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Why We Are Teaching Science Wrong, and How to Make It Right

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the fixing-the-teachers-should-help dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:22PM (#209974)

    They come from having enough people in the population who don't understand science to the point where they can't distinguish between the scientific method and snake oil. And this is going to get increasingly more dangerous, as the recent US measles outbreak has shown.

    You are showing your science illiteracy, by blindly accepting the media narrative. You should know better than to think they have any idea what they are talking about. First, what percent of people are anti-vaxxers in the US? What percent of people are unvaccinated for measles overall? What is the main reason for not being immune to measles? Interesting that you have never been given this information. How reliable is our data on vaccination rates anyway?

    Second, herd immunity only slows the rate at which a virus spreads, which will also increase the amplitude of the outbreaks. If the virus is not eradicated and the proportion of those who get infected drops more so than the proportion of vaccinated, eventually a large enough proportion of susceptible people will build up (due to missed vaccination, vaccination failures, waning immunity) so that huge outbreaks are inevitable:

    The second scenario represents the impact of a vaccination programme that reaches high levels of coverage (85% of all new-borns) which are, nevertheless, not high enough to lead to eradication of the agent. However, for the first 15 years after the introduction of vaccination, it appears as if eradication has been achieved, there are no infections. Then, suddenly, a new epidemic appears as if from nowhere. This is an illustration of a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’. This is the period of very low incidence that immediately follows the introduction of a non-eradicating mass vaccination policy. This happens because susceptible individuals accumulate much more slowly in a vaccinated community. Such patterns were predicted using mathematical models in the 1980s6 and have since been observed in communities in Asia, Africa and South America7. Honeymoon periods are only predicted to occur when the newly introduced vaccination programme has coverage close to the eradication threshold.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 [nih.gov]

    The measles vaccination program was misguided from the beginning. They thought it would be eradicated in a year:

    With the development of the further attenuated strain of measles vaccine virus a national campaign for measles eradication was launched. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) led in mounting the program with a formal paper at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Miami in the fall of 1966. Two colleagues and I wrote the “official statement” which outlined in detail unqualified statements about the epidemiology of measles and made an unqualified prediction. My third position in the authorship of this paper did not adequately reflect my contribution to the work.14 I will make but two quotes:

    1. “The infection spreads by direct contact from person to person, and by the airborne route among susceptibles congregated in enclosed spaces.” (Obviously the ideas of Perkins and Wells had penetrated my consciousness but not sufficiently to influence my judgment). 2. “Effective use of (measles) vaccines during the coming winter and spring should insure the eradication of measles from the United States in 1967.” Such was my faith in the broad acceptance of the vaccine by the puhiic and the health professions and in the infallibility of herd immunity.

    The results of this prediction are well known. The reported incidence of the disease dropped from a level of 400,000-500,000 cases a year during 1960-1964, to 250,000 in 1965 and 200,000 in 1966. This clearly reflected the use of the early-type vaccines in private practice. Incidence further dropped to 50,000 in 1967 and to 25,000 in 1968 but since then has continued a fluctuating course .The variability can be related to the degree of the total national effort, and the availability of federal funds to defray vaccine costs. Eradication remains elusive although intensification of effort during the past 12 months appears to have brought incidence to a lower point, near 12,000 cases.

    There are many reasons and explanations for this rather egregious blunder in prediction. The simple truth is that the prediction was based on confidence in the Reed-Frost epidemic theory, in the applicability of herd immunity on a general basis, and that measles cases were uniformly infectious. I am sure I extended the teachings of my preceptors beyond the limits that they had intended during my student days.

    In the relentless light of the well-focussed retrospectiscope, the real failure was our neglect of conducting continuous and sufficiently sophisticated epidemiological field studies of measles. We accepted the doctrines imbued into us as students without maintaining the eternal skepticism of the true scientist.

    If you believe the current numbers for vaccination rates (~92%) and measles cases (1000 per year) in the US, the huge epidemic that is bound to occur is just as much due to an overconfident CDC as any anti-vaxxers. I only ask that you educate yourself and THINK before calling others ignorant/idiots/whatever.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:43PM (#209992)

    Forgot the source of the second quote: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 [nih.gov]

    I may as well also mention a few other things I have discovered. First, another common claim is that anti-vaxxers are aggregating together to sustain measles. This amounts to claiming that there are communities of 200k plus anti-vaxxers somewhere in the US, where is the evidence for this?

    The critical community size is the size of population needed to sustain endemic transmission (i.e., to prevent fade-out). For measles in an unvaccinated population, this is observed to be ∼250,000–500,000 [3, 4], possibly lower for sparse populations and higher for dense populations [4].

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106086 [nih.gov]

    A second misconception spread by the media is that infants cannot be vaccinated because it is dangerous. This is untrue. The reason that vaccination is delayed one year is because the infants are already protected by maternal antibodies. However, these wane faster when the mother was vaccinated rather than infected:

    The recommended age for vaccination in the US changed from 9 months in 1963 to 12 months in 1965 and 15 months in 1976 in response to data showing higher seroconversion rates at older ages in absence of maternal antibodies [7].
    [...]
    The first two studies comparing both groups of infants were conducted in the US [29] and the UK [30]. Women vaccinated with live attenuated measles vaccine had lower amounts of antibodies and passed on shorter term protection against measles to their children (up to the age of 8 months) than naturally infected mothers (up to the age of 11 months). Lennon and Black [29] calculated the proportion of children expected to be susceptible to measles infection and responsive to vaccine by infant's age and mothers birth year cohort in the US. The children of younger mothers appeared to be sooner susceptible to measles infection: measles GMT declined sharply among women with birth-years between 1955 and 1961. This was the cohort vaccinated at the start of vaccination programmes in the US.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21133659 [nih.gov]

    The obvious solution is to lower the age of vaccination to coincide with the loss of maternal antibodies. Who is responsible for this not occurring? The anti-vaxxers?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:12PM (#210078)
      so this is your argument against op's call for increased science education? you're kind of proving his point...

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:26PM (#210087)

        I am definitely FOR improved science understanding, if this is something education can accomplish then we are agreed upon that. I just think that disagreeing with popular narratives is not suggestive of poor science understanding.