Foreword

When I first read this book as a manuscript, I was impressed. Here was a group of engineers willing to say that teachers in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines ought to be looking at the research on learning and implementing it in their classrooms. They deliver this message clearly, unequivocally, and with compelling logic.

They aren’t the first or only ones to point out the need for change. In a review of the research on active learning, Joel Michael (2006) of the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Physiology at Rush Medical College writes

As scientists, we would never think of writing a grant proposal without a thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, nor would we go into the laboratory to actually do an experiment without knowing about the most current methodologies being employed in the field. Yet, all too often, when we go into the classroom to teach, we assume that nothing more than our expert knowledge of the discipline and our accumulated experiences as students and teachers are required to be a competent teacher. But this makes no more sense in the classroom than it would in the laboratory. The time has come for all of us to practice ‘evidence-based’ teaching. (p. 165)

Engineers are precise and systematic, and these authors are no exception. They move through the research carefully, explaining in readable prose what has been documented and what those who teach in these disciplines ought to do about it. The changes they advocate are sensible and doable. The authors write cognizant of the realities of higher education—increasing class sizes, students not as well prepared as they once were, and students beset with pressures that often diminish the time and energy they can devote to study. They write knowing about those aspects of instruction teachers can control (like when and how to use PowerPoint) and those beyond their control (like the configuration of the rooms and labs where they teach). They also write with the voice of experience. They have tried the changes they recommend, and they are willing to admit that some of their first attempts were not as successful as subsequent ones.

It is unusual, but highly appropriate, in books on teaching and learning to hear the voice of experience coupled with careful study of the literature. The book then becomes what Michael calls for in his quote—a description of what “evidence-based teaching” looks like in the STEM disciplines. The description of teaching laid out in this book is encouraging because, although it calls for change, many of the changes are not all that radical. For example, these authors point to research documenting that taking an exam can be a significant learning experience. That requires faculty to reconsider the design of exam experiences and help students see their learning potential beyond how many points exams are worth. In another chapter, based on research, they recommend against telling stories when presenting concepts. Anecdotes may interest the students, but stories can distract and muddle the mental models students need to be creating. They offer sanguine advice illustrated with examples showing how problems currently assigned can be reformulated and used in problem-based learning activities. After reading the book, it’s hard to understand why more faculty aren’t making the changes consistent with research findings.

You will find this an eminently readable book. It makes educational research understandable—no small accomplishment, given that educational research, like research in so many of our fields, is written to inform research more often than practice. The authors write with voice—you can hear them talking, you can tell that they’re college teachers themselves. They make their way through the topics in a conversational style with an occasional interjection of humor.

It is a book written by engineers who imagine that learning can be built much like the structures and circuits they construct. Even though learning construction may not be quite as definitive as electrical engineering, teaching can be designed so that it more directly and systematically promotes learning. This book shows how that happens and how to make changes in your teaching to better facilitate learning for students.

Maryellen Weimer
Professor Emeritus, Penn State University

Reference

Michael, J. “Where’s the Evidence That Active Learning Works?” Advances in Physiology Education, 30, 159–167, 2006

Preface

Think back to when you were a new college professor—or ahead to that time if you are just starting. You have just finished your PhD, have accepted a teaching position at a college, and are about to face your first class. What do you do?

If you are like most other new professors, you reflect on what your professors did best and try to emulate those moments. That’s the way it’s usually done, and it’s been done that way for hundreds of years. Spence (2001, pp. 12–13) said, “Plop a medieval peasant down in a modern dairy farm and he would recognize nothing but the cows. A physician of the 13th century would run screaming from a modern operating room. Galileo could only gape and mutter touring NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Columbus would quake with terror in a nuclear sub. But a 15th century teacher from the University of Paris would feel right at home in a Berkeley classroom.”

Think about that for a moment. Medieval peasants are an earlier version of today’s farmers, who need to know a fair amount of chemistry and biology. If they don’t know the pH of their fields and the concentration of nutrients and fertilizer, then it is hard to succeed. Farmers need to know enough biology to comprehend, for example, the life cycle of crop pests, or else failure is likely.

