Studies have piled up in recent years, making clear that newer, hands-on methods of teaching science—emphasizing discussions over lectures, practical applications rather than rubrics—can significantly improve student success.
And if anyone could be expected to make a convincing case for the wider adoption of those methods, it’s Carl E. Wieman. Winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics, he has made a second career of studying and promoting such overhauls, even founding his own center at the University of British Columbia for developing and validating new teaching approaches.
Mr. Wieman’s authority as a scientist and his advocacy for improving science education led President Obama to make him a White House adviser in 2010, amid clamor for the production of more science graduates.
“He has had a huge impact on bringing attention to this issue,” says Tobin L. Smith, vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities.
Three years later, however, the status quo on American college campuses—with faculty worrying more about research than about teaching, and most would-be science students failing to graduate as science majors—has proven stubborn.
Mr. Wieman’s work in the White House culminated in one key proposal: an annual survey of teaching practices as a way of encouraging improvements. It met immediate resistance from major research universities, which saw it as coercive.
Now the proposal is off the table, and Mr. Wieman is out of the White House. Frustrated by university lobbying and distracted by a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, an aggressive cancer of the circulatory system, he resigned last summer.
His efforts and those of his allies have not been without effect. There are high-profile examples of colleges that have introduced the methods he advocates. President Obama has repeatedly identified the improvement of science education as a top priority. The Association of American Universities has begun a five-year project to raise the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning in science and math fields.
But the speed of change is a concern. Reports last year by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and by the National Research Council said that scientifically validated methods of improving the teaching of science and math simply have not found widespread adoption at American colleges.
Back in his home state, Oregon, as Mr. Wieman concentrates on battling his illness, advocates of better methods of teaching science are left without one of their chief crusaders. He believes that without some kind of direct pressure, there’s little reason to believe that most professors will break out of their old, ineffective habits.
“I’m not sure what I can do beyond what I’ve already done,” Mr. Wieman says.
Decades of Research
Mr. Wieman’s efforts began in 1979, when he was hired as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He quickly realized something that more than a few teachers realize: Many of his students weren’t learning much. Unlike most professors, he decided to use his research skills to figure out why.
“I always believed in doing experiments,” he says.
He continued his inquiry after moving to the University of Colorado at Boulder, in 1984, establishing separate research operations for studying both physics and educational practices.
Now he has some firm ideas about what works, much of it centered on the sharp growth in abilities shown by students once they start hands-on work in labs.
“I got convinced that this wasn’t just a funny thing about people—it was consistent enough that there were some basic things about learning here,” he says.
Mr. Wieman has never pushed for any specific approach to remedying the educational problems he sees, but rather for a combination of key elements. In general, he has argued that students need more hands-on exposure to scientific discovery, helping them learn—and be inspired—by approximating the real-world environment in which they would work, with realistic tasks and problems.
Mr. Wieman tried for years, without luck, to win grants from the National Science Foundation and private foundations to expand his research into educational methods.
His leverage changed in 2001, when he and a colleague at the University of Colorado won a Nobel for producing Bose-Einstein condensate—matter supercooled to the point at which it demonstrates the quantum behavior predicted by Einstein.
With the Nobel in hand, he persuaded the University of British Columbia to give him $10-million for a six-year effort to test out his ideas about teaching. Among his published results was a study showing that students there who were taught with the newer approaches showed increased attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning than those taught by more traditional methods.
In 2010, while at British Columbia, he got a visit from another Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, U.S. energy secretary under Mr. Obama. Mr. Chu urged Mr. Wieman to join the White House science office. Mr. Chu suggested that Mr. Wieman could do a lot more to improve undergraduate science education from Washington than from Vancouver, Mr. Wieman says.
Government Intrusion?
At the White House, Mr. Wieman tried to figure out what might actually get colleges and their faculty members to adopt proven teaching practices. His centerpiece idea was that American colleges and universities, in order to remain eligible for the billions of dollars the federal government spends annually on scientific research, should be required to have their faculty members spend a few minutes each year answering a questionnaire that would ask about their usual types of assignments, class materials, student interaction, and lecture and discussion styles.
Mr. Wieman believed that a moment or two of pondering such concepts might lead some instructors to reconsider their approaches. Also, Mr. he says, data from the responses might give parents and prospective students the power to choose colleges that use the most-proven teaching methods. He hoped the survey idea could be realized as either an act of Congress or a presidential executive order.
College leaders derided it as yet another unnecessary intrusion by government into academic matters.
