The latest batch of TEDxGeorgiaStateU talks from April was finally released, and among them are talks by two SIFs: Krisna Patel and me. The title of my talk was “Failure is Necessary to Discovery in STEM.”
My talk touches on both the broad-reaching and the personal implications of failure. I talk about how prohibiting “failure” inhibits classroom learning in the sciences and other STEM fields. I also speak to how this same practice of prohibiting failure extends into the culture of STEM fields beyond the classroom.
In my TEDx talk, I mainly talk about why we need students to build resiliency to failures in STEM classrooms. I don’t talk very much about how to accomplish this so I will write briefly about that here.
Many STEM educators are working on changing the taboo against making mistakes. This starts with changing how students feel about their mistakes. Educational innovation in this area involves structuring classroom activities such that instead of internalizing mistakes, students instead focus on figuring out where their errors came from and tracing the problem back to its source. We want to get students from “I’m stupid” and “I can’t do this” to “I can figure this out.”
Credit: Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien of “The Straight ‘A’ Conspiracy”
Shifting students’ perspectives on their mistakes also involves building self-reflection and metacognitive tasks into assignments so that students know where their mistakes come from. An effective strategy for this is figuring out where students’ intuitions about a topic coincide with how scientists view a topic.
Physics education researchers at the University of Maryland have built “intuition refinement diagrams” into their Open Source Tutorials. Here is an example of one of the questions that uses intuition refinement:
Source: Open Source Tutorials: Newton’s Third Law (University of Maryland)
Question: A moving truck rams into parked car. The moving truck has twice the mass of the parked car. Which vehicle feels a bigger force from the other?
Most students have the intuition that the car will “feel” twice the force that the truck will feel. This intuition is often based on past experience. Perhaps a student witnessed a similar car collision and saw the smaller vehicle “react” to the collision more than the larger vehicle did. However, the correct answer according to Newton’s third law is that both vehicles will experience the same force. The tutorial designers recognized the gap between students’ “common sense” intuition and the correct physical explanation. The questions in the tutorial ask students to think about their initial intuition and shows them that it came from valid thought processes. The common student belief – that the car “feels” more force than the truck – violates Newton’s 3rd law. But the intuition has a grain of truth in it: namely, that the car has twice the acceleration of the truck while the collision is taking place rather than twice the force. The tutorial helps students to refine their intuitions and to recognize that they are not entirely wrong in their raw intuition. It helps students to see that Newtonian physics does not violate common sense by connecting the physics to student ideas.
Source: Open Source Tutorials: Newton’s Third Law (University of Maryland)
When students think that their common sense does not agree with what they are learning in science class, it is a huge blow to self-esteem and to science identity. It makes students reluctant to continue learning science since “it doesn’t even make sense.” (One of my students said this.) On the other hand, if we show students that science can be intuitive when you have sufficient background information, this makes them build resiliency; they don’t respond as destructively to mistakes and failures in the classroom.
You can watch my talk below. If you have any comments or suggestions about how to help students to accept and embrace their learning mistakes and failures, please let me know in the comments.
The SIF Physics Active Learning Team has been working hard this year to improve the instruction in our physics classes.
Fellow SIF Saif Ali has been working diligently on analyzing and coding student survey data from introductory physics labs to find patterns and ways to improve the classes’ learning potential. This data is sure to prove invaluable in efforts to revamp and reorganize the physics labs and studio (SCALE UP) classes. You can read more about Saif’s project on his blog.
My personal project was to help update the way we train our graduate TAs and undergraduate LAs (learning assistants) in physics classes. The results of the interventions we employed to help train these instructors in active learning and student modes of thinking are still preliminary but my sense was that they were a resounding success. Many of the results of this work will be published this summer so I will have to hold off on posting some of the details just yet.
Over the course of the year, I wrote and helped to facilitate seven roleplay activities designed to help teach TAs and LAs about physics pedagogical content knowledge in a two-semester seminar class about teaching physics. In the roleplays, the TAs and LAs prepared a skit with certain parameters that tackled topics such as how to increase participation among students, how to ask “good” questions that stimulate student thinking, getting students to explain ideas to each other, and checking for understanding. The roleplays simultaneously looked at common student misconceptions about physics concepts and how to help students build a bridge to the correct conceptual understanding. I can’t post videos of these roleplays here because they are part of an IRB-regulated research project but the videos below show similar (albeit professionally filmed and produced) examples. The videos come from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Teaching and Learning. You can view some examples here, here, and here.
I also observed the TAs and LAs many times over the course of the semester while they taught to give them direct feedback and to try to draw conclusions about what effect the class was having on their teaching skills and behaviors. We also have important survey data from instructors and their students that should give us a more complete picture of what happened this year.
