Abstract
Science education in the United States has undergone a profound shift in emphasis away from lecture-based and knowledge-based approaches towards more hands-on platforms with emphasis on skill training and maximizing feedback. Of central importance in this movement has been the concept of scientific teaching: the idea of treating education like a scientific subject by performing experiments on educational outcomes. In the last two decades, a wealth of research has been conducted using this principle to examine the effectiveness of a wide range of pedagogical techniques. Of the many methods used to deliver class content to students, active learning has emerged as one of the most powerful. Another critical development in scientific teaching has been the realization of a wide range of standardized assessment tools for quantifying various student outcomes. Despite the convincing nature of empirical evidence in favor of the utility of both scientific teaching and active learning, dissemination of these platforms in average teaching practices has been slow, even in the US. This article reviews the many advances and challenges of scientific teaching reform, ending with a brief commentary of reform experiences in the US and how these may impact East Asia in the near future.
Highlights
Dr Donald Bligh was the first to experimentally verify that lectures are not effective methods of learning (Bligh, 1985; Bligh, 1998)
This lack of effectiveness is evident in knowledge learning (Laws, 1991; Sivan, Leung, Woon, & Kember, 2000; Powell, 2003) but even more pronounced in skill learning (Hake, 2001; Handelsman, Houser & Kriegel, 1997; Pukkila, 2004). This latter fact is of particular importance in the sciences because laboratory and science process skills are often considered the basic foundations of proper training (Roth & Roychoudhury, 2003; Harlen, 1999; Padilla, 1990). In lieu of this realization, science education in the United States has undergone a profound shift in emphasis away from lecture-based and knowledge-based approaches towards more hands-on approaches with emphasis on skill training and maximized feedback (Hofstein & Lunetta, 2004; Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich & Tenenbaum, 2011)
In 2004, a groundbreaking paper by Jo Handelsman and colleagues was published in Science, a work that identified the importance of treating education like a scientific subject by performing experiments on learning outcomes with carefully designed and quantifiable outputs to analyze (Handelsman et al, 2004; Miller, Pfund, Pribbenow & Handelsman, 2008)
Summary
Dr Donald Bligh was the first to experimentally verify that lectures are not effective methods of learning (Bligh, 1985; Bligh, 1998). His findings were met at first with various degrees of skepticism (Wilson and Korn, 2007; Matheson, 2008) but continued work on assessments of educational outcome by a variety of authors has effectively confirmed lectures are not to be favored (McCarthy & Anderson, 2000; Niemi, 2002; Armbruster, Patel, Johnson, & Weiss, 2009) This lack of effectiveness is evident in knowledge learning (Laws, 1991; Sivan, Leung, Woon, & Kember, 2000; Powell, 2003) but even more pronounced in skill learning (Hake, 2001; Handelsman, Houser & Kriegel, 1997; Pukkila, 2004). Various combinations of these efforts have begun to deliver widespread improvements in learning gains and student outcome in STEM education (Labov, Reid, & Yamamoto, 2010; Udovic et al, 2002), as demonstrated in recent work published by Freeman and colleagues (Freeman et al, 2004)
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