WHY NOT TRY

a Scientific Approach
to Science Education?

B y Ca r l Wi e m a n

T
he purpose of science education is no longer simply In short, we now need to make science education effective
to train that tiny fraction of the population who will and relevant for a large and necessarily more diverse fraction of
become the next generation of scientists. We need the population.
a more scientifically literate populace to address What do I mean by an effective education in science? I be-
the global challenges that humanity now faces and lieve a successful science education transforms how students
that only science can explain and possibly mitigate, think, so that they can understand and use science like scientists
such as global warming, as well as to make wise decisions, do. (See Figure 1). But is this kind of transformation really pos-
informed by scientific understanding, about issues such as sible for a large fraction of the total population?
genetic modification. Moreover, the modern economy is
largely based on science and technology, and for that economy
to thrive and for individuals within it to be successful, we need Figure 1. Transporting student thinking from
technically literate citizens with complex problem-solving novice to expert.
skills.

Carl Wieman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001 and the
Carnegie Foundation’s U.S. University Professor of the Year Award in
2004, currently directs the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative
at the University of British Columbia and the Colorado Science Edu-
cation Initiative. Prior to joining UBC, he served on the faculty at the
University of Colorado from 1984 to 2006 as a distinguished professor
of physics and presidential teaching scholar. This article is adapted
from his lecture at the Carnegie Foundation’s Centennial celebration
at the Library of Congress.
Change ● September/October 2007 9
 The hypothesis that I and others have advanced is that it is students, on whose professional development I have spent a
possible, but only if we approach the teaching of science like a lot of time and thought. And over the years I became aware
science. That means applying to science teaching the practices of a consistent pattern. New graduate students would come to
that are essential components of scientific research and that work in my laboratory after 17 years of extraordinary success
explain why science has progressed at such a remarkable pace in classes, but when they were given research projects to work
in the modern world. on, they were clueless about how to proceed. Or worse—often
The most important of these components are: it seemed that they didn’t even really understand what physics
• Practices and conclusions based on objective data rather was.
than—as is frequently the case in education—anecdote or tra- But then an amazing thing happened: After just a few years
dition. This includes using the results of prior research, such as of working in my research lab, interacting with me and the
work on how people learn. other students, they were transformed. I’d suddenly realize
• Disseminating results in a scholarly manner and copying they were now expert physicists, genuine colleagues. If this
and building upon what works. Too often in education, par- had happened only once or twice it would have just seemed an
ticularly at the postsecondary level, everything is reinvented, oddity, but I realized it was a consistent pattern. So I decided to
often in a highly flawed form, every time a different instructor figure it out.
teaches a course. (I call this problem “reinventing the square One hypothesis that occurred to me, as it has to many other
wheel.”) research advisors who have observed similar transformations,
• Fully utilizing modern technology. Just as we are always is that the human brain has to go through a 17-year “caterpil-
looking for ways to use technology to advance scientific re- lar” stage before it is suddenly transformed into a physicist
search, we need to do the same in education. “butterfly.” (See Figure 3.) But I wasn’t satisfied with that
These three essential components of all experimental scien- explanation, so I tackled it like a science problem. I started
tific research (and, not incidentally, of the scholarship of teach- studying the research on how people learn, particularly how
ing and learning) can be equally valuable in science education. they learn science, to see if it could provide a more satisfactory
Applied to the teaching of science, they have the capability to explanation of the pattern. Sure enough, the research did have
dramatically improve both the effectiveness and the efficiency another explanation to offer that also solved the earlier puzzle
of our educational system. of why my classroom teaching was ineffective.

The Learning Puzzle

?
the topic and got it clear in my own mind. Then I explained it
to my students so that they would understand it with the same
clarity I had. 17 yr
At least that was the theory. But I am a devout believer in the
experimental method, so I always measure results. (See Figure
2.) And whenever I made any serious attempt to determine
what my students were learning, it was clear that this approach
just didn’t work. An occasional student here and there might
have understood my beautifully clear and clever explanations, Research on Learning
but the vast majority of students weren’t getting them at all. In a traditional science class, the teacher stands at the front
of the class lecturing to a largely passive group of students.
Those students then go off and do back-of-the-chapter home-
Figure 2. Student reaction to my brilliantly work problems from the textbook and take exams that are simi-
clear explanations. lar to those exercises.
