AY 375 Fall 2013: Fourteenth Day Plan

Today we'll continue talking about your Design-A-Section projects and our third special topic: student motivation and restructuring science courses.

1. The way most science classes are currently structured gives students the impression that science consists of memorizing facts and discovering new facts through a very straightforward, linear process.
2. If we want our students to think more like scientists and to have an understanding of the scientific process that's truer to reality (its nonlinearity, the importance of developing and refining questions, etc.), we need to restructure our courses and our assessment of students.

Have people pair up and share their lecture notes, section activity ideas, and questions with each other. Instructors will roam around and offer suggestions and comments.

Wrap up with instructors reminding everyone what happens in two weeks. 15 minute presentations which include statement of learning objectives and topic, 5-7 minute mini lecture, description of the activities you plan to do in section for the remainder of your 50 minutes. Students should hand in lesson plan, lecture notes, and any materials accompanying their planned activities.

Emphasize that learning objectives should be precise and that your lesson plan should refer back to these objectives.

Open the floor (path?) up for general questions and sharing about how sections are going. Some questions include:

• What did you do?
• How did you implement your activities?
• What worked?
• What didn't work?
• What would you do differently?
• How did you assess learning?
• Did you receive any unexpected questions/reactions/etc.?
• Did anything unexpected happen?
• What were you thinking about while you were running section? Any moments of panic?

Discussion questions:

1. Firestein talks about the fact that many of the popular models/analogies of science are flawed in that they portray knowledge as finite, as something we can slowly unravel completely. What is your model/understanding of the scientific method? What would you want your students to understand about the scientific method?
2. If we don't want students to think of science as the regurgitation of facts, we need to restructure our courses, and, in particular, rethink the way we assess/evaluate our students. Firestein suggests that assessment should involve feedback and opportunities for editing (just like in science) and that we should ask questions such as “This is what we know. What's the next question?” Do you agree with his suggestions? Can you think of ways of making them more concrete? How can we evaluate our students' scientific thinking?

Francesca's notes from the talk:

1. The focus of science is what remains to be done. “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
2. Models of science: puzzle, onion, iceberg > all take science to be a body of knowledge we're chipping away at, so that one what is unknown slowly decreases with time
3. Question propagation: Knowledge generates ignorance. “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” “Knowledge is a large subject. Ignorance is even larger.”
4. Science/scientists advance by learning to ask better/deeper questions, refining ignorance, going after higher-level ignorance.
5. “You get what you screen for.” The way science is taught is turning students away from science by making it more about facts than curiosity.
6. Evaluation vs. weeding: instead of assessing via regurgitation, we could try giving longer projects, involving feedback and editing, and our tests could include asking students not just to spout what they know but to formulate the next questions

Aaron's notes drawing from the talk and elsewhere:

1. Staurt's talk talks about motivation and designing courses around student motivation. Educational Psychology can help us here, particularly the work of Self-Worth Theory, pioneered by UCB's own Martin Covington. LINK TO PAPER
2. His argument, and one that is supported by the video, is that we should adopt a problem-oriented approach to teaching: all aspects of student work is coordinated around a seminal or ‘capstone’ problem which students work on for a significant amount of time, if not through an entire school term. Everything is done towards creating solutions to relevant problems (even if the students don't necessarily know the problems at first).
3. How do we do this? Based on four ideas: first, insuring coherence and transparency; second, insuring grading equity; third, alliance-building and inclusion; and, fourth, providing inherently interesting tasks (interesting to both the instructor and the students).
   1. Course objectives often tend to remain abstractions, with little justification for why what student must learn fits into a larger picture. Instead, with a problem motivated approach, all aspects of student work are coordinated around the steps necessary to solve a central real-world problem.
   2. Alliance-building means establishing a partnership in which instructors and students together dedicate themselves to tackling meaningful problems or issues of enduring importance and complex enough to command the best that each has to offer. In short, problem solving can create a rallying point for like minds and talents.
   3. In a problem-focused approach, the problem itself becomes the final arbitrary of ‘excellence’. The quality of student contributions can now be tied objectively to the question of how effective their work is in creating progress toward solutions judged against such absolute, merit-based criteria as practicality, creativity, and utility.
   4. The theme of problem solving exudes a sense mystery and intrigue—it is said that everyone loves a mystery, and for this reason problem solving is potentially ‘reward rich’ in intrinsic payoffs that sustain task engagement. There is the pleasure of satisfying one’s curiosity and of making discoveries in the service of achieving something personally meaningful and worthwhile.

Class will not meet next week. Prepare for Design-A-Section presentations, which will be given the next time we meet.