In the same way, modern physicians cannot succeed without understanding a large amount of biochemistry and biology. Modern astronomers and space scientists need a large store of knowledge about relativistic physics and mechanics, for starters. And anyone in command of a nuclear submarine needs to know an awful lot about nuclear physics and oceanography.

But what do college teachers need to know? Currently, we seem to assume that expertise in the discipline is sufficient and that it is not necessary to be aware of how people learn. We appear to believe that the knowledge amassed in educational psychology and cognitive science in the last quarter century or so can be ignored. In all those other fields—from farming to running a nuclear sub—the person in charge receives an education that includes background knowledge necessary for job success. But universities continue to hire faculty who have no awareness of the learning process.

In education we tend to do things the way they have been done—which is what makes Spence’s (2001) idea simultaneously humorous and painfully true. Most college teachers teach the way they were taught. There is no requirement that a teacher in a college actually know anything about teaching or the relevant research in fields like cognitive science and educational psychology. Particularly distressful are comments like the following:

The preparation of virtually every college teacher consists of in-depth study in an academic discipline: chemistry professors study advanced chemistry, historians study historical methods and periods, and so on. Very little, if any, of our formal training addresses topics like adult learning, memory, or transfer of learning. And these observations are just as applicable to the cognitive, organizational, and educational psychologists who teach topics like principles of learning and performing, or evidence-based decision-making. (Halpern and Hakel, 2002, p. 37)

Most current approaches to curriculum, instruction and assessment are based on theories and models that have not kept pace with modern knowledge of how people learn. They have been designed on the basis of implicit and highly limited conceptions of learning. (Pellegrino, 2006, p. 3)

So, most importantly, college teachers need to be grounded in basic knowledge about how people learn. That is what we try to share in this book. This book presents and then explores a model for the learning process. The various parts of that model are based on findings in the cognitive sciences and educational psychology. For the most part, those findings come from work in the last 50 years as psychology has moved away from behaviorism to a mostly constructivist approach. Those findings together give a coherent picture of what takes place in the learning process. In examining the model, we can identify various instructional practices that aid student learning, thereby increasing effectiveness in the classroom. All three of the authors are experienced both in the practice of engineering and teaching engineering. That gives us a design perspective. In other words, we are accustomed to using basic knowledge in the sciences—buttressed by mathematical analysis—to inform the designs that we have produced. As engineering educators, we require our students to learn a vast amount of material in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and other basic sciences. Then, in the latter part of our curricula, we focus on getting students to apply that material to designing various items that have a purpose.

In science and engineering, if there is knowledge available we try to use what has been discovered in other fields (like physics and chemistry) when we design various devices. What is known about learning should be applied in the classroom similarly, and it should not take as long as it has taken in the past for that to happen. Application of basic research results happens dramatically faster in many other branches of science, and it seems rather peculiar that it has taken this long for those of us who teach—particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—to begin to move basic knowledge in these relevant fields to the practice of teaching.

The essence of engineering is design. In the process of design we apply knowledge from the areas of physics, mathematics, and various other sciences to produce a result. To us, it makes sense that course design and the design of classroom activities should implement knowledge from the areas of cognitive science and educational psychology to produce instruction that more effectively promotes learning. As we devised workshops involving course design, we wondered if courses could be designed as engineering artifacts were designed. In other words, we wondered if it was possible to apply knowledge of the learning process to the design of a course. We approached this as engineers and began reading the literature in educational psychology and cognitive science. We were particularly interested in work that formed a coherent model of the learning process and techniques that seemed to be based on that sort of model. This book presents our findings, and we indicate where we found different aspects of the model in the literature.

As we have stated already, those who teach should understand how students learn, regardless of the course level or discipline. However, this book applies particularly to teachers of the STEM disciplines. They are more accustomed to thinking in terms of models, so having a model of the process will help in understanding what to do and why something will or might not work.