We’ve got big plans for next year too. The Center for Instructional Innovation is refurbishing one of the older physics labs in the Natural Science Center over the summer. This lab was in desperate need of a refresher. Its changes are all being made to facilitate active learning and inquiry-based labs. The tables in the room will be higher, with the exception of one disability-accessible table that is adjustable, which will encourage students to move around and look at the experiments from different angles. Students will also have access to three sides of the table instead of just one side as it is now, which will foster collaboration because students can look at each other and share ideas easier. There will be tools like white boards at each table and screens to help students and instructors share and display their ideas. The possibilities for learning in this updated lab classroom are endless. I can’t wait to teach in it!
I will also be helping to make the teaching physics seminars even better. We will be looking at the possibility of tweaking the roleplay structure to maximize the effectiveness of their teaching capacity. We may also be looking at how to produce videos about concepts in Physics Education Research (PER) like mental models, common misconceptions in physics, etc. That way we can flip the class and move it closer to a completely activity- and discussion-based seminar that will provide both theoretical and practical experience on teaching. We also want to look at ways to make this instructor-training model applicable to other departments at GSU. Hopefully, I can work more closely on other SIF Active Pedagogy projects so we can share what we are learning.
There is a pervasive meme in the collective consciousness that science is a purely rational pursuit with no room for bringing in personal experiences or points of view. This, in my experience, is entirely false. Science is fundamentally a creative pursuit. Good scientists know how to draw connections between disparate ideas and disciplines. Paradigm-changing scientists know how to look at old problems in a way that no one else has ever looked at them and create an idea that is entirely new.
While it is true that professional scientists have to have immense creativity, science education often lags behind in training creative scientists. Classes that emphasize rote memorization and do not take an interdisciplinary approach can stifle scientific creativity.
Some science professionals have responded to this divide by adding a letter to the traditional acronym STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) and making it instead STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics). This is meant to show a connection between the creativity of all of these fields and lead to more interdisciplinary projects between STEM fields and the Arts. Another approach in middle, secondary, and university education is integrated science and technology fairs that emphasize taking a creative design approach to designing science fair projects, posters, and materials.
STEM active pedagogy projects in the SIF program at Georgia State University (GSU) are also responding to this dearth of creativity in science classrooms. Fellow SIFs Andrew Berens and Megan Smith and Taylor Burch, an Instructional Designer at the Center for Innovative Instruction, are doing great work together to create a series of creatively-designed climate labs for students at GSU.
As a part of my own project on the SIF physics active pedagogy project, I have been writing a series of roleplays designed to teach graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) in physics labs to facilitate group work. As a large component of these roleplays, I have been thinking a lot about the role of creativity in science education.
In our roleplays, the TAs are required to embody an assigned role as a “TA” or a “student.” The “students” work in groups of three while the “TAs” are supposed to help facilitate the “students” thinking deeply about the physics problems they are solving by asking questions. Those who take on the roleplays often find them challenging because they are being asked to take a limited amount of information about their roles and fill in the gaps with a semi-improvised performance. This is remarkably similar to what their students do when solving physics problems in their classes. Students have to take a limited amount of information and find the connections so that they can draw conclusions. By teaching TAs about creative problem solving through roleplays, we hope that they will use this model with the students in their classes.
Training future scientists and citizens starts with showing students in science class why science is important and how it connects with other disciplines and ideas. The best way to do this is through training creativity-oriented future science educators who can show students through hands-on learning how everything in the natural world is connected.
As a SIF this year, I have felt like a fish out of water when engaging in social science and education research. I find that doing good, rigorous social science is more difficult than doing experimental physics in a lot of ways. When delivering social science surveys, you have to worry about whether or not the questions you are asking are actually measuring what you want to measure and you have to make sure that the questions are not ambiguous (see this Wikipedia article on survey validity). In the case of physics education, you also have to make sure that what you are trying to measure is useful for physics pedagogy. If you work with people or other animals, there are also additional, rigorous ethical concerns involved to make sure you avoid exploitation or harm. All of these things are a lot to learn for someone who is also doing experimental physics research, taking classes, and teaching.
As a component of our SIF active learning pedagogy team’s revamp of the TA training class for physics lab instructors, I am performing teaching observations and giving immediate feedback to undergraduate and graduate instructors. Essentially what I do is eavesdrop on the instructor’s conversations with groups of students and tell them what they can do to improve and what they did well. I am drawing inspiration from ethnography guides and methodology.
Classrooms are like mini-communities, with each functioning differently. Therefore, I am approaching this study of introductory physics labs as an ethnography, or the systematic recorded study of a culture or people. Classroom culture and dynamics make a huge difference in the learning environment of a class, including the tone set by the instructor(s), the identities of the students, and how everyone interacts with one another. Everything is important, from the structure of the class down to the verbal and body language students and instructors use when talking about the physical concepts. Students in active learning classes depend on each other more than in traditional classrooms so observing the interactions between students is crucial, as is observing how the instructor interacts with their students. Together with background information from surveys, ethnography field notes from the classroom can help to bring a complete picture to what is going on. We are using the field notes to inform our lessons on pedagogy and to give direct one-on-one feedback to the TA.
