Data Driven Inquiry: Reforming the Teaching
of Science 101 Through the Use of Instructional Technology

Gregory D. Bothun, Department of Physics, University of Oregon

Overview

The integration of research into the general undergraduate curriculum can take a variety of forms. At the lowest level, this form consists of a professor who does research being the principal lecturer to a class full of students. While neither interesting or creative, many faculty at the research university actually believe that they are exposing students to research by simply lecturing to them. The belief is that if the students are able to see a real life researcher, they will be molded and inspired by such a vision. This form of "integration" remains the dominant one at the University of Oregon, and I suspect at most any Big State Research University (hereafter BSRU). At the opposite extreme, actual student research with faculty mentors would earn students course credit. Of course, this scheme is incredibly expensive to implement and the resource starved BSRU environment can't come close to providing this kind of learning opportunity for all but a very small percentage of its total students. In between these extremes lies a vast continuum of levels.

In this contribution we will demonstrate how technology and computer networks can be used to facilitate the integration of research, more specifically actual data products, into the teaching curriculum. Despite the potentially large payoff, large scale implementation at BSRU has not yet occurred because of a variety of barriers that change with time. We will confront some of these barriers directly in a way that hopefully demonstrates them to be indirect reflections of a general inability for BSRU to create a range of learning environments for its students. This, of course, requires an investment in general undergraduate education as well as a recognition that things are different in 2001 compared to 1901.

The Scale of the Problem:

Before launching into the potential that technology has to transform the teaching and learning experience, it is important to be grounded in reality. For the rest of the discussion we will make BSRU a generic university of 20,000 students that is mandated by the state to accept all reasonably qualified high school graduates. To graduate from BSRU you must take several general education courses. To meet the science requirement, we assume that four courses need to be taken by each of the 20,000 students. We further assume that the average graduation time at BSRU is 10 semesters. Since four courses are required then, at any given time, 4/10 x 20,000 students are enrolled in at least one general education science class. That's 8000 students! (1/2 of which will be in Astronomy 101).

So the typical situation at BSRU is that thousands of undergrads will be enrolled in some introductory science class for non-majors for the sole purpose of fulfilling a general education requirement. In general, at BSRU the class size for this exercise is in the range of 150-300 students (and can be higher). Its been my experience (at the Universities of Washington, Michigan and Oregon) that this class is an exercise in student seat time and generated student credit hours for the host department. One professor together with a few TAs, spews words or show slides to the students for a term and the students get their credit and move on. The opportunity to use these classes to actually teach science as a process and to instill science literacy in the students is wasted. As will be shown below, technology offers a way out of this dilemma but implementation on the required scale remains a challenge.

Restructuring the Mass Lecture:

A major obstacle towards effective implementation of pedagogical changes lies in our collective inability to admit the many deficiencies of the mass lecture approach. This sardine can method of instruction certainly represents the lowest unit cost to the University and so it is administratively favorable. The suggestion that the students don't really learn anything in this environment, somehow, seems to carry little or no weight. Conversations with colleagues who generally teach these classes reveals the second obstacle to change. Approximately 80% of the professors I have discussed this "problem" with actually believe the students are learning the material directly from them, even when they are speaking to 300 students at a time. Perhaps the word learn has been confused with the word "absorb" in this case. Or, perhaps it is I that just doesn't know what learning is. On the other hand, approximately 20% of the professors readily acknowledge that the mass lecture is a student credit hour generating machine for their department and that student learning is really not a primary goal. Hence, the first step for pedagogical change at BSRU is to be honest about the nature of these courses and the reason for their existence. When scholarship asymptotically approaches zero, change might result.

Unfortunately, there really is a lot at stake with respect to this issue of pedagogical and structural change in these mass lecture science classes. For many University students nationwide, an introductory Physics or Astronomy course represents their last formal exposure to science. The nearly ubiquitous pedagogy is lecture presentation of ``factual'' material, even though this is a poor representation of science and its practice. Not surprisingly, this approach to teaching science tends to produce a scientifically illiterate general population with an overall disinterest in the process of science. As scientists and educators, we know that the ability to perform unbiased and accurate observations and experiments is crucial to scientific advancement. Yet the primary teaching aid is a textbook which usually cannot communicate this vital aspect of science. To teach science as a process, the student has to be empowered to make an observation or perform an experiment, formulate a hypothesis, then test the predictive power of the hypothesis by performing new experiments. In this way the hypothesis (or model) is either refuted or refined. While physical resources are not available for the mass students to engage in this practice, the use of robust simulation software is more than an adequate substitute and provides a dimension of learning that is sorely missing. Indeed, the real nature of science is that of a discovery process, and yet science is seldom taught in this manner. We need to put the sense of discovery back into the scientific curriculum and that can most practically be done using software and simulation.

