It’s All Their Fault?

Abstract

Many students fail our introductory science courses and give up on science altogether. How much of this is their fault is debatable. But what is not debatable is that we can improve the situation by using active learning methods. Many faculty claim critical thinking is their highest priority. Their teaching seldom reflects this. They emphasize facts and lecture without context. Most of our students are not going to be scientists, but they are going to be citizens and need to be able to spot inaccuracies when they appear in the media. Case-based and Problem-based Teaching are proven ways to achieve this goal.

I never wanted to believe it. The reason so many students fail, receive Ds, or withdraw from general science courses is because it is their fault. Not the teacher’s fault. Not the educational system’s fault. But the students’ fault —their immaturity, their lack of motivation.

I dislike this argument. I heard it when I first started teaching. I used to reject it out of hand. To accept it means that the work that I have put into being a good teacher is largely a waste. I have heard the argument from some well-known scientists: “The students who are good will do well no matter how poorly you teach. The students who are bad will be bad no matter how well you teach. You, as a teacher, have very little to do with the outcome.”

I don’t think the folks that say this are necessarily arguing genetic determinism, but they are saying that the die is pretty well cast by the time we see the students in college. There is some evidence to back up their argument. Let’s take an example from Arizona State University (4). The faculty in the chemistry department were teaching 1,000 students in five sections of 200 students. All of them took the same exams. Over the years, poor teachers and good ones were involved but regardless of the purported differences in their teaching skills, there were no differences in the students’ performance. What do we make of this?

I don’t want to believe that it is all over by the time students come to college. We all know of personal examples when students catch on fire in college after a mediocre high school performance. I am the academic director of my school’s Honors College. We accept about 300 students into the program each year on the basis of their high school grade point average and SAT scores. Most of them do well — but not all. Our ability to predict performance is far from perfect. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. We lose some, but we gain some. By the time of graduation, 75% of the students graduating with Latin Honors in the university are NOT Honors students. Where did these students come from? Answer: they were there all along; we just didn’t discover them on our first pass at selection. They were fairly good students in high school, but they came alive in college and buckled down. This happened fairly fast. Our data show that the grades at the end of the first semester already tell the tale; they predict with a high degree of accuracy what the students will have earned at the end of four years!

Here is some more food for thought: Recent neurological data indicate that a child’s brain development continues well beyond their teenage years. Decision-making activity may not mature until about 20 years of age (6). Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain shows that the prefrontal cortical structures, which are involved in impulse control, strategizing, and judgment, are not fully mature until after 25 years of age (15). Insurance companies have long known about such tendencies, for they generally charge higher rates for youths under the 25-year mark.

Maybe we are expecting too much. Or, maybe not. What about the rest of the world?

The United States ranks below most developed countries in science and math scores at virtually every level through the K-12 years. Clearly, other countries are doing something different. What is it? It is not because they are using a new-fangled teaching method unknown here in the USA. It is simpler than that: the students spend more days in school and in many cases are more mature and disciplined. The results are also evident in many of our US colleges; international students are frequently disproportionately represented at the top of our science classes.

What to do about this? There have been many serious attempts to remedy the problem. The National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Department of Education, and countless philanthropic agencies have poured millions upon millions of dollars into improving our teaching practices. There has been a slow recognition that we need faculty development strategies for teaching. A few decades ago, there were no teaching and learning centers on campuses around the country. Journals devoted to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education did not exist. Faculty were pretty much on their own in the classroom.

But things have changed, and, as a result, we now have lots of information about teaching. For example, Hake (11) looked at the data for 6,000 students and found striking improvements in exam scores among physics students when active learning was used. Those of us who are proponents of Problem-based Learning and Case-study Teaching have demonstrated that these techniques lead to better test scores in the critical thinking areas (8, 10). Guided Design, Just-in-Time Teaching, Discovery Learning, Team Learning, and Learning Cycles have shown similar results. All of these methods are better than the straight lecturing techniques of the past.

While all of this has been a revelation, the lecture method should not be abandoned too quickly. There are many reasons for this. Shelia Tobias (20, 21) has reminded us that science majors are more tolerant of lecturing and poor teaching then non-majors because they like the material and they have faith that they can use this later. Non-majors have no such trust and, even if they receive A’s in our science classes, they desert STEM and go off to majors that have more relevance to them. Even if we lose them to other disciples, is that bad? Don’t we need artists and political scientists and economists and business majors and lawyers? We don’t all have to be scientists, do we?

Then there is this: those of us in the STEM business did just fine with the lecture method. Why abandon it? We survived and prospered; we got A’s and B’s, and we became the next generation’s scientists. But there is a predicament here: most of our students are not going to be scientists. They are, however, going to become the next generation of decision makers, voters, and consumers.

Our big universities where our advanced degrees are awarded compound the problem. Professors are rewarded primarily for their research, not for teaching. Promotions and tenure decisions seldom hinge on teaching prowess. And, here is the crux of the problem: these are the very institutions that produce our faculty for the next generation. Graduate students seldom see anything but the lecture method. Most of them do not end up at Research I universities but at small colleges where the emphasis is on teaching. Yet, because they may never have experienced anything beyond the lecture, they do as they have been taught – lecture.

Alternative methods to the lecture are taught in some large research institutions, which have teaching assistant training, and teaching and learning centers where innovations are covered. Some even require their graduate students to take courses in how to teach. These are positive steps, but many young PhD. students slip through the system untouched. In my institution, perhaps only 10% of the graduate students receive any guidance before being launched into their first classroom. A few recognize that they need more training and attend faculty development workshops after graduation and hear about alternative methods of teaching. Indeed, 80% of the faculty that attend my training case study workshops come from small schools. But that is not where most of the nation’s college students are educated.

