Summary of reform: Reforms involve both faculty development efforts and curricular modification. NSF has provided grants for faculty enhancement. These grants have been used to put on workshops that focus on experiential, collaborative, cooperative, active and interdisciplinary teaching. Many of these teaching methods center on collaboration or groups that helps to build community that has been illustrated to enhance learning. Also specific focus on increasing faculty's abilities to use technology. Faculty are also being asked to find an effective balance between teaching and research. Finally, there is an attempt to change faculty culture in order to make new pedagogies and new ways to approach learning more acceptable.
Curricular changes focus on a move to a problem solving or problem centered curriculum for example a course on AIDS; interdisciplinary around themes such as evolution, stability and change. The emphasis on interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum is meant to foster students understanding of connections between various ways of looking at the world through different disciplinary lens. There is an emphasis on examples and process other than simply memorizing facts. A more general move from facts and formulas to the use of and active engagement of material is made.
Encouraging partnerships with K-12 and business and industry since HE can't improve science literacy alone. Emphasis on articulation between educational institutions and the workplace. So transitions are important from K-12 and then on to work. These initiatives also involve concerns about pluralism as they try to increase the numbers of under represented students taking these courses. This involves faculty development to be prepared to meet the needs of students from different backgrounds, getting more faculty of color teaching science courses, partnerships with k-12 and community colleges.
Recent efforts have tried to address the pace of classes, conflicting purposes of courses, attitudes of professors and fellow students, the implicit conventions of particular sciences (paradigm), exam design and grading practice, class size, absence of community.
Connection to other reforms:
Collaborative Learning; Active Learning; Student Peer
Teaching; Cultural Pluralism; Technology; K-16;
First Year Experience; Standards; Faculty Peer Teaching; Service Learning
Model Institutions:
University of Wisconsin; Hanover, Wheaton; St. John's; Fosher; Dickinson;
College of the Holy Cross; Tufts University; Beloit; UC Berkeley;
University of Maryland; Santa Fe Community College; Indiana; Chicago;
Harvard
Web Site: http://www.wcer.wisc
Types of institutions: Multiple institution types
Duration: Approximately ten years.
Source list of institutions:
National Center for Improving Science Education; Kaleidoscope that
documents successful programs in science reform.
Contact for further information:
Denise Benton, University of Wisconsin, 608/238-1795; Sheila Tobias;
Walter Massey with the American Association for the Advancement of
Science; Patricia Laws at Dickinson College
Outcomes: Increase the number of students in introductory and general science courses; increase the number of science majors and graduate students entering sciences; address the low number of women and minorities majoring in science.
Process: These initiatives seem to be some of the most comprehensive in terms of process since it involves faculty development, curriculum, changes in student culture, partnerships with K-12, new forms of pedagogy, different ways about thinking about learning. Because of this comprehensive process it provides a model of improvement initiatives encompassing almost all of the other singular reforms.
K-12 parallel:
Origination of reform: Association or national level
Support: Government grant-NSF, private support
Linking Characteristic 1: Linking or integrating
Linking Characteristic 2: Collaboration
Linking Characteristic 3:
Linking Characteristic 4:
Assessment? Yes
Resistances: Some resistance stems from resources since faculty need time set aside in order to revamp their curriculum. In addition, science reforms involves extra funding for computers, altered institutional infrastructures to accommodate new facilities and different scheduling requirements for a workshop and research based approach to science. Barriers to this change also include faculty rewards systems that do not encourage the type of pedagogical and curricular changes required. Faculty culture is a major barrier related to collaboration, pedagogy. Barrier to long term change is intermittent funding for innovation based on political pressures.
Evolution/History: Over the past 150 years, concern about science and technology in higher education has waxed and waned. The current science reforms have typically evolved mostly out of criticism of science lodged in the 1980's by groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The specific criticism focused on high attribution in the sciences, declining numbers of students majoring in science, and low numbers of women majoring in science. In addition, complaints were heard from industry that students were ill equipped for work.
Major sources:
American Association for the Advancement of Science. The liberal art of
science: Agenda for action, 1990.
Byrne, Candace. (1994.) Collaborative Approaches in Science Education Reform. Washington Center News, 9(1), 1-2.
Byrne, Candace. (1994.) "Rethinking Introductory Biology": Conversion Experiences. Washington Center News, 9(1), 8-10.
From Analysis to Action: Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology.
Massey, Walter E. (1988.) Making Science Accessible. Liberal Education, 24(2). 16-19.
Project Kaleidoscope. What works: Building Natural Science Communities: A Plan for Strengthening Undergraduate Science and Mathematics, 1991.
Shaping the Future, Advisory Committee to the NSF Directorate, 1996
Tobias, Sheila. (1988.) Dealing with Math/Science Blocks. Liberal Education, 24(2). 20-23.
Tobias, Shiela. (1992.) Science Education Reform: What's Wrong with the Process? Change, May/June 1992, 13-19.