Five Reasons why the Mass Lecture is Broken:

There are many deficiencies in the traditional mode of teaching a large lecture class. These deficiencies, noted below, can be corrected by the preparation and delivery of a more dynamic, innovative and interactive curriculum which can be developed, given adequate resources. We will first list and comment on the deficiencies and then move on to discussing how technology can overcome each of these five limitations.

1. The Passivity Problem:

First, there is little direct contact between students and the instructor. Lecturing in front of a large class encourages passivity by the students, few of whom will typically come to office hours or otherwise seek help. Research shows that students often have preconceptions or naive beliefs about scientific concepts. In the standard mode of a lecture, that of transmission from expert to novice, these prior conceptual frameworks are rarely, if ever, challenged. Often, preconceptions prevent the student from assimilating new concepts and knowledge. These stereotypes are duly reinforced in introductory science classes in which the large class size precludes active experimentation, and the students are exposed only to traditional classroom lectures interspersed with a few classroom demonstrations. As a result, science is often taught as a collection of ``facts'' about the physical world. Memorizing the facts of ``science'' and then regurgitating them at exam time is certainly not the same as understanding and appreciating the process of science.

2. The Facts Problem:

Second, in direct response to the passive nature of our current pedagogy, there is a critical need to re-engage our introductory science students in a mode of experimentation and discovery that will lead to student-driven inquiry. The current state of pedagogy in these large introductory science classes, in contrast, relies heavily on static material as there is no practical mechanism for students to interact directly with the material via experimentation. As a consequence, most of the students in these classes remain disinterested in the material and do not gain an adequate understanding of it. Indeed, getting real data and tools into the hands of students will allow them to duplicate the same steps that the real scientist undertakes.

3. The One Size Fits All Problem

Third, the lecture mode of presentation is poorly suited to the range of ways that students learn. Cognitive research identifies four distinct learning styles. Concrete learners use direct experience, doing, acting, sensing, and feeling. Abstract learners are skilled at analysis, observation and critical thinking. Active learners are best able to apply new information to facilitate tasks. Reflective learners prefer to reflect and think about new information. Traditional delivery-oriented education emphasizes procedures that best serve abstract and reflective learners. Large lectures can deny or limit the active, hands-on, experimental approach that many students require. A single approach to teaching and assessment will lead to failure for many students who would be well-served by a more diversified approach to learning. In particular, simulations can be used effectively to allow the students to make mistakes in some experiment or situation without feeling penalized.

4. The Syllabus Problem

Fourth, traditional classes vest the instructor as the primary information source. The instructor leads the students linearly through the curriculum and the textbook to reach a predetermined outcome. Student success or failure depends on their ability to master (e.g. memorize) the body of information presented in lectures or in the textbook. I refer to this as the syllabus problem (addiction). That is, the class is designed strictly on the basis of a one page listing of topics. The goal of the course is to get through the topics. Most students and faculty would be better served by ripping up their syllabus and stating the learning goals of the course instead. Because of the widespread nature of the syllabus problem, it is no surprise that most students perceive science as a dry, static body of facts. Ideally, the student should be free to navigate through the course content, with the instructor as a guide and facilitator. The leading edge of science consists of recent research results, technology being pushed to its limits, and the cut and thrust of ideas being debated. The course material needs a solid base of reliable knowledge, but it should reflect the richness of active research as well as the process that leads from data acquisition to new knowledge. Paring down the topical list so as to promote better student engagement and debate would make for a far more powerful learning experience.

5. The Isolation Problem

The final problem with large lecture classes is the way that they limit the opportunities for cooperative learning. In an ideal world, students would break into smaller sections that would center around experimentation and student-driven inquiry. While there are examples where this is done (e.g. Eric Mazure at Harvard) these are the rare exception rather than the ubiquitous rule. Instead, the students tend to be isolated from one another and therefore can not benefit from peer learning and collaboration. Such isolation tends to reinforce to the student that they should act in a competitive manner instead of a cooperative one as their grade depends on the former and not the latter. Of course, forming a peer learning environment is expensive and few public universities have the budget for these resources and rising enrollments mean that class sizes are never likely to get smaller. With the conventional mode of classroom lectures, there are few ways to encourage students to do research, work on projects and papers together, or communicate with each other. The large lecture format, in essence, precludes student collaboration and questioning of the material which ultimately leads to decreased motivation on the part of science educators to teach these classes.