Regardless of where our faculty are trained, most still lecture, and the emphasis is on facts with multiple-choice tests as the preferred method for evaluation. But here is a puzzle: faculty invariably claim that critical thinking should be a primary objective of a college education (23), and numerous publications in educational research call for critical thinking development (1, 18, 3). But when asked to define what critical thinking is, most faculty struggle. Here is one example. In 1995, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in California and the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University initiated a study of college and university faculty throughout California to assess current teaching practices (19). They found that 89% of faculty surveyed said that critical thinking is a primary objective in their courses, but only 19% were able to explain what critical thinking is, and only 9% of this group were teaching for critical thinking in any apparent way. They also found that 81% of the faculty surveyed believed that graduates from their departments acquire critical-thinking skills during their studies, but merely 9% could articulate how they would determine if a colleague’s course is actually encouraging critical thinking.

STEM course materials are almost always focused on the lower level of Bloom’s (5) taxonomy—facts. There are problems with this approach. First, lecture material is rapidly lost from the memory. The lecture method is the least adequate technique to use if recall is important (7, 16). In addition, this is an exponential loss. Second, if we really want students to develop critical thinking skills, active learning methods are better. Two of the best are Problem-based Learning (PBL) and Case-based Learning.

For example, Dochy, et al., (8) reviewed 43 empirical articles on problem-based learning in real-life classroom settings. The authors found PBL was better than lecture in allowing students to apply their knowledge (skill development), and led to better long-term recall of factual information. In another meta-analysis of 40 studies, Gijbels et al. (10) demonstrated PBL students performed better on understanding and application of the principles that link concepts. The authors concluded that problem-based learning allowed students to be accelerated towards expertise (10). Over the past two decades, the NSF has strongly endorsed case-based and PBL methods (9). The basic proposition is that students will learn and retain information more effectively when it is presented, discussed, and applied to a real-life situation.

This has important implications for most of our students—the ones that don’t become scientists (i.e., the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers, and the lawyers). They end up leaving their general science experience thinking that science is all facts. They hate it. They don’t understand how science is done; they think discoveries are revelations rather than hard slogging enterprises. They are suspicious of scientists’ motives. The new active learning strategies are designed to overcome these misconceptions (2). Case-based Learning does the same. The reason? Both put learning into context rather than simply asking students to memorize material that does not seem to link to anything they will ever use or see again. Cognitive scientists who study learning strongly advocate such an approach (22).

Faculty resist shifting to these methods (12). One reason is their inherent resistance to change, especially if the lecture method worked for them and if there is no reward for changing. Another argument is that using these methods will not allow teachers to cover enough material. That is sometimes true, but what good is it if the students forget the material they did cover by lecture soon after the exam?

Another critique is that there are not enough problems or case studies for teachers to use. That problem is rapidly being corrected. Workshops have been developed that promote these methods. There are websites devoted to discussing them. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science is one of the most active (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases) The website receives over 4,000 visitors a day and has over 350 cases and teaching notes published on the site; additional ones are being added constantly. The University of Delaware has a site for PBL cases as well (https://primus.nss.udel.edu/Pbl/).

Another issue is that PBL and Case-study Teaching are primarily suitable for small classes and many of our classes are over 100 students. This problem has largely disappeared now that personal response systems have invaded the classroom. These “clickers” are like remote control devices that allow students to respond to questions that the instructor can ask. The data are transmitted via a radio frequency to a computer, the results for individual students are recoded, and a graphic display for the entire class can be projected for the class to see. This technique is now being used with case studies in mega classes of hundreds of students with great success (13). Data that we have obtained with NSF support over three years and involving a dozen schools indicate that the clicker case approach produces greater learning than a lecture, for most topics. Most important, clicker cases produce greater improvement in learning in women than men and greater with non-scientists than with majors (14). Now, that is something.

So where are we at the present time?

Compared to many countries, US students appear immature and undisciplined. But the USA culture is unlikely to change anytime soon. In the meantime, we need to fine-tune our teaching methods. The basic problem is not that we don’t know how to teach. We do. The problem is that not enough instructors are using the best methods. Faculty members who use active learning methods are a small minority of the tens of thousands of teachers teaching science. It has been devilishly hard to convince our colleagues to change from the lecture method. But things are improving.

We must accept the fact that even our best methods will not produce spectacular changes. The changes are statistical—a shifting upward of the middle grades. Fewer students get C’s and D’s, with more students in the B range. Many of our colleagues are just not that impressed, certainly not enough to completely overhaul their approach to education. Panaceas are hard to find. Miracles are rare. Still we must continue to try. The recently released American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) report, Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action, is a major step in that direction where the emphasis is on active learning strategies such as case-based and problem-based methods.

But our goals should be clear. We would like all of our students to achieve true scientific literacy – not only the kind that Jon Miller (17) has touted where more students can identify what DNA is or why it is colder in winter than in summer. Such factual information is important but we should aim higher than that. We want students who can analyze arguments and appreciate evidence, who are skeptical of paranormal claims, read newspapers and books, and who listen to media and sort out the nonsense. Is that too much to ask of our educational system? The lecture method just won’t do the job. It may tell the students what DNA is, but it won’t give them the tools to make decisions about cloning, vaccination, health insurance, or global warming. We have a greater obligation than merely to teach facts.