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【社会人文】HHMI教授建议改变科学教育文化的策
HHMI Professors Suggest Strategy to Change the Culture of Science Education
Research universities in the United States excel at pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and work hard to attract and retain top scientists and engineers. But according to a group of Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientist-educators, that pursuit of knowledge often comes at the expense of undergraduate education. Largely to blame, they say, are university cultures that have evolved to reward research while marginalizing teaching.
In an opinion piece published in the January 14, 2011, issue of Science, the scientists suggest that research and teaching don’t have to compete but can complement each other. They propose seven initiatives that they believe would improve the quality of undergraduate science education and student engagement. “We’re trying change the mindset of the research faculty,” says Jo Handelsman, a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University. “There’s a sense that teaching isn’t important in review or promotion or tenure, and unless research universities take a role in making teaching important, it’s going to be very difficult to get faculty to invest more and change their methods.”
“We’re trying change the mindset of the research faculty. There’s a sense that teaching isn’t important in review or promotion or tenure, and unless research universities take a role in making teaching important, it’s going to be very difficult to get faculty to invest more and change their methods.”
Jo Handelsman
All of the article’s 13 authors are HHMI Professors, a group of distinguished research scientists who receive funding from HHMI to develop education projects and curricula that get undergraduates excited about science. “Faculty at research universities, for the most part, are very interested in educating our future scientists as broadly and as well as we can,” says Diane O’Dowd, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine. “But there’s a constant struggle to be the effective teacher that you want to be because the reward and support system in universities focuses so heavily on research.”
The seven initiatives that the professors recommend are:
Educate faculty about research on learning in order to employ the most effective teaching methods;
Create awards and named professorships that provide research support for outstanding teachers;
Require excellence in teaching for promotion;
Create teaching discussion groups for peer support and feedback;
Create cross-disciplinary programs in college-level learning, enabling collaboration among education, psychology, and science or engineering departments;
Provide ongoing support for effective science teaching; and
Engage chairs, deans and presidents in creating a culture that values and promotes both teaching and science.
Support from HHMI has provided these scientists-educators with the opportunity to apply their research skills to teaching by studying which teaching techniques are more and less effective, something most faculty don’t have the time or resources to do, the professors say. Providing similar resources to help faculty nationwide experiment with teaching strategies would benefit both students and their professors, says O’Dowd, who has been able to experiment with teaching methods to find those that are most effective in large classes. “We’re all scientists, but most of us don’t teach scientifically. When I started evaluating my students’ progress in class and not just at exam time, I was excited to see that their learning improved because I was able to address misconceptions and clarify points that I had not realized were a problem.”
Increasing the importance of teaching within the tenure-review process—and emphasizing it within research universities as a whole—can have an effect that reaches beyond a campus’s confines. Changing course, the professors say, is vital for science education in this country. About 60 percent of the students who start college nationwide intending to major in science end up in other fields. “We’re very good at scaring people away from science, and we’re apparently scaring away some of our best students,” Handelsman says. “It comes down to the climate we create, and the weed-out mentality that’s a part of the science culture.”
With her University of Colorado colleague Bill Wood, Handelsman has created a summer training program to teach methods that faculty can use to help students learn. Training enough scientists to fill the fast-growing need will require a fundamental change in that culture, she says. “The most rapidly growing sector of jobs is in science and technology, and it’s not clear that the supply is currently there in our own education system,” she says. “But all we have to do is retain people who already say they’re interested in science to meet that need.”
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-01-24 13:02
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