A Look Ahead

One frequently raised objection is that teachers are doing pretty well despite their lack of knowledge of the learning process. In other words, we seem to manage using common sense approaches in the classroom. However, as Robert Bjork (2002) points out, many of the most effective classroom approaches and important results about how people learn are counterintuitive (p. 3). So, it may take some courage to implement some of the concepts in this book.

In the first chapter, we take some time to provide a rationale for the idea that there really is a problem with what we are doing. We are not surviving as well as we ought to or as well as we may think we are. The first chapter presents evidence that helps us to focus on some problem areas. Despite any good feelings we may have, all is not well, particularly within STEM disciplines.

In the next three chapters we look at a model of the human memory system (Chapter 2), how we perceive material and get it into working memory (Chapter 3), and the evidence that exists for the best ways to process material that is perceived to store that material in long-term memory (Chapter 4). Along the way we will encounter some concepts about just how that material is stored in memory; this will be useful as we consider how to achieve learning that results in long-term retention. In particular, we find strong evidence that active learning techniques very effectively promote long-term retention and improvements in learning.

In Chapter 5 we look at levels of learning interpreted through the lens of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. This categorization gives us a way to classify students’ levels of knowing, which are strong determinants of how effective we are in achieving long-term retention. Later in the book we note that various teaching techniques produce learning at different levels and that achieving different levels is important for long-term retention and “transfer.”

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 together focus on various topics in active learning. We face a conundrum here because the evidence we encounter in Chapter 4 is not based on a really good definition of active learning. As we proceed through this sequence of chapters—beginning with some commonly advocated methods in Chapter 6 through to a discussion of problem-based learning (PBL) in Chapter 8—we attempt to refine the concept of active learning and regularly refer to concepts from Bloom’s taxonomy.

In Chapters 9 and 10 we discuss the multifaceted concept of transfer, in which students apply what they learn in different contexts and situations to problems that might not be directly related. STEM teachers know full well that the material students learn today could be outdated in only a few years, so they want their students to be able to adapt to whatever is coming. There is a vast, and rapidly growing, literature on this topic.

Finally, in the last chapter we look at ways the concepts in the book can be used to improve your teaching. This is perhaps the hardest part. Effective techniques, some known for years, never seem to make it into many classrooms. In this final chapter, we address some of the issues that make it difficult for STEM faculty to implement changes.

Maybe you anticipate that some of the techniques you will encounter in this book are chancy—something you find interesting to read about but are wary of using in the classroom. Almost everything presented here has been used successfully by faculty both teaching now and previously. In the 1950s, for example, the engineering curriculum at Carnegie Institute of Technology (as Carnegie-Mellon University was known in those days) implemented many of the ideas in this book. Those faculty had a strong sense of what worked as well as the courage to use what they believed in. They built strong programs using these ideas, and those of us fortunate enough to experience that curriculum realize how powerful their approach was. You can build courses and curricula with that educational and motivational power—and you will have the added advantage of knowing why what you are doing works.

Questions About Teaching and Learning

It makes sense to begin a journey through a book knowing where you are starting. To that end, take several minutes and answer the following questions we assembled by circling your answers. If you think two or more answers could be correct, choose the answer you think is best or the most commonly found result:

When a student learns
1. A copy of what is in the instructor’s mind is the goal for what should be in the student’s mind after the instruction.
2. Information is transmitted from the instructor to the student.
3. Students retain a processed version of the material perceived by the student.
4. None of the above options are true.
Which of these statements are generally true?
1. Competition pushes students to achieve higher levels of learning than cooperation.
2. Students master material more effectively if they work independently rather than in groups.
3. Students must learn the underlying facts, formulae, and theories before being asked to solve real problems.
4. Lecturing remains the most common instructional method in higher education because it is one of the most efficient methods of delivering information.
When students learn a set of material
1. They either know or don’t know the material.
2. They may be able to explain the material but not be able to apply it.
3. They may be able to apply the material but not be able to explain it.
4. None of the above options are true.
A clear, logically presented lecture
1. Leads to deeper understanding than group exercises on the same material.
2. Allows the instructor to cover more material in the allotted time because students learn faster and better.
3. Produces learning equivalent to the best active learning methods.
4. Does not need to be supplemented with hands-on activities.
5. None of the above options are true.
Good teachers
1. Must have a deep understanding of the material.
2. Can teach any material.
3. Have knowledge of the conceptual barriers to learning a particular set of material.
4. Primarily enhance learning by developing clear and logical lectures.
5. Improves their lecture when students fail to learn adequately.
6. None of the above options are true.
Learning increases as
1. Students reread the material.
2. Lecture time increases.
3. Activity time increases.
4. None of the above options are true.

These questions lead to insights regarding how instructors think about the concepts, and answers often reveal some interesting misconceptions about the learning process. In the numerous workshops we have given for faculty in engineering and science, we have posed those questions. A tabulation of attendees’ responses (in percentages) is given herein, along with our comments. Note that participants in these workshops may have been predisposed to active learning methods, which could have influenced these results.

Reviewing these results indicates that many instructors (at least those attending our workshops) have fairly good ideas about what are effective pedagogical techniques but that the evidence is not overwhelming. Many of the answers to these questions are fairly widely distributed among the possible answers.

1
Is There a Problem?:
Or Is the Problem That We Don’t Think There Is a Problem?

This chapter examines our educational system to get a clearer picture of its fairly substantial problems. Pinning down exactly what they are is the goal of this chapter.

These observations should make us all think a little:

“Education is not as effective as it needs to be, should be, and can be, in our nation, particularly math and science” (Bjork, 2004, p. 2).
“Typical first-year college students … are not well prepared for college learning” (Leamnson, 1999, p. 2).
“Although faculty members want their students to achieve higher kinds of learning, they continue to use a form of teaching that is not effective at promoting such learning” (Fink, 2003, p. 3).

Some of the evidence is anecdotal but still quite convincing and often very entertaining. Late-night television shows and court TV shows illustrate that great entertainment can be found by exposing the ignorance of people. News stories often recount various failings in the educational system. Graduates in some school systems are counted lucky if they can read their own diplomas. Yet evidence to the contrary can be found. An educational system that produces graduates who can’t name the current president of the country also produces graduates who can sequence the human genetic code and design integrated circuit chips of ever increasing speed and complexity. This enigma (or is it a dilemma?) needs to be examined to name the problem, if there is one. Let’s look for an answer by looking at some of the past research.

Some Evidence for the Problem

Halloun and Hestenes (1985a, in Bain, 2004) did a classic study on how typical introductory physics courses change student conceptions about motion and basic physics concepts related to motion. Going into the course, students carried a lot of baggage often referred to as “Aristotelian physics” and medieval concepts of “impetus.” Introductory physics courses are designed to present concepts based on Newton’s conception of inertia and the force laws he first propounded. (The students are not expected to cover relativistic concepts, for example.)

What Halloun and Hestenes found is that after the course “even many ‘A’ students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton … They had memorized formulae and learned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions” (Bain, 2004, p. 22). These are disturbing results because they give a clear indication that an introductory physics course did not effectively impart the basic concepts necessary for later courses in physics and any discipline that applies those physical concepts. Halloun and Hestenes then conducted individual interviews designed to probe student understanding further, only to discover that students firmly held on to their misconceptions even in the face of evidence that contradicted those misconceptions. Those students were, however, very adept at devising explanations about why those experiments did not perform as they expected. Unfortunately, Halloun and Hestenes are not alone in concluding that students do not learn what we think they learn in their courses.

Several years ago Philip Sadler (1989), a professor in the education department at Harvard University, began a project that generated a series of very unsettling films. His results on the state of science education confirm what Halloun and Hestenes found. Those results are found in two films.

