Lecturing remains the most common method for teaching undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as the STEM disciplines. Although other forms of instruction have made inroads, the continuing reliance on this pedagogical tool may be stymieing efforts to increase the number of graduates in those programs.
“We have a really good idea about what doesn’t work: lecturing students without engaging them, having labs not linked with lectures,” says James S. Fairweather, a professor of educational administration at Michigan State University and a co-principal investigator of an Association of American Universities project that seeks to improve STEM education.
A recent faculty survey shows that more instructors in STEM fields than those in other disciplines rely on this method: 63 percent of STEM professors said they used “extensive lecturing” in all or most of their classes, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. About 37 percent of faculty in other fields said they did so.
The latest results of the survey were released on Wednesday. The survey, which is conducted every three years, was administered during the 2010-11 academic year to 23,824 full-time and 3,547 part-time faculty who teach undergraduates at four-year institutions.
Increasing the number of graduates from STEM programs has been a national priority for years, and it has only grown in urgency. President Obama and other policy makers have recently touted it as an economic, civic, and national-security imperative.
High Rate of Attrition
Students continue to wash out of those programs at a high rate, though. Less than 40 percent of those who enter college intending to be STEM majors complete a degree in one of those fields, according to a report issued this year by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The traditional view among some faculty members has been that students leave those majors because they are poorly prepared or cannot handle the intellectual rigor.
That view irritates Elaine Seymour, whose 1997 book, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, marked a watershed in understanding the dynamics that cause STEM majors to quit their disciplines. Ms. Seymour, director emerita of ethnography and evaluation research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her co-author, Nancy M. Hewitt, surveyed seven institutions, conducting hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with 335 students, including those who had left STEM majors and those who had persisted. Ms. Seymour and a team of researchers will start revisiting the same institutions next year to update the original study.
“Poor teaching,” a term the researchers used to describe a litany of student complaints, emerged as the most common concern among both STEM graduates and those who had left those majors, according to the 1997 book.
And STEM teaching in the 1990s, Ms. Seymour says in an interview, invariably took the form of lecturing. “This was all a critique of that method,” she says.
The researchers heard that professors often grew frustrated with students when they failed to learn from the faculty’s explanation of the material, instead of giving the students opportunities to work with the subject matter themselves. Some professors, says Ms. Seymour, seemed especially concerned with covering as much of the curriculum as possible, which could make the instructional pace overwhelming.
The UCLA data about the use of lectures are actually a hopeful sign, Ms. Seymour says. If 63 percent of STEM faculty are lecturing, it means that nearly 40 percent are not. “It’s a good marker of change,” she says.
Developing Muscles
Faculty in the STEM disciplines stand out for other reasons, according to the UCLA survey. They grade on a curve at double the rate of their non-STEM colleagues. About 26 percent of STEM faculty report grading on a curve; 13 percent of non-STEM faculty do so.
Curves tend to be used for two purposes, says Kevin Eagan, assistant director for research at UCLA’s institute. The first is to raise grades, an approach that he says is most common at open-access and other nonselective institutions. At more-competitive ones, he says, the practice often serves to distribute grades along a bell-shaped pattern.
A professor curving to conform to a bell shape will hand out only a limited number of A’s and B’s, which means that a student’s grade may appear worse than what he or she actually earned, Mr. Eagan says. “In some ways, grading practices may discourage students from staying in the majors.”
Using a curve in grading is symptomatic of larger problems with STEM faculty’s lack of familiarity with educationally effective practices, says Carl E. Wieman, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of British Columbia.
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, Mr. Wieman has dedicated the past several years to improving STEM education, visiting campuses in hopes of bringing wider acceptance to new teaching methods that have an empirical record of helping students learn. He stepped down in June as associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Using a curve separates students’ performance from the grades they receive. It is part of a general pattern often seen in STEM courses, say several experts, in which rote tasks obscure the subject matter’s underlying concepts, and tests and laboratory activities are disconnected from authentic scientific practice.
Faculty members are very rarely trained in creating valid measures of learning, Mr. Wieman says, and they do not receive feedback on the quality of their examinations. “They’re novices, and they stay novices,” he says. Grading, he is persuaded, has become “this totally arbitrary thing.”
A growing body of research demonstrates that gaining expertise in any complex subject, like a STEM discipline, is much like developing muscles, he argued in an article in the fall issue of Issues in Science and Technology. Sitting passively in a lecture hall fails to develop those muscles.
Faculty, Mr. Wieman says, must design practice tasks for students that are appropriate to their levels of understanding, but still sufficiently difficult to require intense intellectual effort. Work assigned in and out of class should connect patterns of expert thinking in the discipline to what the students already know, and it should motivate them. The tasks also need to be followed by timely feedback from professors.
Lectures can be effective when used in those ways, Mr. Wieman says. But they should be kept short and focused, and faculty need to interact frequently with students, who must expend effort to engage with the material.
Testing Sites
A few superstar performers can also bring material to life in lectures, says Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities, which represents 61 leading research universities. “Some lecturers are just fantastic at inspiring and simulating students,” he says. “But let’s be honest and admit that’s not always the case.”
Many advocates for changing STEM education are heartened that the association, whose member institutions train a large share of research faculty in the STEM disciplines, is paying close attention to the topic.
The association’s five-year project started last year. As many as eight member universities will serve as test sites, within which two or three STEM departments will adopt approaches to developing syllabi and teaching courses that have a record of success. They will set learning goals and compare results with other departments and universities over two or three years.
“We’ll write articles and treat it the way it should be,” Mr. Rawlings says, “namely, as a science research project.”
Requiring several departments in a university to participate is a critical part of the strategy, he says. It is more likely to shift the culture of the institution.
“It means the chair and leadership have to get behind it and say, ‘We have to change,’” he says.
One challenge for those who seek to change STEM education is to make it more manageable, says Mr. Fairweather, the Michigan State researcher who is helping lead the AAU project. Research about learning is one thing. Knowing how to distill it into practices that faculty can use in the classroom is something else. Rewards and incentives, Mr. Fairweather says, also need to change.
Mr. Wieman proposes deeper, more structural fixes. He suggests making federal grants for STEM research contingent on universities’ reporting on their teaching practices and rate of student success.
Such an expectation could prompt improvements in teaching practices, he says. A prospective student could compare elite universities, all of which may do pathbreaking research.
“You might say, ‘Gosh, although their research looks the same, they’re profoundly different in how they educate students,’” he says. “That’s what you’re paying tuition for.”
