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from the fixing-the-teachers-should-help dept.
Active problem-solving confers a deeper understanding of science than does a standard lecture. But some university lecturers are reluctant to change tack.
Outbreak alert: six students at the Chicago State Polytechnic University in Illinois have been hospitalized with severe vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain, as well as wheezing and difficulty in breathing. Some are in a critical condition. And the university's health centre is fielding dozens of calls from students with similar symptoms.
This was the scenario that 17 third- and fourth-year undergraduates dealt with as part of an innovative virology course led by biologist Tammy Tobin at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The students took on the role of federal public-health officials, and were tasked with identifying the pathogen, tracking how it spreads and figuring out how to contain and treat it — all by the end of the semester.
In the end, the students pinpointed the virus, but they also made mistakes: six people died, for example, in part because the students did not pay enough attention to treatment. However, says Tobin, "that doesn't affect their grade so long as they present what they did, how it worked or didn't work, and how they'd do it differently". What matters is that the students got totally wrapped up in the problem, remembered what they learned and got a handle on a range of disciplines. "We looked at the intersection of politics, sociology, biology, even some economics," she says.
Tobin's approach is just one of a diverse range of methods that have been sweeping through the world's undergraduate science classes. Some are complex, immersive exercises similar to Tobin's. But there are also team-based exercises on smaller problems, as well as simple, carefully tailored questions that students in a crowded lecture hall might respond to through hand-held 'clicker' devices. What the methods share is an outcome confirmed in hundreds of empirical studies: students gain a much deeper understanding of science when they actively grapple with questions than when they passively listen to answers.
http://www.nature.com/news/why-we-are-teaching-science-wrong-and-how-to-make-it-right-1.17963
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:11AM
We should be teaching this stuff to our kids. When I was in grade 6 we took turns on the class computer during class. I can't remember what all the kinds of things we could do on it were, but I ended up playing some kind of science game where you were given options on testing a "new" micro-organism for an experiment, after which you had to tell the computer the traits of it and then it would tell you if you were correct. Things like response to light, heat, various kinds of food, and you could control how long the experiment was conducted for, how many organisms there were, how many different traits to test at once, etc. So of course being a kid I started with quick experiments, with few organisms, and tested as many traits as possible at once because I wanted to win quickly. Of course, I failed the experiment. I tried again with fewer traits at a time, more organisms and longer periods of time and sure enough, I started getting right answers (when you win the program names the organism after you). I think I learned more about the basics of science from that one game than I did in most of my science classes afterwards. And as for learning the actual contents of science, many other games taught me those quickly long before I ever took them in school: Chem Lab (a virtual chemistry lab), SimLife, heck even Moon Lander and similar games teach you about gravity, momentum, etc. So yeah, keep the kids engaged I say.