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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (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.