“Linking federal funding for scientific research to pedagogical decisions of the faculty would have set a terrible precedent for policy makers,” said Princeton University’s Shirley M. Tilghman, one of several presidents of major research institutions who wrote to the White House to complain about Mr. Wieman’s idea. “It is naïve to think that the ‘surveys’ will not have consequences down the line.”
“This is something that I ran into from the very beginning,” Mr. Wieman says of the pushback against providing data about teaching practices. “For whatever reason, they were assuming that if you were going to collect it, you must have penalties attached to it.”
Still, he clearly hoped to generate peer pressure, and market pressure, as more parents and students came to expect the newer approaches. “If you make information available to people, things happen” without compulsion, he says.
Mr. Wieman is right to be impatient with the pace of change so far, says the AAU’s Mr. Smith, since research “proves that there are better ways to teach than we are currently utilizing in the majority of classes.”
At the same time, he says, there are still unanswered questions about how to encourage, support, and reward faculty members in using these best practices.
The association’s five-year effort, bolstered last October by a $4.7-million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, is designed to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning in science and math fields by encouraging colleges to develop and adopt new approaches. Half of the AAU’s 62 member universities submitted proposals, with eight winners to be announced this month.
Mr. Wieman says that he appreciates the group’s efforts, but that he has already seen one proposal submitted and regards it as “completely without substance.”
“It had all sorts of nice rhetoric but was not willing to commit to making any changes in the accountability-and-reward system or to having any faculty member change what they were doing,” he says. “It was all window dressing.”
Faculty members, by and large, still achieve tenure and promotion on the basis of their research work, and colleges continue to regard that situation as representing their best interest because of the potential for income, Mr. Wieman says.
Leaders of the Association of American Universities “believe that all faculty would like to teach better, which I agree with,” Mr. Wieman says. “But what they do not fully appreciate is how heavily the incentive systems are weighted to neglect teaching.”
‘Critical Needs’
Compelling faculty to complete a survey in the hope of prodding them to reconsider their teaching approach would probably work, if not for the fact that it might also alienate too many people, says John P. Cumalat, a professor of physics at Colorado. In some ways, that White House proposal reflects the hard-driving determination Mr. Wieman showed when they worked together, Mr. Cumalat says.
“He can be challenging, he can be impatient, and he can say, ‘We need to fire this person right away,’” Mr. Cumalat says. “And we would tell Carl, ‘OK, we’re not going to do that.’ But he wanted to make these changes, and he was convinced from reading the literature that this was the right thing to do. But you don’t always get people to do things with a club.”
Eventually, most faculty members will figure it out and adopt more-effective teaching methods, says William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system and an admirer of Mr. Wieman’s.
The problem, however, is that students, and the nation, might not be able to wait that long, Mr. Kirwan says. Already Maryland counts some 19,000 unfilled jobs statewide in computer security, he says. Nationwide, three million jobs requiring science and math degrees are open for qualified applicants, the National Science Foundation has reported.
“It’s coming, and we’re going to get there,” Mr. Kirwan says, referring to changes in teaching practices at the undergraduate level. “But our country has critical needs right now.”
At Maryland, Mr. Kirwan has paid close attention to reworking faculty incentives for teaching. The system has avoided mandates and instead cultivated allies in the teaching corps, letting changes spread as colleagues recognize success.
At the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, 40 courses have been redesigned with weekly sessions of students working collaboratively, among other improvements, “and we’ve been able to demonstrate improved learning outcomes in most cases,” Mr. Kirwan says.
But without the federal push that Mr. Wieman sought, such progress has depended on committed leaders at the campus level.
Mr. Wieman has begun pondering other challenges. Youthful-looking and fit at 62, he has been taking an experimental cocktail of drugs that so far has shown value in holding off his disease, though success against multiple myeloma may mean six or seven years rather than just three or four. “It always comes back, so it’s a question of how many years you’ve got,” he says.
He also recognizes the cost of the disease to his work on education.
Even within the White House, which ultimately refused Mr. Wieman’s proposed executive order, his plan was known as “Carl’s method,” a colleague says. Mr. Wieman sees that as reflecting the fact that in Washington, virtually any policy idea, whether good or bad, can rise or fall on the determination and long-term ability of a single person to push it through.
For this one, he may have simply run out of time.
Rather than bemoan the failure of his survey idea, however, Mr. Wieman should take pride in how far he has helped move colleges, says Mr. Smith, of the AAU.
“We’re on the same page with Carl,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t think he recognizes how much of a positive impact he had.”