Scientific literacy among students
|
The cookbook method of teaching was of no help
|
STEVE RISSING has a goal. That is to teach students to be independent and objective thinkers, to create a group of scientifically literate citizens who can intelligently discuss multi-faceted issues such as stem cell biology, evolution, genetically modified organisms and the like. This applies to science majors and non-majors alike. Rissing is a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University.
Give college students less instruction and more freedom to think for themselves in laboratory classes, and the result may be a four-fold increase in their test scores.
Paradigm shift
Rissing played a major role in revamping the way the university teaches its introductory-level biology courses.
"For one, we got away from the cookbook method of teaching concepts of biology in a lab course," he said. "Instead, many of those classes now include real experiments that leave room for additional inquiry."
The effort paid off. During a talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, Rissing cited one particularly difficult laboratory experiment in which students worked with enzymes. Students often struggled through this exercise, and usually scored poorly when later tested on the implications of the experiment's findings.
He asked the laboratory instructors — usually graduate students in biology — to use two different approaches when teaching the experiment.
Roughly 300 students, all taking an introductory biology course for science majors, were in each group. The first group used what Rissing calls the "cookbook method" — they followed step-by-step instructions on how to carry out the experiment and display their results. These students were provided with a standard, prepared enzyme solution.
The second group of students had to prepare their own enzyme solutions from a piece of raw turnip. They were also given more freedom to think through their approach to the same experiment, and were encouraged to use critical thinking and hands-on discovery to come up with their approach.
At the end of their respective experiments, both groups of students were asked one simple question: Where do enzymes occur in nature?
Telling results
About 23 per cent in the `cookbook' group answered the question correctly. But 83 per cent of the students who developed their own approach gave the right answer — enzymes come from living tissue, according to an Ohio State University press release.
"The students in the first group were just as intelligent as those in the second group," Rissing said. "They just lacked confidence. No teacher had ever asked them how to display what they saw in the experiment. The students have always been told how to do that." — Our Bureau
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Sci Tech