Instructional Technology as a Means to Improve Pedagogy

Each of the five ills associated with the mass lecture can be partially, or in some cases completely, mediated with the appropriate use of instructional technology. In what follows, we will describe how the mass lecture that generally defines Astronomy 101, can be transformed into a real, data-driven learning experience, by using software and simulations. However, to be clear, what this ultimately means is more work for the students as the burden of learning shifts to them. Implementation of the scheme below has most certainly resulted in lower teacher evaluations as a result of increased workload on the student. However, I would argue that the scholarship of the class has greatly increased and in the end, that should be the measure of effective teaching.

The Passivity Problem

Most of Astronomy 101 consists of showing "pretty pictures". This is a mirror of the passivity problem and is ironic in the sense that when you show, say the latest and greatest image from the Hubble Space Telescope, its not really a pretty picture, its a digital image upon which you can measure things. Similarly, a spectrum of star is not an image that you memorize its a digital collection of data that you analyze. The heart of our curriculum reformation movement at the UO is to construct interfaces to data that allows the student to download and actually measure the data. This is all done in the JAVA programming language so that the Web Browser, which most all students are now familiar with, is the only piece of software the student has to use. So we have constructed JAVA based engines that, among other things, will allow students to:

These are done in the form of standard homework assignments and students work together in groups (more on this below). In doing this, the students are now forced (well it is an assignment) to analyze real astronomical data as a standard part of the course. This is a significant amount of work on the part of the student but it does immerse them in data. Much emphasis is put on how noise effects the kinds of measurements that are made and we have some robust JAVA applets that simulate noise on a detector. The pedagogical goal here is for the students to learn about signal-to-noise, noisy data, sparse sampling and what a detection is. Success is measured by the number of e-mail questions asserting that the virtual apparatus is "broken" because it doesn't return the same answer as the example in the noise-free textbook.

By getting data products into the hands of the student, and an interface for measuring and analyzing the data, instructional technology has gone a long way in removing passivity from the learning environment. Students now have to directly work with and think about the data. While this requires significant development (and is therefore expensive), this is what the technology was made for. Interactive data driven exercises are the main reason that instructional technology should be adopted as a standard part of this course. Spiffy lectures in Powerpoint (the current main use of the medium) pales in comparison to what this technology really can offer the student.

The Facts Problem:

In this case, while instructional technology can facilitate a move away from facts and towards inquiry, the barrier of student attitude may be the most difficult to overcome. Students expect to "learn" material simply by memorizing the facts spewed by the professor. They are quite uncomfortable with the notion that they are supposed to discover the "facts" themselves via some guided, interactive journey through data. Many students, when confronted with the scientific reality that there is no clear answer, become frustrated and confused. Their brains are hardwire to equate learning with fact memorization because, afterall, that's what is on the test! All that instructional technology can really do in this case is to offer a facilitated avenue of inquiry as another mode of learning. Re-programming the students to get away from fact memorization as the principal mode of learning is considerably more difficult. Of course, it is precisely this programming which is at the heart of the science literacy issue. Hopefully, improved teaching methodology at the K12 level will eventually produce a population of undergrads that would rather question than memorize.

On the other hand, even in the fact memorization mode, instructional technology can play an improving role. This interface allows the professor to customize the curriculum around their own material and thereby inject their research directly into the classroom. Even though the students will not have inquiry based modules centered around that research, they will at least be exposed to it so that the subject matter might be come more real and less abstract.

The One Size Problem:

This is where instructional technology is ideally suited. It is clear that the best learning occurs in a one-on-one environment. Indeed, the greatest amount of learning that occurs during the entire term in the typical 300+ student class, likely happens when 2 or 3 of them (accidentally) wander into your office and ask a real question. Clearly, BSRU does not have any where near the resources to replace classroom learning with one-on-one learning via physical means. However, software is generally used in a one-on-one basis. In principle, it would be possible to design and implement intelligent agent software that would allow the individual user to customize their journey through the resource base that comprises the curriculum. The "game-like" nature of such a journey might even motivate the students more than the traditional lecture. Such curriculum flexibility would help to overcome the one-to-many and one style of teaching that plagues the classroom environment.

