Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning: Learning Styles and the Problem of Instructional Selection—Engaging All Students in Science Courses

Abstract

Teachers aspire to have all of their students learn. This aspiration of reaching all students spans disciplines, age levels, and all varieties of institutions. Most teachers do so out of a genuine love for their discipline and a desire to share the wonder of their chosen field with others. Science teaching is no different than other disciplines in this respect. However, try as we may in science, the lack of diversity apparent in the statistics of who chooses to pursue scientific disciplines professionally suggests that we still have much to learn about how to reach all students. In their book, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt (1997) provide ample evidence from analysis of previous studies and their own research that two major factors contribute to choices students make about pursuing science majors and their satisfaction with science as a choice of major—classroom climate and faculty pedagogy. These factors underlie many of the reasons ‘‘switchers’’ leave science majors and many of the complaints ‘‘nonswitchers’’ have about their education in science (Seymour, 1997). Competitive class climate, strict grading, overpacked curricula, and the overt ‘‘weed-out’’ attitude of some faculty are cited most often as criticisms and reasons for abandoning a science major. However, Seymour and Hewitt (1994) emphasize that ‘‘switchers’’ and ‘‘nonswitchers’’ are not identifiably different populations of students, in that academic ability is not a reliable predictor of who stays and who leaves. This leads to the conclusion that science classroom environments, instructor teaching styles, and the process of instructional selection is unintentionally causing the loss of able, interested students from the profession of science. If we lose students precisely because they learn differently and think differently than those who currently dominate the profession and teach them, we lose a potential source of future creativity in our discipline. Sheila Tobias (1990), author of They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different, writes that ‘‘not every student who doesn’t do science can’t do science; many simply choose not to.’’ Tobias identifies the selection process of introductory science courses as a driving force against diversifying participation, and thus diversifying intellectual approaches within the profession. Consider the environment that characterizes most science classrooms, particularly in the late 1980s when Sheila Tobias conducted her research in these classrooms. It is usually organized by an individual—faculty or a teacher of grades 6 through 12—who survived, if not thrived, in the fairly traditional pedagogical settings of teacher-centered direct instruction, mostly dominated by lecture-based approaches to teaching. The dominance of lectures and direct instruction, especially at the high school and undergraduate level, in an attempt to transmit the large body of accrued scientific knowledge efficiently, has created a relative monoculture of teaching styles in these settings. Although a variety of strategies have been developed to broaden access for students through more varied instructional strategies (see, e.g., Allen and Tanner, 2003; Tanner et al., 2003), these approaches are not widely used for a variety of reasons. This is not to say that lectures have no place in the pedagogical toolbox of a science instructor, but rather that this tool tends to be overused (Powell, 2003). As such, teaching strategies used in science classrooms have created a situation that we’ll refer to here as Instructional Selection, in which by our very choice of pedagogy, we are constructing environments in which only a subset of learners can succeed. Understanding the variety of learning styles that students bring to a science classroom will not only help some students learn more science, but also help more students learn any science.