The research has several things to say about this pedagogi-
cal strategy, but I’ll focus on three findings—the first about
the retention of information from lecture, the second about un-
derstanding basic concepts, and the third about general beliefs
?????????????????????????????????????????? regarding science and scientific problem-solving. The data I
discuss were mostly gathered in introductory college physics
courses, but these results are consistent with those of similar
For many years, this failure of students to learn from my studies done in other scientific disciplines and at other grade
explanations remained a frustrating puzzle to me, as I think it levels. This is understandable, because they are consistent with
is for many diligent faculty members. What eventually led me what we know about cognition.
to understand it was that I was encountering the even bigger
puzzle of my graduate students. Retaining Information
I have conducted an extensive research program in atomic Lectures were created as a means of transferring infor-
physics over many years that has involved many graduate mation from one person to many, so an obvious topic for
10 Change ● September/October 2007
research is the retention of the information by the many. The and most widely used of these is the Force Concepts Inventory
results of three studies—which can be replicated by any fac- (FCI) (see Hestenes, 1992 in “Resources” below). This instru-
ulty member with a strong enough stomach—are instructive. ment tests students’ mastery of the basic concepts of force and
The first is by Joe Redish, a highly regarded physics profes- motion, which are covered in every first-semester postsecond-
sor at the University of Maryland. Even though the students ary physics course. The FCI is composed of carefully devel-
thought his lectures were wonderful, Joe wondered how much oped and tested questions that usually require students to apply
they were actually learning. So he hired a graduate student to the concepts of force and motion in a real-world context, such
grab students at random as they filed out of class at the end as explaining what happens when a car runs into a truck. The
of the lecture and ask, “What was the lecture you just heard FCI—now administered in hundreds of courses annually—nor-
about?” It turned out that the students could respond with only mally is given at the beginning and end of the semester to see
with the vaguest of generalities. how much students have learned during the course.
Zdeslav Hrepic, N. Sanjay Rebello, and Dean Zollman at Richard Hake compiled the FCI results from 14 different tra-
Kansas State University carried out a much more structured ditional courses and found that in the traditional lecture course,
study. They asked 18 students from an introductory physics students master no more than 30 percent of the key concepts
class to attempt to answer six questions on the physics of sound that they didn’t already know at the start of the course (See
and then, primed by that experience, to get the answers to those Figure 4). Similar sub-30-percent gains are seen in many other
questions by listening to a 14-minute, highly polished commer- unpublished studies and are largely independent of lecturer
cial videotaped lecture given by someone who is supposed to quality, class size, and institution. The consistency of those
be the world’s most accomplished physics lecturer. On most of results clearly demonstrates that the problem is in the basic
the six questions, no more than one student was able to answer pedagogical approach: The traditional lecture is simply not
correctly. successful in helping most students achieve mastery of funda-
In a final example, a number of times Kathy Perkins and I mental concepts. Pedagogical approaches involving more inter-
have presented some non-obvious fact in a lecture along with active engagement of students show consistently higher gains
an illustration, and then quizzed the students 15 minutes later on the FCI and similar tests.
on the fact. About 10 percent usually remember it by then. To
see whether we simply had mentally deficient students, I once
repeated this experiment when I was giving a departmental Figure 4.
colloquium at one of the leading physics departments in the
United States. The audience was made up of physics faculty
members and graduate students, but the result was about the
same—around 10 percent.
Given that there are thousands of traditional science lectures
being given every day, these results are quite disturbing. Do
these findings make sense? Could this meager transfer of infor-
mation in lectures be a generic problem?
These results do indeed make a lot of sense and probably
are generic, based on one of the most well-established—yet
widely ignored—results of cognitive science: the extremely
limited capacity of the short-term working memory. The re-
search tells us that the human brain can hold a maximum of
about seven different items in its short-term working memory
Source: Plot from R. Hake, “A six-thousand-student survey,” AJP 66, 64-74 (1998).
and can process no more than about four ideas at once. Exact-
ly what an “item” means when translated from the cognitive
science lab into the classroom is a bit fuzzy. But the number
of new items that students are expected to remember and pro- Affecting Beliefs
cess in the typical hour-long science lecture is vastly greater. Students believe certain things about what physics is and
So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to how one goes about learning the discipline, as well as how one
take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them solves problems in physics. If you interview a lot of people,
in that format. you find that their beliefs lie on a spectrum that ranges from
“novice” to “expert.” My research group and others have devel-
Understanding Basic Concepts oped survey instruments that can measure where on this scale a
We physicists believe that one of the great strengths of person’s beliefs lie.
physics is that it has a few fundamental concepts that can What do we mean by a “novice” in this context? Adapting
be applied very widely. This has inspired physics-education the characterization developed by David Hammer, novices see
researchers to study how well students are actually learning the content of physics instruction as isolated pieces of informa-
the basic concepts in their physics courses, particularly at the tion—handed down by an authority and disconnected from the
introductory level. world around them—that they can only learn by memorization.
These researchers have created some good assessment tools To the novice, scientific problem-solving is just matching the
for measuring conceptual understanding. Probably the oldest pattern of the problem to certain memorized recipes.
Change ● September/October 2007 11
 Experts—i.e., physicists—see physics as a coherent long-term memory, which is developed via the construction and
structure of concepts that describe nature and that have been assembly of component proteins. So a person who does not go
established by experiment. Expert problem-solving involves through this extended mental construction process simply can-
employing systematic, concept-based, and widely applicable not achieve mastery of a subject.
strategies. Since this includes being applicable in completely When you understand what makes up expert competence
new situations, this strategy is much more useful than the nov- and how it is developed, you can see how cognitive science
ice problem-solving approach. accounts for the classroom results that I presented earlier. Stu-
Once you develop the tools to measure where people’s dents are not learning the scientific concepts that enable experts
beliefs lie on this expert-to-novice scale, you can see how to organize and apply the information of the discipline, nor are
students’ beliefs change as a result of their courses. What you they being helped to develop either the mental organizational
would expect, or at least hope, is that students would begin their structure that facilitates the retrieval and application of that
college physics course somewhere on the novice side of the knowledge or a capacity for metacognition. So it makes per-
scale and that after completing the course they would have be- fect sense that they are not learning to think like experts, even
come more expert-like in their beliefs. though they are passing science courses
What the data say is just the opposite. by memorizing facts and problem-solving
On average, students have more novice- recipes.
like beliefs after they have completed an
introductory physics course than they had Improved Teaching and Learning
when they started; this was found for near- If we now return to the puzzle of my
ly every introductory course measured. To the novice, graduate students—why their first 17 years
More recently, my group started looking of education seemed so ineffective, while
at beliefs about chemistry. If anything, the scientific a few years of doing research turned gradu-
effect of taking an introductory college ate students into expert physicists—we see
chemistry course is even worse than for problem-solving that the first part of the mystery is solved:
taking physics. Those traditional science courses did little
So we are faced with another puzzle is just matching to develop expert-like thinking about phys-
about traditional science instruction. This ics. But why is working in a research lab so
instruction is explicitly built around teach- the pattern different?
ing concepts and is being provided by in- A lot of educational and cognitive
structors who, at least at the college level, of the research can be reduced to this basic prin-
are unquestionably experts in the subject. ciple: People learn by creating their own
And yet their students are not learning con- problem to certain understanding. But that does not mean they
cepts, and they are acquiring novice beliefs must or even can do it without assistance.
about the subject. How can this be? memorized Effective teaching facilitates that creation
Research on learning once again pro- by getting students engaged in thinking
vides answers. Cognitive scientists have recipes. deeply about the subject at an appropriate
spent a lot of time studying what consti- level and then monitoring that thinking and
tutes expert competence in any discipline, guiding it to be more expert-like.
and they have found a few basic compo- When you put it in those terms, you
nents. The first is that experts have lots realize that this is exactly what all my
of factual knowledge about their subject, graduate students are doing 18 or 20
which is hardly a surprise. But in addition, hours a day, seven days a week. (Or at
experts have a mental organizational structure that facilitates least that is what they claim—the reality is a bit less.) They
the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge. Third, are focused intently on solving real physics problems, and I
experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking (“meta- regularly probe how they’re thinking and give them guidance
cognition”), at least in their discipline of expertise. They are to make it more expert-like. After a few years in that environ-
able to ask themselves, “Do I understand this? How can I check ment they turn into experts, not because there is something
my understanding?” magic in the air in the research lab but because they are en-
A traditional science instructor concentrates on teaching fac- gaged in exactly the cognitive processes that are required for
tual knowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like developing expert competence.
ways of thinking about the subject come along for free or are Once I realized this, I started to think how these ideas could
already present. But that is not what cognitive science tells us. be used to improve the teaching of undergraduate science. Of
It tells us instead that students need to develop these different course it would be very effective to put every student into a
ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort. research lab to work one-on-one with a faculty member rather
Also, new ways of thinking are always built on the prior think- than taking classes. While that would probably work very well
ing of the individual, so if the educational process is to be suc- and is not so different from my own education, obviously it is
cessful, it is essential to take that prior thinking into account. not practical as a widespread solution. So if the economic reali-
This is basic biology. Everything that constitutes “under- ties dictate that we have to use courses and classrooms, how
standing” science and “thinking scientifically” resides in the can we use these ideas to improve classroom teaching? The key
12 Change ● September/October 2007
is to get these desirable cognitive activities, as revealed by re- minimizing the use of technical jargon. All these things reduce
search, into normal course activities. unnecessary cognitive demands and result in more learning.
I am not alone in coming to this conclusion. There is a
significant community of science-education researchers, Addressing Beliefs
particularly in physics, who are taking this approach to the A second way teachers can improve instruction is by recogniz-
development and testing of new pedagogical approaches. This ing the importance of student beliefs about science. This is an area
is paying off in clear demonstrations of improved learning. my own group studies. We see that the novice/expert-like beliefs
Indeed, some innovative pedagogical strategies are sufficiently are important in a variety of ways—for example they correlate
mature that they are being routinely replicated by other instruc- with content learning and choice of major. However, our particular
tors with similar results. interest is how teaching practices affect student beliefs. Although
So what are a few examples of these strategies, and how do this is a new area of research, we find that with rather minimal in-
they reflect our increasing understanding of cognition? terventions, a teacher can avoid the regression mentioned above.
The particular intervention we have tried addresses student be-
Reducing Cognitive Load liefs by explicitly discussing, for each topic covered, why this topic
The first way in which one can use research on learning to is worth learning, how it operates in the real world, why it makes
create better classroom practices addresses the limited capac- sense, and how it connects to things the student already knows.
ity of the short-term working memory. Anything one can do to Doing little more than this eliminates the usual significant decline
reduce cognitive load improves learning. The effective teacher and sometimes results in small improvements, as measured by our
recognizes that giving the students material to master is the surveys. This intervention also improves student interest, because
mental equivalent of giving them packages to carry. (See Figure the beliefs measured are closely linked to that interest.
5). With only one package, they can make a lot of progress in a
hurry. If they are loaded down with many, they stagger around, Stimulating and Guiding Thinking
have a lot more trouble, and can’t get as far. And when they My third example of how teaching and learning can be im-
experience the mental equivalent of many packages dumped on proved is by implementing the principle that effective teaching
them at once, they are squashed flat and can’t learn anything. consists of engaging students, monitoring their thinking, and
So anything the teacher can do to reduce that cognitive load providing feedback. Given the reality that student-faculty in-
while presenting the material will help. Some ways to do so are teraction at most colleges and universities is going to be domi-
obvious, such as slowing down. Others include having a clear, nated by time together in the classroom, this means the teacher
logical, explicit organization to the class (including making must make this happen first and foremost in the classroom.
connections between different ideas presented and connections To do this effectively, teachers must first know where the
to things the students already know), using figures where ap- students are starting from in their thinking, so they can build
propriate rather than relying only on verbal descriptions and on that foundation. Then they must find activities that ensure
that the students actively think about and process the important
ideas of the discipline. Finally, instructors must have mecha-
Figure 5. Result of loading student up with low, nisms by which they can probe and then guide that thinking on
medium, and high cognitive loads. an ongoing basis. This takes much more than just mastery of
the topic—it requires, in the memorable words of Lee Shulman,
“pedagogical content knowledge.”
Getting students engaged and guiding their thinking in the
a classroom is just the beginning of true learning, however. This
classroom experience has to be followed up with extended
“effortful study,” where the student spends considerably more
time than is possible in the classroom developing expert-like
b thinking and skills.
Even the most thoughtful, dedicated teachers spend enor-
mously more time worrying about their lectures than they do
about their homework assignments, which I think is a mistake.
Extended, highly focused mental processing is required to
build those little proteins that make up the long-term memory.
No matter what happens in the relatively brief period students
spend in the classroom, there is not enough time to develop the
long-term memory structures required for subject mastery.
To ensure that the necessary extended effort is made, and
c that it is productive, requires carefully designed homework
assignments, grading policies, and feedback. As a practical
matter, in a university environment with large classes the most
effective way for students to get the feedback that will make
their study time more productive and develop their metacogni-
tive skills is through peer collaboration.
Change ● September/October 2007 13
Using Technology represent a much broader distribution by ethnicity and gen-
I believe that most reasonably good teachers could engage der—than when using the peer-instruction approach without
students and guide their thinking if they had only two or three stu- clickers.
dents in the class. But the reality of the modern university is that A third powerful educational technology is the sophisticated
we must find a way to accomplish this with a class of 200 students. online interactive simulation. This technique can be highly ef-
There are a number of new technologies that, when used properly, fective and takes less time to incorporate into instruction than
can be quite effective at extending instructors’ capabilities so that more traditional materials. My group has created and tested
they can engage and guide far more students at once. over 60 such simulations and made them available for free
A caveat: Far too often, the technology drives instruction (www.phet.colorado.edu). We have explored their use in lecture
and student thinking rather than the educational purposes and homework problems and as replacements for, or enhance-
driving the development and use of the technology. A sec- ments of, laboratories.
ond caveat: There is far too little careful testing of various The “circuit construction kit” is a typical example of a simu-
technologies’ effectiveness in increasing the learning of real lation (See Figure 6). It allows one to build arbitrary circuits
students. However, here are three demonstrably effective uses involving realistic-looking resistors, light bulbs (which light
of technology. up), wires, batteries, and switches and get a correct rendition of
“Just-in-time teaching” was introduced by Gregor Novack, voltages and currents. There are realistic volt and ammeters to
Andy Gavrin, Evelyn Patterson, and Wolfgang Christian. The measure circuit parameters. The simulation also shows cartoon-
technique uses the Web to ask students questions concerning like electrons moving around the circuit in appropriate paths,
the material to be covered, questions that they must answer just with velocities proportional to current. We’ve found this simu-
before class. The students thus start the class already engaged, lation to be a dramatic help to students in understanding the
and the instructor, who has looked at the students’ answers, basic concepts of electric current and voltage, when substituted
already knows a reasonable amount about their difficulties with for an equivalent lab with real components.
the topic to be covered.
A second technology that I have worked with extensively
is personal-response systems or “clickers.” Each student has a Figure 6. Circuit constructions kit interactive
clicker with which to answer questions posed during class. A simulation.
computer records each student’s answer and can display a his-
togram of those responses. The clicker efficiently and quickly
gets an answer from each student for which that student is ac-
countable but which is anonymous to their peers.
I have found that these clickers can have a profound impact
on the educational experience of students. The most produc-
tive use of clickers in my experience is to enhance the Peer
Instruction (PI) technique developed by Eric Mazur, particu-
larly for less active or assertive students.
I assign students to groups the first day of class (typically
three to four students in adjacent seats) and design each lec-
ture around a series of seven to 10 clicker questions that cover
the key learning goals for that day. The groups are told they
must come to a consensus answer (entered with their clickers)
and be prepared to offer reasons for their choice. It is in these
peer discussions that most students do the primary processing
of the new ideas and problem-solving approaches. The pro-
cess of critiquing each other’s ideas in order to arrive at a con-
sensus also enormously improves both their ability to carry on
scientific discourse and to test their own understanding.
Source: Physics Ecducation Technology Project, University of Colorado
Clickers also give valuable (albeit often painful) feedback
to the instructor when they reveal, for example, that only 10
percent of the students understood what was just explained.
But they also provide feedback in less obvious ways. By As with all good educational technology, the effectiveness
circulating through the classroom and listening in on the of good simulations comes from the fact that their design is
consensus-group discussions, I quickly learn which aspects governed by research on how people learn, and the simula-
of the topic confuse students and can then target those points tions are carefully tested to ensure they achieve the desired
in the follow-up discussion. Perhaps even more important is learning. They can enhance the ability of a good instructor to
the feedback provided to the students through the histograms portray how experts think when they see a real-life situation
and their own discussions. They become much more invested and provide an environment in which a student can learn by
in their own learning. When using clickers and consensus observing and exploring. The power of a simulation is that
groups, I have dramatically more substantive questions per these explorations can be carefully constrained, and what the
class period—more students ask questions and the students student sees can be suitably enhanced to facilitate the desired
14 Change ● September/October 2007
Table 1. Comparison of Learning Results required to bring about cultural change in organizations like
from Traditionally Taught Courses and science departments.
Courses Using Research-Based Pedagogy Our society faces both a demand for improved science edu-
cation and exciting opportunities for meeting those demands.
Traditional Instruction Research-Based Instruction Taking a more scholarly approach to education—that is, utilizing
research on how the brain learns, carrying out careful research on
Retention of information from Retention of information from
what students are learning, and adjusting our instructional prac-
lecture: 10% after 15 minutes lecture: More than 90 % after 2 days
tices accordingly—has great promise. Research clearly shows
Gain in conceptual understanding: Gain in conceptual understanding: the failures of traditional methods and the superiority of some
25% 50-70%
new approaches for most students. However, it remains a chal-
Beliefs about physics and problem- A small improvement lenge to insert into every college and university classroom these
solving: significant drop pedagogical approaches and a mindset that teaching should be
pursued with the same rigorous standards of scholarship as scien-
tific research.
learning. Using these various effective pedagogical strategies, Although I am reluctant to offer simple solutions for such
my group and many others have seen dramatic improvements a complex problem, perhaps the most effective first step will
in learning. be to provide sufficient carrots and sticks to convince the fac-
ulty members within each department or program to come to
Institutional Change a consensus as to their desired learning outcomes at each level
We now have good data showing that traditional approaches (course, program, etc.) and to create rigorous means to measure
to teaching science are not successful for a large proportion the actual outcomes. These learning outcomes cannot be vague
of our students, and we have a few research-based approaches generalities but rather should be the specific things they want
that achieve much better learning. The scientific approach to students to be able to do that demonstrate the desired capabili-
science teaching works, but how do we make this the norm ties and mastery and hence can be measured in a relatively
for every teacher in every classroom, rather than just a set of straightforward fashion. The methods and instruments for as-
experimental projects? This has been my primary focus for the sessing the outcomes must meet certain objective standards of
past several years. rigor and also be collectively agreed upon and used in a consis-
A necessary condition for changing college education tent manner, as is done in scientific research. C
is changing the teaching of science at the major research
universities, because they set the norms that pervade the
education system regarding how science is taught and what Resources
it means to “learn” science. These departments produce
most of the college teachers who then go on to teach science
to the majority of college students, including future school W. Adams et al. (2005), Proceedings of the 2004 Physics
teachers. So we must start by changing the practices of Education Research Conference, J. Marx, P, Heron, S. Franklin,
those departments. eds., American Institute of Physics, Melville, NY, p. 45.
There are several major challenges to modifying how they R. Hake (1998), The American Journal of Physics. 66, 64.
educate their students. First, in universities there is generally D. Hammer (1997), Cognition and Instruction. 15, 485.
no connection between the incentives in the system and student
learning. A lot of people would say that this is because research D. Hestenes, M. Wells, G. Swackhammer (1992), The
universities and their faculty don’t care about teaching or stu- Physics Teacher. 30, 141.
dent learning. I don’t think that’s true—many instructors care a Z. Hrepic, D. Zollman, N. Rebello. “Comparing students’
great deal. The real problem is that we have almost no authentic and experts’ understanding of the content of a lecture,” to be
assessments of what students actually learn, so it is impossible published in Journal of Science Education and Technology. A
to broadly measure that learning and hence impossible to con- pre-print is available at http://web.phys.ksu.edu/papers/2006/
nect it to resources and incentives. We do have student evalua- Hrepic_comparing.pdf
tions of instructors, but these are primarily popularity contests E. Mazur (1997), Peer Instructions: A User’s Manual,
and not measures of learning. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
The second challenge is that while we know how to devel- G. Novak, E. Patterson, A.Gavrin, and W. Christian (1999),
op the necessary tools for assessing student learning in a prac- Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web
tical, widespread way at the university level, carrying this out Technology, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
would require a significant investment. Introducing effective
research-based teaching in all college science courses—by, K. Perkins et al. (2005), Proceedings of the 2004
for instance, developing and testing pedagogically effective Physics Education Research Conference, J. Marx, P. Heron,
materials, supporting technology, and providing for faculty S. Franklin, eds., American Institute of Physics, Melville, NY,
development—would also require resources. But the budget p. 61.
for R&D and the implementation of improved educational E. Redish (2003), Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite,
methods at most universities is essentially zero. More gener- Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
ally, there is not the political will on campus to take the steps
Change ● September/October 2007 15