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Miami professor part of national committee studying higher education teaching and learning in science and engineering

05/21/2012

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Stacey Lowery Bretz

Miami University's Stacey Lowery Bretz, professor of chemistry, is part of a 15-member National Research Council committee that released findings today (May 21) that could help improve undergraduate education in science and engineering.

The report says disciplined-based education research (DBER), which investigates how students learn in particular scientific disciplines and identifies ways to improve instruction, has yet to prompt widespread changes in teaching practices.

“Students harbor incorrect ideas in every single science discipline and engineering. No discipline is immune,” said Lowery Bretz. “It's not just learners who are non-majors, but includes future scientists and engineers. These challenges span several areas, including conceptual understanding, problem solving and interpretation of representations, which all sciences use.

“If faculty were more aware of the challenges students face, they might change their instruction and assessment to focus on conceptual understanding instead of assessing learning at a lower level where students can successfully mimic what was presented.”

DBER research is emerging in many scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, the geosciences, and astronomy, as well as in engineering. A DBER scholar in physics, for example, might investigate how students learn concepts such as force or acceleration and try to identify effective ways for instructors to teach these concepts.

Notable research findings from DBER on undergraduate teaching and learning include:

Student-centered learning strategies can enhance learning more than traditional lectures. Examples of effective, research-based approaches are making lectures more interactive, having students work in groups, and incorporating authentic problems and activities.
Students have incorrect understandings about fundamental concepts -- particularly phenomena that are not directly observable, such as those that involve very large or very small scales of time and space. For example, students often have difficulty understanding processes that involve deep time, such as Earth’s history or natural selection, and many learning challenges in chemistry result from students’ difficulties in comprehending that matter is made up of discrete particles.
Students are challenged by important aspects of the domain that can seem easy or obvious to experts. For instance, in problem solving, students tend to focus on the superficial aspects of a problem rather than its deep structure. Students in all disciplines also have trouble understanding representations like graphs, models and simulations. These challenges pose serious impediments to learning in science and engineering, especially if instructors are not aware of them. Several strategies appear to improve problem-solving skills, such as providing support and prompts -- known as “scaffolding” -- as students work their way through problems.

Science and engineering faculty, institutions, disciplinary societies, and professional societies should all support high-quality DBER and the adoption of the evidence-based teaching strategies that have emerged from it, the report says. They should also work together to prepare future faculty who understand research findings on learning and teaching and who value effective teaching as part of their career aspirations, the report states.

The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and National Research Council make up the National Academies. The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. For more information and a pdf link, visit http://national-academies.org.

An example of DBER at Miami

Lowery Bretz, an expert in CER (chemistry education research) five years ago used CER to determine that some of the 1,000 students who took Chemistry 141 (general chemistry) at Miami every fall had weak mathematical backgrounds that created difficulties in chemistry. She created 141-R, a 4-hour chemistry course section with a weekly recitation, for about 120 students each fall. Because she has addressed their learning needs, retention of these at-risk students in general chemistry is significantly increased and their attrition is significantly reduced. Bretz is currently developing a suite of concept inventories to measure students’ conceptual understanding of the properties and behaviors of molecules.

Several additional faculty at Miami also conduct DBER:
In addition to Lowery Bretz, Ellen Yezierski, associate professor of chemistry, specializes in conceptual understanding and inquiry instruction with special expertise in professional development of high school chemistry teachers; Beatriz D’Ambrosio, professor of mathematics, investigates conceptual understanding of place value, proportional reasoning and graphing; Jennifer Blue, associate professor of physics and teacher education, studies attitudes and scientific research skills in learning, plus teaches pre-service teachers; and Dana Cox, assistant professor of mathematics, investigates the role of visualization in the development of geometric proportional reasoning and the use of technology to examine and extend mathematical understanding.