...PCAST identified five overarching recommendations that it believes can achieve this goal: (1) catalyze widespread adoption of empirically validated teaching practices; (2) advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery based research courses; (3) launch a national experiment in post secondary mathematics education to address the mathematics preparation gap; (4) encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversify pathways to STEM careers; and (5) create a Presidential Council on STEM Education with leadership from the academic and business communities to provide strategic leadership for transformative and sustainable change in STEM undergraduate education."
"Recommendation 2.
Advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery-based research courses.
Traditional introductory laboratory courses generally do not capture the creativity of STEM disciplines. They often involve repeating classical experiments to reproduce known results, rather than engaging students in experiments with the possibility of true discovery. Students may infer from such courses that STEM fields involve repeating what is known to have worked in the past rather than exploring the unknown. Engineering curricula in the first two years have long made use of design courses that engage student creativity. Recently, research courses in STEM subjects have been implemented at diverse institutions, including universities with large introductory course enrollments. These courses make individual ownership of projects and discovery feasible in a classroom setting, engaging students in authentic STEM experiences and enhancing learning and, therefore, they provide models for what should be more widely implemented."
Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. Susan R. Singer, Natalie R. Nielsen, and Heidi A. Schweingruber, Editors; Committee on the Status, Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education Research; Board on Science Education; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council. ISBN 978-0-309-25411-3 282 pages 6 x 9 PAPERBACK (2012)
"DBER clearly shows that research-based instructional strategies are more effective than traditional lecture in improving conceptual knowledge and attitudes about learning. Effective instruction involves a range of approaches, including making lectures more interactive, having students work in groups, and incorporating authentic problems and activities."
1. The baccalaureate degree should be recognized as the “pre-engineering” degree or bachelor of arts in engineering degree, depending on the course content and reflecting the career aspirations of the student.
2. ABET should allow accreditation of engineering programs of the same name at the baccalaureate and graduate levels in the same department to recognize that education through a “professional” master’s degree produces an AME, an accredited “master” engineer.
3. Engineering schools should more vigorously exploit the flexibility
inherent in the outcomes-based accreditation approach to experi-
ment with novel models for baccalaureate education. ABET should
ensure that evaluators look for innovation and experimentation in
the curriculum and not just hold institutions to a strict interpretation of the guidelines as they see them.
4. Whatever other creative approaches are taken in the four-year
engineering curriculum, the essence of engineering—the iterative
process of designing, predicting performance, building, and testing—should be taught from the earliest stages of the curriculum,
including the first year.
7. As well as delivering content, engineering schools must teach
engineering students how to learn, and must play a continuing role
along with professional organizations in facilitating lifelong learning, perhaps through offering “executive” technical degrees similar
to executive MBAs.
8. Engineering schools introduce interdisciplinary learning in the
undergraduate environment, rather than having it as an exclusive
feature of the graduate programs.
9. Engineering educators should explore the development of case
studies of engineering successes and failures and the appropriate
use of a case-studies approach in undergraduate and graduate
curricula.
11. U.S. engineering schools must develop programs to encourage/reward domestic engineering students to aspire to the M.S. and/or
Ph.D. degree.
Robotics technology holds the potential to transform the future of the country and is expected to become as ubiquitous over the next decades as computer technology is today.
While some critical capabilities and underlying technologies are domain-specific, the systems effort identified a number of critical capabilities that are common across the board, including robust 3-D perception, planning and navigation, human-like dexterous manipulation, intuitive human-robot interaction, and safe robot behavior.
Robotics technology offers a unique opportunity to invest in an area that has a real potential for new jobs, increased productivity, and to add to worker safety in the short-term. It will allow an acceleration of inshoring of jobs, and longer-term, will offer improved quality of life in a society that is expected to experience significant aging.
4. Research and Development: Promising Directions. 4.1 Learning and Adaptation, 4.2 Modeling, Analysis, Simulation, and Control , 4.3 Formal Methods, 4.4 Control and Planning, 4.5 Perception, 4.6 Novel Mechanisms and High-performance Actuators, 4.7 Human-Robot Interaction, 4.8 Architecture and Representations, 4.9 Measurement Science, 4.10 “Cloud” Robotics and Automation for Manufacturing.