The Problem of the Seasons

In “Private Theories” (from A Private Universe, Sadler, 1989) an interviewer approached recent Harvard graduates (still in their graduation robes) and a few Harvard faculty and asked why it was warmer in the summer than it was in the winter. The commonest answer was that the earth was closest to the sun in the summer, which causes the increase in temperature experienced in the summer.

The correct answer is that the earth’s seasons are caused by axial tilt (with respect to the plane of the earth’s orbit), so the angle of the sunlight reaching the surface in the northern hemisphere is greatest (closest to verticality) late in June. Interestingly, the earth is closest to the sun in January, when it is coldest in the northern hemisphere—where these students were located. And, if it were a matter of distance, we would have summer at the same time in both North America and South America, and we all know that is not what happens. Finally, it should be noted that clueless students in the film proudly proclaimed that they had taken astrophysics.

Where Does the Wood Come From?

In “Out of Thin Air” (from Minds of Our Own, Sadler, 1996), an interviewer asks where the mass in a block of wood comes from. The commonest answer is that wood is composed of material sucked from the earth by tree roots (presumably transmogrified somehow by the tree).

If you burn a piece of wood, the ash that remains is all of the solid material that comes from the earth. The rest is water—some from the roots, some absorbed through the leaves—and carbon dioxide absorbed through the leaves. The bulk of the material in wood is fiber, a carbohydrate composed of carbon and water.

The Lightbulb Problem

In “Batteries and Bulbs” (from Minds of Our Own, Sadler, 1996), an interviewer approached very recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates, also with robes on, and asked if they could illuminate a lightbulb given three items—the lightbulb, a battery, and a single piece of wire. They were uniformly confident that they could light the bulb, but precious few could actually do it. You can try this experiment with your students if you teach a course that covers basic electrical concepts. It takes very little equipment, and the responses can be revealing. We don’t recommend doing it immediately after you have taught an introductory course in electrical engineering to those students.

__________________

What happens in these films is very disconcerting because the misconceptions are both fundamental and pervasive. Even after taking courses (in astrophysics) that should have gotten rid of the misconceptions, they persist. If you are interested in the videos, they are available from the Annenberg Foundation, at the URL indicated in the Sadler references.

There are other indications of a problem. You can almost always find a professor who bemoans how poorly prepared students are in his class. Even though he vows that he can do much better, after teaching the prerequisite material he is utterly dismayed that the student are just as poorly prepared. Perhaps you have bemoaned how little your students take from the classroom to apply in the laboratory. And, if you are really curious, you may have talked to students about topics in your class only to find that they have a very shallow knowledge of topics you thought you had taught well.

Either the education we think we are giving to our students is almost totally evanescent, or we never really get through to them in the first place. But have we precisely defined the problem yet? Exam results indicate that students seem to learn material; however, they seem not to retain it, or, when they do, they can’t apply it to a real-life problem.

“The Science and Art of Transfer” (Perkins and Salomon, 1990) begins with “a disappointed professor of physics at a nearby college. … ”

Among the stock problems explored in the physics course was one like this: “A ball weighing three kilograms is dropped from the top of a hundred meter tower. How many seconds does it take to reach the ground?” [Physics aficionados will recognize that the weight of the ball has nothing to do with the problem; it is a distraction. The answer depends only on the acceleration of gravity.] On the final exam, the professor included a problem like this: “There is a one-hundred meter hole in the ground. A ball weighing three kilograms is rolled off the side into the hole. How long does it take to reach the bottom?” Some students did not recognize the connection between the “tower” problem and the “hole” problem. One student even came up after the exam and accosted the professor with this complaint. “I think that this exam was unfair,” the student wailed. “We never had any hole problems!” (p. 1).

Professors of physics or any other sciences and engineering will recognize that there is no conceptual difference between the tower problem and the hole problem. In both problems a ball drops 100 meters, and that is all that counts. Yet many students will find it difficult or will be unable to apply the general knowledge acquired in the tower problem to any other context.

