Transformations in Science Education
“The funny thing is, the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) taught us that we really didn’t know what the challenges for learning actually were,” says Professor Steve Wolfman, a senior instructor for the computer science department at UBC.
“We’ve since discovered the real challenge for learning is how to get the students to think about these ideas actively, and how to get them connecting with the concepts in a real way. We weren’t doing that in our classrooms. The CWSEI taught us how to do that and also prompted the questions – what is it that we want students to learn and what is it that they’re actually learning? Almost invariably, what we discovered is that students are learning much less than what we thought.”
The CWSEI was established in 2007 after the recruitment of Carl Wieman, Nobel laureate and director of the CWSEI, to UBC. The five-year project is designed to transform science education by helping to establish learning goals, initiate curriculum and course improvements, adopt new and proven teaching techniques and scientifically evaluate and document student progress.
David Cheriton, a founding investor of Google and a UBC alumnus, has gifted the university with a substantial donation towards this learning initiative.
Funding like the Cheriton gift enables the Faculty to hire support in the form of postdoctoral students and Science Teaching and Learning Fellows (SFLFs) who assist in analyzing and implementing evidence-based educational improvements. These improvements include experimenting with tools such as “clickers” – hand-held wireless devices which record students’ personal responses – which help to engage students in classroom discussion and provide valuable immediate feedback to instructors.
“We are seeing what the impact is on the class and it’s really quite dramatic in terms of students’ retention and understanding of material,” says Mark MacLean, a Mathematics professor at UBC and instructor of the Science One Program for 17 years
MacLean himself has enthusiastically adopted the use of an innovative digital recording pen which promotes interaction and problem solving skills. “I’ve always been a bit of an experimentalist at heart in my teaching; always interested in finding ways to engage students,” explains Mark.
Steve Wolfman, and his fellow Faculty members, have a very different understanding of their role as educators since their participation with CWSEI. “It’s become clear to us that scientific literacy means something a little different than we thought it did. The CWSEI and gifts like the David Cheriton donation will enable us to not only train students to be the next generation of PhDs in the sciences, but to also train them so that they have an informed, intelligent viewpoint on important topics that span the world. Change happens very quickly these days, and our students need to be ready for that by understanding how the universe works scientifically.”