3.3.9 Education and Training: The U.S. can only take advantage of new research results and technology if there is a workforce well- trained in the basics of robotics and the relevant technologies. This workforce should have a wide range of skill and knowledge levels—from people trained at vocational schools and community colleges to operate high-tech manufacturing equipment, to BS- and MS-level developers trained to create robust, high-tech manufacturing equipment, to PhD-level basic researchers trained to develop and prove new theories, models, and algorithms for next-generation robots. To train the best workforce, the educa- tional opportunities must be broadly available. The roadmap for the workforce is as follows:
5 years: Each public secondary school in the U.S. has a robotics program available after school. The program includes various informational and competitive public events during each session, and participants receive recognition comparable to other popular extra-curricular activities.
10 years: In addition to the 5-year goal, every 4-year college and university offers concentrations in robotics to augment many Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees.
15 years: The number of domestic graduate students at all levels with training in robotics is double what it was in 2008. Ten ABET-approved BS programs in Robotics and 10 PhD programs in Robotics are active.
7 Principles of good practice in teaching:
1. Good practice encourages contact between students and faculty: Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of class is a most important factor in student motivation and involvement.
2. Good practice develops reciprocity and cooperation among students: Working with others often increases involvement in learning. Sharing one's ideas and responding to others' improves thinking and deepens understanding.
3. Good practice uses active learning techniques: Students retain much more information when engaged in the activity as compared with listening or simply studying.
4. Good practice gives prompt feedback: Knowing what you know and don't know focuses your learning.
5. Good practice emphasizes time on task: Allocating realistic amounts of time means effective learning for students and effective teaching for faculty.
6. Good practice communicates high expectations: Expect more and you will get it. Set high but achievable goals.
7. Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of knowing: Students need opportunities to show their talents and learn in ways that work for them. Then they can be pushed to learn in new ways that do not come so easily.
Being told procedures and concepts before problem solving can inadvertently undermine the learning of deep structures in physics. If students do not learn the underlying structure of physical phenomena, they will exhibit poor transfer. Two studies on teaching physics to adolescents compared the effects of “telling” students before and after problem solving. In Experiment 1 ( N 128), students in a tell-and- practice condition were told the relevant concepts and formulas (e.g., density) before practicing on a set of contrasting cases for each lesson. Students in an invent-with-contrasting-cases (ICC) condition had to invent formulas using the same cases and were told only afterward. Both groups exhibited equal proficiency at using the formulas on word problems. However, ICC students better learned the ratio structure of the physical phenomena and transferred more frequently to semantically unrelated topics that also had a ratio structure (e.g., spring constant). Experiment 2 ( N 120) clarified the sources of the effects while showing that ICC benefited both low- and high-achieving students.
We compared the amounts of learning achieved using two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. We measured the learning of a specific set of topics and objectives when taught by 3 hours of traditional lecture given by an experienced highly rated instructor and 3 hours of instruction given by a trained but inexperienced instructor using instruction based on research in cognitive psychology and physics education. The comparison was made between two large sections (N = 267 and N = 271) of an introductory undergraduate physics course. We found increased student attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning in the section taught using research-based instruction.
A Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned science educator, Wieman doesn’t understand why institutions of higher education would disregard decades of research showing the superiority of student-centered, active learning over the traditional 50-minute lecture. Using that outdated approach, he says, means universities are squandering talent at a time when U.S. higher education is being criticized for not turning out enough science-savvy graduates to keep the country competitive.
Colleagues also laud Wieman’s rigorous approach to reform. “I have an incredible amount of respect for his deep commitment to the evidence,” says Susan Singer, head of undergraduate education at NSF and a national leader in reforming undergraduate biology education. “Carl is someone who digs in and really wants to know.”
“There’s an entire industry devoted to measuring how important my research is, with impact factors of papers and so on,” Wieman says. “Yet, we don’t even collect data on how I am teaching. It receives no attention. … If everything about teaching remains hidden, then universities can avoid having to devote anything more than minimal effort to doing it well.
A department should plan on spending about 5% of its budget for 5 years to transform its courses, Wieman says.