Nobel Laureate Prefers Peer Instruction

By Eric Mankin on October 16, 2009 10:50 AM

Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman brought his message to nearly 100 USC faculty members that current methods of teaching subjects such as physics, chemistry and engineering are wrongminded and inefficient.

The 2001 physics prize winner, whose appearance was sponsored by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC College and the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching on Oct. 13, was introduced at the Andrus Gerontology Center by Eugene Bickers, vice provost for undergraduate programs.

Wieman, a professor at the University of British Columbia, documented how the traditional science lecture delivered to quiet note takers was at loggerheads with cognitive theory and brain research.

He heads the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative and is chair of the board of science education at the National Academy of Sciences. He has won numerous teaching prizes, including the Oested Award and the 2004 Professor of the Year Award. He has spread his message of science-based science education for years.

Learning a discipline such as science requires not just mastery of information details, he said, but actual brain change. Tests on students in lectures consistently showed dismally low rates of assimilation of information — rates that remain low regardless of the skill of the lecturer and the talents of the students.

Part of the problem is the intrinsic difficulty of the material. Learning to be a scientist requires thousands of hours of work in adapting thinking to the discipline.

For years, Wieman has attempted to develop a new model of instruction, one that he believes is more attuned to human abilities, such as the peer instruction system partially based on the work of fellow physicist Eric Mazur. In that system, large audiences are divided into small groups.

Such techniques, Wieman said, consistently produce better results.

TAGS: research

Search search

Search only News Archives