On Thursday, July 26th at 10:00 in WEL 2.110, Prof. Carl Wieman will be presenting a talk on “Taking a scientific approach to science and engineering education”. See below for an abstract for this talk. There will be a reception following the talk from 11:00-11:45 in WEL 2.110.
Wieman is a professor of physics and education at Stanford University. In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of the Bose-Einstein condensate. In recent years, he has been involved in improving science education, including serving as the Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences.
Please email Sarah Eichhorn (s.eichhorn@austin.utexas.edu), if you would like to meet with Prof. Wieman during his visit.
“Taking a scientific approach to science and engineering education”
Carl Wieman
Physics and Education, Stanford University
Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science and engineering education meanwhile has remained largely medieval. Research on how people learn is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than what is in use in the traditional science or engineering class. It makes more use of the instructor’s expertise, and it also shows students how to learn most effectively. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching and learning that can provide the relevant and effective STEM education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. I will discuss basic principles, classroom research results, and how the science of learning reveals counterintuitive deficiencies in several extremely common teaching practices. Finally, I will touch on better ways to evaluate teaching and institutional change to achieve greater teaching expertise. Although the focus of the talk is on undergraduate science and engineering teaching, where the data is the most compelling, the underlying principles come from studies of the general development of expertise and apply widely.