like a scientist. Specifically, that looks like the skills outlined in the text, Scientific Habits of Mind. The specific content is not as important as how the students interact with the content as “scientists.” These outcomes are assessed in the traditional sense with weekly problem sets, posing questions based on the lecture material, a midterm and final. The midterm and final are attempts to synthesize all the knowledge that they are supposed to have acquired, and apply it to new situations.

Q. Often the things that engage the students the most are the loci of science and society (i.e. Climate change, GM foods). How do you handle this within the course without diluting the science?
A: We use these things as a context because they are interesting. However, our focus is always on the science. For example, in the climate debate (explained earlier) students must argue using the data, not the socio-economic arguments. It would be profligate to ignore the interest generated by social issues. However, it is important to establish that the focus of the course is the science.

Q: Do you ever come across problems having faculty teaching outside their expertise?
A: It is clear that faculty will not be able to answer every student question. However, what faculty bring to the class when they teach even outside their field of expertise is a knowledge and perspective far beyond that of the students. One important side effect of this is that the students are able to see how faculty approach questions to which they don’t know the answer, and see them in action trying to converge upon a first order answer. The best part of this course for the faculty is that they get to learn fascinating science outside their own disciplines.

Q: Is there a way to teach all of science in an interdisciplinary way? How do we develop the faculty to do this?
A: This was recognized as a very difficult problem. When faculty members are faced with the challenge of teaching in an interdisciplinary context, they quickly default to giving mini lectures in their own specialty. To make interdisciplinary teaching work you really need a committed group of faculty who will teach each other. The faculty group provides a course development effort that helps in the preparation of lectures to clearly articulate the points being made and to avoid jargon. Having to teach across disciplines as a communal effort develops interdisciplinarity among all participants.

Additional ideas:

UCLA has an innovative project that integrates students into large-scale research projects such as human genome sequencing, and large biodiversity projects. UCLA equips the students (majors/non-majors, high school/college seniors) to perform a small task within a larger research project that requires many hands. The sense of contributing to a real scientific endeavor is a highlight of undergraduate education for many students.

Another example that worked very well for students from less privileged backgrounds was to write essays on real world problems conveyed in the media that depended on scientific knowledge. The example provided was on the risks associated with asbestos. The students were encouraged to ask questions such as “How do you assess danger?” and to consider whether the newspaper article covered all the pertinent scientific points. The form of the student response was a letter to the newspaper.

Recommendations:

Institutional Recommendations:

1. We are scientists not because of introductory Chemistry or Physics or Biology but because we are fascinated by the questions science asks. Therefore, begin science education with the interesting questions that capture student imagination rather than demand that they labor through a series of uninspiring requirements before they reach the interesting questions. Such an approach minimizes the risk that the students will lose interest before they arrive at the interesting questions.
2. Place the undergraduate research experience in the students’ first year so that they have opportunities to take advantage of the experience throughout their undergraduate careers. Locating the research experience in the first year also works to honor the students as they participate in the research endeavor. Further, it provides them with confidence to continue with research.

Recommendations for the Reinvention Center:

Support efforts to critically assess novel undergraduate experiences and courses and communicate those outcomes throughout the academic community. This can be very difficult because of lack of funding for assessment and dissemination. However, assessment and dissemination are critical components in transforming undergraduate education.

References/Resources:

Printed Materials

1. Helfand, David J. Scientific Habits of Mind available on-line at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/frontiers/
2. Dreifus, Claudia. (2003, July 8) “A Conversation with Shirley Tilghman; Career that grew from an embryo.” New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907E3DF143DF93BA35754C0A9659C8B63&sec=health

Websites

Frontiers of Science On-line http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/frontiers/habits.html