Carl Wieman on Teaching and Science

On Current U.S. Science Education
There clearly are serious problems.  It's not achieving what we'd like it to achieve and what we need it to achieve.

Good science and technology education has a critical role in preparing the nation's workforce for the 21st century economy and allowing students to thrive in that economy.  We also need a much more technically literate society because society is faced with major issues now that have science at their core. Issues like global warming, choice of energy sources, and what to do and not to do in terms of genetic modification and manipulation -- these are all fundamentally technical issues.  If people are going to make wise decisions about these things they have to understand much more about them and how science is done than they do now.  And making the wrong decisions can have enormous detrimental impacts.

Because of these two reasons, science education is really much more important now than it was a few decades ago.  It's not about just producing more scientists.

On What Drives His Interest in Teaching
This sort of goes against the grain of this award, but I'm not actually that passionate about teaching -- I'm passionate about people learning.  To me it's not that big of a thrill to stand up in front of a crowd of students and lecture them.  My big concern is with students learning and my doing whatever it takes to accomplish that.

On How Students' Attitudes and Beliefs Affect Their Success
There are lots of attitudes and beliefs that students bring to the classroom, and you have to deal with all of these human factors if you want humans to learn.  For example, some students have an idea that you are either good at science or you are not -- whereas other students can have the view that anybody can learn this, it's just a question of how much work you put in. So when these latter students fail they see that as a sign they need to work harder.  Students in the former group see failure as an indication they are not capable of learning so they respond by giving up on it.  This difference in attitude has a tremendous impact on how successful a student will be. There are lots of other similar sorts of beliefs students have that are important for their learning.

Psychology research has shown, however, that people can change.  You can influence a student's basic beliefs.  And you can influence them in good ways or bad ways.  So that's one of the things my education research group is looking at.  In my teaching I discuss these beliefs quite explicitly.  I try to stress to the students repeatedly that physics is something that's not easy for anybody.  It's like most activities, it requires a long, sustained effort -- but that effort is what determines whether people are successful or not -- it's not some genetic predisposition to knowing physics.  Of course, you also have to think about how to convince them that there is some value in putting in all that effort -- they can get something more out of this than just passing the class. I'm still working on this part.  There has been some improvement, but as in most of my teaching, there is still considerable room for improvement.

On the Use of the Scientific Method in Teaching
The basic idea of science is that it doesn't matter what one's opinion is -- what matters is what the data show.  And so to be a good scientist you look very objectively and carefully at what the measurements are and what they tell you.  That approach works equally well in teaching.  When you start carefully measuring what students are learning, it's clear that a lot of things that have been done in the traditional teaching of science are just wrong -- they don't work and they often work in exactly opposite ways of what was intended.  So this shows how a scientific approach to teaching science can be so useful.

I have learned, mostly through lots of painful mistakes, that just because something feels right to me or because some important person told me or it's been done this way for the last 500 years that does not mean that it is the right way to teach something.  Now when I teach I figure out exactly what it is I really want students to know.  Then I try to be very careful about how I can measure whether they're really learning that, and then I look at the results.   And if I'm not getting the results I want, I look hard at the research on how people learn and how that can be applied to the particular material I'm trying to get students to learn.  Then I see if that gives me a better result.  That's very much the scientific process.

The other part of doing science research is if you want to do something, you start by looking at what other people have done, what other people have proven, and you see how you can use that and copy and build on it.  It works for teaching too, but people usually don't do that.  They either do it just the way they were taught or just wing it.

And the real trouble with that approach is that students just don't think like expert scientists.  Often, teachers who are experts in a subject misinterpret how students respond.  The same words often mean something very different to students than they do to the faculty.  I've learned that when something makes sense to me one way, that that doesn't mean that that is the right way to present it to the students.  They are beginning students, and I've been thinking about physics for 40 years -- our minds don't think about the subject in the same way.  However, I confess I catch myself still making this mistake all the time.  It is easy to say and incredibly hard to remember when asked a question by a student that you should not just explain things as you understand them. It just goes against human nature.

On the Relationship Between Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching
One of the things that I found interesting is that a lot of these ideas about how people learn apply as well in training graduate students as they do introductory nonscience students. It just makes the point that there really are guiding principles and models about how people think and learn that apply quite broadly.  I see how lessons that I have learned about better training my graduate students can be usefully applied in my introductory course for nonscientists and vice versa.

On the Role of Technology in Teaching Science
There are tremendous opportunities for uses of technology in science education. There are new ways to present science that is more engaging to students and technology provides an efficient way to learn so much more about what students are learning or not learning.  Technology can make education more effective and more efficient at the same time.

On What He Hopes Students Take From His Class
I hope that they'll take away a basic understanding of physics, of how that describes the world around them and how that can be useful to them.  I'm happy when one of them says, "Oh this is why something happens that way."  For example, "this is why I can put metal in the microwave if it's under certain circumstances and why things blow up under other circumstances."