Dr. Carl Weiman: Science Education in the 21st Century

The video below is a talk that Dr. Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, gave at Cornell University in 2009. The notes below are a summary of the talk.

How Experts Think and Learn

• Experts have a lot of factual knowledge
• Experts have a mental organizational framework that is consistent
  across that discipline that allows them to retrieve and apply their
  knowledge.
• Experts monitor their own thinking and learning. They are able to
  ask themselves if they understand something. This ability doesn’t come
  naturally. This information takes time to develop in order to get it
  into long-term memory.

How well do students learn?

• Concept Inventories can be used to determine how well students
  understand a principle. Concept inventories are typically given at the
  beginning of a course and then at the end in order to determine how
  much the students have learned.
• Results of experiments from using concept inventories indicate
  that lecture-based classes aren’t helping students learn the concepts.
• Novices see principles of physics as isolated facts and learning
  is a matter of finding the appropriate formulas in order to solve
  physics problems.
• Experts look at broader concepts.
• How a presentation is perceived by an expert is different than
  how it is perceived by the novice.
• The limitation of the working memory needs to be considered. The
  working memory capacity limits how much new information the brain can
  handle.

What needs to be done to
help students learn?

• Learning is built on prior thinking and understanding. You have
  to connect with their prior knowledge.
• Students have to see what expert thinking is like and they have
  to practice it for extended periods of time. There has to be effective
  feedback (timely and specific) in order to guide their thinking and
  understanding. Thinking alone is not enough; students have to be
  guided. Students need to be motivated in order to accomplish. There
  also needs to be spaced repetition in order for the learning to be
  retained.

• Motivation

  • Students need to see the relevance in the topic in
    order to be motivated.
  • Students have to believe that they can master the
    subject.
  • They must feel that they have self-control.

• Practice expert-like thinking
  

  • Students need to engage in thinking and have it
    monitored.

    • progressively more challenging tasks
    • They have to see relationships and also determine what is relevant and what is not relevant
    • Students need to self-check (metacognition).

How do you do
all of this with a large number of students?

• You have to depend on technology.
• Highly interactive lecture using clickers
• See the Course Transformation Guide and the Clicker Resource Guide from the Carl Weiman Institute in order to understand how to use clickers effectively
• Important to have challenging questions. They students need to be engaged by attempting to answer higher-order thinking questions, not just rote-memory questions.
• After asking a clicker question, allow student discussion in order to answer the question. Also, the instructor needs to follow up on the discussion. You can ask the students to work in a group and have the members of the group come to a consensus before they answer the
  question. You can also wander around the room and listen to their discussions.