The problem is students’ inability to use the material they learn in a course after passing exams and earning a good grade. This material is said to be inert; students cannot transfer it to a new situation. This problem is at the heart of the Sadler–Annenberg films and the anecdote about the hole.

What Do Others Think?

An investigation of the state of education by other individuals and organizations has produced some interesting results. In the first chapter of a report by the National Research Council (NRC) titled How People Learn (Bransford et al., 2000), three key findings used to drive material throughout the book are presented:

“Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom” (p. 14).
“To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must have a deep foundation of factual knowledge; understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework; [and] organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application” (p. 16).
“A ‘metacognitive’ approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them” (p. 18).

The first key concept addresses the existence of misconceptions in learners. The essence of this is that misconceptions must be found and addressed, or new learning will simply cover up basic, preexisting misunderstandings and misconceptions. It is hard to argue with that, and the first key finding clearly points to some classroom teaching strategies that seem to make good sense—like identifying preexisting misconceptions.

The second key finding concerns the depth of understanding that students need to achieve. However, this is somewhat fuzzier, with undefined phrases like “deep foundation.” Further, a teacher in the classroom will need specific “ways that facilitate retrieval and application.” As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details, and many details would be needed to implement this finding.

Finally, there is a call to address metacognitive aspects of learning. The problem with the three key findings is that they all point somehow to things that can be done in the classroom but give us little indication of what is actually taking place inside the students’ minds as they learn. Teachers, especially those who teach engineering and science, have a strong tendency to think using an explanatory model. This model is missing from How People Learn but would be very helpful when examining recommendations for teaching and learning strategies in the classroom. It would provide a framework to explain why certain classroom strategies work and should be used. In later chapters we present an explanatory model of what takes place as students learn. Details of that model are finding support in various research results.

Many other educators have been concerned with the question of how people learn. An article in ASEE Prism (Grose, 2006) cites how a number of universities, including Purdue University, Virginia Tech, and Utah State University, have established not only teaching centers but also departments centered on engineering education. The hope expressed therein is that more are coming. Clearly there is a developing consensus that educators need to understand more about how students learn and how to construct learning situations that maximize what students learn.

Our experience is what motivated us to write this book; we have incorporated into our teaching many of the concepts and ideas we describe herein in our teaching. We are convinced that students learn better—and in some sense more deeply—when these ideas make their way into the classroom. Our students have responded to these approaches with enthusiasm and more focused attention.

As we have become involved with the material in the book we have come to value the research that has been done in this area. However, we have also realized that, though a considerable amount of good work has been done, not everything directly applies to those of us who teach science and engineering content. We have made an attempt to put together work that forms what we think is a coherent whole—a big picture—but that is relevant to our content and teaching contexts. Here’s the most important issue and the driving force behind our work in this book: Even the best of us can do better if we learn more about what actually takes place in the minds of the students and if we apply that knowledge in the right way.

Summary

In this chapter we argue that there is a problem in our educational system. Students arrive unprepared for college and bring serious misconceptions with them. College course work does not deal with the misconceptions as directly or effectively as it should. Students leave college unprepared for what awaits them. Moreover, college faculty do not regularly use the teaching methods consistent with research findings. Most are unaware that research in educational psychology and cognitive science has established much about how people learn and the kinds of teaching that promotes that learning.

What’s Coming Up

As we proceed, we will encounter numerous recommendations, which we will examine through the lens of a model of the learning process that we develop and present in the next few chapters. Many of the effective methods are counterintuitive. As Bjork (2004, p. 3) observes, “the ways that I see based on basic research to dramatically upgrade instruction, are, in many ways, unintuitive, and counter to prevailing practices.”

So, as you proceed through the book, please be prepared to abandon your preconceptions about what might work in the classroom and to entertain some concepts that are “unintuitive, and counter to prevailing practices.”

Effective Instruction for STEM Disciplines

From Learning Theory to College Teaching