Indeed, nowadays it is customary for students to make mental models of their professor and guess (assume) what pleases them. This kind of performance is unrelated to actual course material. Why students do this is anyone's guess but it clearly does happen. How do I know? Well, recently I taught a course that was mostly configured to operate in a self-paced discovery mode. For the first three weeks of the term the students were extremely confused. They did not know what to do. One student directly told me that she felt "incapable" of learning on her own and depended entirely on the professor telling her what to do. This kind of student attitude is a clear warning that the learning process has been effectively paralyzed by our traditional approach and therefore structural change is required if we want to achieve science literacy as the principal learning outcome.

The Syllabus Problem

One of the potential teaching resources that the Internet offers is the ability for the student to interact with a diverse and distributed expert knowledge base. The sage on the stage is no longer the sole keeper and presenter of the information. If used subversively, the student learning experience can be greatly enhanced. As just one example: I give a series of lectures on the dwindling nature of the fossil fuel reserve and the likely "fact" that we only have 50 years worth of of fossil fuel production on the planet. I then assign the students a number of other expert or knowledgeable web sites to go research and find credible information to prove me wrong. The students are generally motivated by this kind of assignment. If well crafted, certain classes, particularly those in Environmental Science, can be a sequence of research experiences for the students who then have to put together disparate sources of information to synthesize a conclusion. Wow - you just taught the scientific method instead of the syllabus. Which one is more important?

To be explicitly redundant, the syllabus problem exists because we collectively fail to define the learning goals for these general education classes. In my own case, I am no longer concerned that my students are exposed to "less" astronomical topics (to memorize, of course) because I know they are actually doing science. My fundamental pedagogical goal is for them to learn the pivotal role of uncertainty in scientific inference. Making the students work with noisy data or noisy (virtual) detectors emphasizes this point far more elegantly than I could ever do in a lecture.

Collaborative Learning

If you disagree that instructional technology can offer a better learning experience for large lecture classes then at least consider the following. One aspect of undergraduate education that is making it irrelevant to the real world is its continual failure to promote collaborative learning environments. These days, the real world is an interdisciplinary team oriented environment in which individual team members are expected to make real contributions to the overall project. But we don't teach Collaboration 101 at BSRU! Higher education really needs to examine this issue and to ask itself whether a focus on collaborative learning would make undergraduate education a more valuable experience.

Instructional technology can greatly facilitate student-student communication. Team exercises around data projects can be given and network tools can be made available to assist the teams with their data analysis and reduction. This is a powerful learning environment with peer-to-peer learning constantly occurring. Combined with group presentations in class, the students learn good written and oral communication skills as well as develop their organizational skills. Although the students initially do not like to work in groups, they generally evolve through the term. The beginning stages are highly dysfunctional but if one is patient, the end product is worth the wait and is very satisfying because you have actually accomplished something. Generally, student reluctance to participate in the group process is related to its perceived effect on their grade (i.e. "what if I am in a bad group ...; everyone in my group is a slacker ...). Once the grade perception hurdle is overcome, students develop a better attitude and generally have a pretty good time in the group learning environment.

I strongly believe that this aspect of the deployment of instructional technology completely justifies the investment. The real world of scientific research is collaborative in nature. Any university department functions by collaboration. Collaboration is what we do in our professional lives all of the time. Why are we so reluctant to teach in that way? Again, there is a significant development effort involved in constructing group exercises around data but it can be done and in the end is highly worthwhile. For example, we have developed a web based content organizational tool for groups to construct presentations from available resources. Specifically, for a group project on global climate change, a wide array of data sets, images, and charts were provided for all teams. The teams could then select which data products best supported their particular perspective and craft a presentation around them. At all times, individual group members could see the project evolving and to make their own contributions. While inefficient the first time this system is used, over the course of the term the students learn how to use the tool and presentations improve considerably. The major learning outcome lies in the newly acquired collaborative skills of the students. They are likely to retain this skill set long after the syllabus topics have been forgotten.

Barriers to Implementation

I have outlined some of the potential that instructional technology has in facilitating the integration of research into teaching and how it can be used as a tool to modify, or even greatly change, the nature of the general education science class. Despite this potential, the majority of these classes are taught the same way in 2001 as they were in 1951 (perhaps even using the same textbooks). While inertia on glacial timescales is part of the higher education landscape, there must be additional reasons for why systemic reform in general undergraduate education is so difficult to implement. While its hard to quantify the reasons, qualitatively, based on conversations and interviews with the relevant players, the following barriers have come to light: