Dive Brief:
- Despite studies that show students learn better in introductory science and math classes when they are engaged with questions from their instructors and small-group problem solving, most universities are sticking with less-effective lecture-style teaching.
- Part of the problem is that universities tend to emphasize published research and landing grants over teaching, the New York Times reports.
- For four-year schools, 28% of students start as majors in math, science, or engineering, but by the time students graduate, only 16% of the bachelor degrees awarded are in those fields, with attrition the highest among female and black students.
Dive Insight:
One of the other problems cited by the New York Times is professors believing that introductory courses should provide a gatekeeping function to weed out students before they make it to higher-level courses. Also, most professors are never trained in educational theory or teaching methods. Higher education has also been slower to adopt teaching technology than K-12 schools.
Among the studies about teaching methods for introductory college courses are the University of Colorado’s, which showed that students who took an introductory physics course using transformed teaching methods had test scores 50% higher than those with traditional teaching methods. Also, a University of North Carolina study showed that new teaching methods used on introductory biology classes boosted student performance, especially for black students whose parents didn’t attend college. The New York Times holds up an overhaul of science courses at the University of California at Davis as a model effort, with the school using funding from the Association of American Universities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Helmsley Charitable Trust to implement the research from Colorado; Eric Mazur, author of “Peer Instruction”; and Doug Lemov, author of “Teach Like a Champion”; along with software from the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.