Upcoming CIRTL Course Raises Unusual Questions about Science Education

Katherine Friedrich

Common lecturing practices can lead to misunderstandings that undermine universities' goal of promoting science literacy. In Fall 2008, the CIRTL Network will offer an interdisciplinary online course, "Teaching and Learning Science: Changing Student Misconceptions," that will train graduate students to detect what undergraduates are really learning - and where their conceptual errors lie.

"I believe that training science teachers at all levels is of critical importance for the country," said course instructor Mike Klymkowsky, a professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "If undergraduate students are not literate in their own disciplines, and if those people become science teachers, that's not good." 

Klymkowsky is familiar with many common scientific misconceptions. Students, he said, often try to apply macro-scale, "common sense" ideas to biological and chemical processes - even though these concepts may not work. He also said that students frequently misunderstand graphs unless their instructors explain them clearly.

"Most professors have no idea what their students find difficult," Klymkowsky said. "The way students look at things is different from the way experts look at them. It's critical, when you're teaching, that you understand what students are thinking."  

Klymkowsky's goal in teaching this course is to give future faculty the tools they need to "be able to appreciate the conceptual problems students face." He plans to use the textbook "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School," a publication of the National Academy of Sciences. Course participants will learn how to interview students and encourage students to discuss their assumptions about science - assumptions that, Klymkowsky said, "work in the normal world but not in the scientific world."

"It's very important to actually listen to what students have to say," Klymkowsky explained. Instructors can ask students what they think graphs mean, and what scientific ideas mean to them.

In graduate school, Klymkowsky added, students often still retain the same misconceptions they had as undergraduates. These techniques are equally as applicable to graduate courses as they are to undergraduate ones.

To view more details about the course, including registration information, please visit the course homepage on the CIRTL Network site.

September 10, 2008

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