I can immediately see some ways to expand these ethnographic methods to investigate the inner workings of a particular type of learning environment. For example, you could use data mining of classroom video recordings or transcripts to analyze trends. Or perhaps, if a researcher were observing an active learning classroom utilizing social media in assignments, the data from the social media interactions combined with the data from in-person interactions would form a more complete picture of the classroom ecosystem. For the time being, I do not have permission to record video, audio, or photographic data, and the data mining methods would probably be resource prohibitive. Nevertheless, these techniques provide interesting prospects for the future of educational ethnography.
Active learning is popular in the education research community right now. According to the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, active learning is a “process whereby students engage in activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, or problem solving that promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content.” This mode of teaching and learning stands in direct contrast with traditional lecture-style learning, which tends to take place in a lecture hall. The spaces in which the learning takes place are important but the environment of the class is far more important. Active learning environments are centered on students learning by doing, whereas traditional learning environments are centered on the passage of knowledge one way from the instructor to the students. Universities are investing vast resources into constructing classrooms specifically to facilitate active learning environments, often with round tables, whiteboards, and technology tailored to meet the needs of an active learning classroom.
An active learning classroom at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis.
The question: is the investment worth it? According to a 2014 study published in Life Sciences Education, the answer is a resounding yes — especially for black and first-generation college students. The researchers implemented a “moderate-structure” change in an undergraduate Biology course, which effectively meant turning the course into an active-learning environment. They found that the performance of all students clearly increased versus a traditional Biology course. This performance increase was especially pronounced in black students and students in the first generation of people in their family to attend college, for whom the achievement gap was halved. The New York Times quoted researcher Kelly A. Hogan, “In a traditional lecture course, [students are] not held accountable for being prepared for class, and they don’t really need to be, because an instructor is going to tell them everything he or she wants them to know. Would you read a report for a meeting if you knew your boss was going to spend 15 minutes summarizing it for you? I know I wouldn’t.” This gets at the main difference between active-learning and traditional classrooms: it levels the playing field by providing for ample in-class and out-of-class engagement with the material, which deepens understanding. The students in the classroom community depend on each other and the learning is more distributed.
Another recent article in the New York Times, entitled “Are College Lectures Unfair?”, examined the inherent biases of the traditional lecture against “undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent”. All students do better in active learning classrooms than in traditional classrooms, but those who are not upper-middle-class white men show significant improvements. This could be due to the active-learning classroom’s tendency to mitigate stereotype threat, a measured phenomenon that affects groups for which there is a stereotype about their abilities and aptitudes in certain tasks or activities. For example, a famous study of women in math classes found that when women are reminded of the stereotype that women are bad at math they perform far worse on math tests than women who are not reminded of this stereotype. Similar research has demonstrated the same effect in black college students and other marginalized groups. One of the main advantages of the active learning classroom over the traditional lecture classroom is that it mitigates the damage of stereotype threat. By constructing an interconnected learning community, active learning classrooms level the playing field without sacrificing the performance of those who are usually high performers.
Where does Georgia State University (GSU) fit into the active learning movement? Georgia State has had remarkable success in the education of students who are typically the least served in higher education as a whole. As one of the most diverse research institutions in the United States, GSU confers more degrees to students of color than any other institution in Georgia. Georgia State’s student body is nearly two-thirds non-white; 30% of students at GSU are in the first generation in their family to attend college and 56% of students receive Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from low-income backgrounds.
Georgia State recently took some actions designed to increase its graduation rate, which directly benefited its most vulnerable students. A 2013 article in The Atlantic examined in depth the specific actions that Georgia State has taken, which has been successful in raising the graduation rate by 22 percent in recent years. These actions include peer tutoring and Supplemental Instruction, among other active learning interventions. Many GSU departments including the Center for Instructional Innovation are designing innovative active learning classrooms and building spaces to accompany these types of changes. As the University moves away from traditional lectures and toward active learning classes, it has the unique opportunity to help students succeed by becoming a leader in the active learning movement.
My name is Monica Cook and I am starting a second year as a graduate student in Physics at Georgia State University. I am delighted that I will be working with the Center for Instructional Innovation this year as a Student Innovation Fellow (SIF). I did my undergraduate degree in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Georgia in Athens where I developed a strong passion for physics and for science in general.
I moved to Atlanta in 2014 to begin my graduate program. Currently, I am a research assistant and a teaching assistant who instructs undergraduate physics labs. My main project as a SIF this year will be to help graduate teaching assistants in physics to become even more effective educators in our active learning and traditional classrooms using evidence-based pedagogical techniques and technology. In addition, I will collaborate with other SIFs who are working on similar projects in Active Learning Pedagogies so we can share our ideas.
I am also involved with an organization called Inclusive STEM, which aims to help underrepresented minorities in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at GSU overcome barriers to access by providing support. You can learn more about Inclusive STEM here or here. Subjects of inclusion in science education will probably come up at some point in my posts on this blog as students’ intersecting identities are inextricably intertwined with their learning styles.
I welcome sharing of these posts (with attribution and a link back to the original page) and I encourage a dialogue in the comments about anything I write here.
