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COVER STORY Excellence in education: PAMS faculty use technology and talent to teach tomorrow's leaders
For nearly half a century, faculty members in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences have remained committed to providing world-class instruction in the physical and mathematical sciences to students across the university. As knowledge within their individual disciplines has advanced and evolved over the years, so too have the techniques and technologies these dedicated teachers use to help their students make that knowledge their own. Today, PAMS is a recognized leader in the study and practice of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education. Our faculty routinely receive campus-wide and UNC System awards for excellence in teaching as well as national and international recognition for their contributions to the advancement of STEM education to students of all disciplines. Here are just a few of the stories that can be found across the College (click on one of the links below to choose a story or scroll down to read all the stories):
Not your parents' physics class
Many of the principles taught in an introductory physics class haven’t changed in centuries, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new ideas on how to teach them. Just ask physics faculty members Robert Beichner and John Risley, each of whome has developed educational innovations that are being felt far beyond NC State. Beichner began developing SCALE-UP - short for Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs - in the late 1990s. The idea was to integrate lecture and laboratory sessions to create a new classroom paradigm that focused less on rote memorization and more on mastery of concepts while also providing more opportunities for discovery and interaction, says Beichner, who is Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor in the Department of Physics. “Research shows that students who work collaboratively in small groups and take an active role in class learn more and get better grades,” Beichner says. “The challenge is how to ‘SCALE-UP’ those benefits of a small classroom setting to a larger class of 100 students or more.” Beichner’s research has led him to the conclusion that the optimum SCALE-UP classroom consists of students sitting in three groups of three students at seven-foot diameter round tables with networked laptop connections. The SCALE-UP instructor intermingles short, interactive lectures with hands-on activities that force the students to apply what they’ve just learned. Does the setup of the classroom really make that much of a difference? When SCALE-UP classes were introduced at NC State in 1997, overall failure rates dropped to less than one-half what they had been in traditional classes - even less for women and minority students. With these kinds of results, it should come as no surprise that SCALE-UP has gone global. More than 50 institutions around the world now use SCALE-UP to teach classes, not just in physics, but in engineering, mathematics, business, nursing and even literature. Perhaps the most notable adopter of SCALE-UP technology is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT was so impressed with the results that they have spent more than $2.5 million in recent years to outfit their version of SCALE-UP classrooms, called Teaching Enhanced Active Learning classrooms. The university teaches all its introductory physics courses in these new rooms.
Around the same time Robert Beichner was contemplating the classroom of the future, his colleague in the Department of Physics, John Risley, was beginning a project that would help revolutionize how students complete and turn in their homework and other classroom projects. Trained as an atomic physicist, Risley became interested in the application of computer technology to teach physics in the early 1980s. In 1997, Aaron Titus, a graduate student, and Larry Martin, a visiting professor, working in Risley’s lab created the first version of WebAssign, a unique online service that enabled students to complete their homework and have it automatically graded online. Under Risley’s guidance, the software has been constantly expanded and improved in the years since. Today, WebAssign offers students more opportunities than ever to test their knowledge through customized homework assignments, quizzes and practice tests based on their specific textbook and classroom curriculum. It also offers more opportunities for them to receive feedback on their performance, both through automated grading and by providing instructors with an immediate and accurate picture of each student’s performance.
Based on its early successes, WebAssign was spun off as a private company in 2003, with its headquarters on NC State’s Centennial Campus. Risley continues to serve as CEO and has seen the company grow to more than 80 employees with more than 300,000 student users at more than 4,500 high schools and colleges. While students across the country now benefit from his innovation, Risley’s first concern was always his students at NC State. “My biggest motivation was to give our students a better learning experience than what students who were 10 or 15 years removed from college had,” he says. “I wanted them to learn just as much, if not more, but also be more engaged and have more fun with the learning process.” Beichner and Risley each credit their success to Richard Patty, who served as physics department head from 1976-1995. Both commended Patty’s willingness to let his faculty try something new, a trait that Patty says just came naturally. “There’s always been a culture in our department of being interested in good teaching,” Patty recalls. “If someone had a new idea they wanted to try in the classroom, I would tell them to go ahead and try it. More often than not, it worked.” For more information:
In addition to teaching our own 1,600 undergraduate and graduate students, PAMS faculty are responsible for providing students across the university with a solid background in the physical and mathematical sciences. This is no small commitment. In fact, last year almost 90 percent of the more than 150,000 credit hours taught in PAMS were for students in other colleges.
With so many non-majors coming through their classes, PAMS professors must teach beyond the specific technical boundaries of any one discipline. This is a fact David McConnell knows well. A professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and author of the textbook, The Good Earth: Introduction to Earth Science, McConnell’s research focus is in the area of science education. He is one of a core group of PAMS faculty with dual backgrounds in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) discipline and in science education who are interested in the research and development of innovative and effective undergraduate learning. McConnell’s laboratory is his introductory geology class, which offers a unique cross section of test subjects. At a large, comprehensive institution like NC State, the typical 100-level science class may have 200 or more students with widely different pre-college experiences and educational aspirations. McConnell’s job, as he sees it, is to develop a learning environment in which students might become interested in taking further coursework in geology and other STEM fields and to provide students going into other fields with an educational experience that will still serve them well down the road.
“We (in PAMS) are not just training geologists or physicists or statisticians,” he says. “We’re trying to create critical thinkers who understand science and are able to grasp concepts that will make them successful and productive members of society.” To achieve this in his classes, McConnell engages students with a variety of short group exercises. Foremost among these are ConcepTests, conceptual multiple-choice questions that focus on one key element of an instructor’s learning goals for a lesson. The process begins with a short instructor presentation on a specific concept followed by a question to the students. Students respond individually using electronic responders, more commonly called “clickers,” and their answers are projected on-screen as a histogram. If multiple answers are selected, students get together in small groups to discuss and possibly rethink their answers. The key, McConnell says, is developing questions that do more than just test knowledge retention. While several students may initially get the answers wrong, the subsequent group discussions provide each student with an opportunity to reflect on why they answered a certain way and to learn from each other’s thought process as well as from the instructor’s original presentation. These “low stakes” questions allow students to measure their ongoing learning and give McConnell an opportunity to assess his teaching and make any necessary adjustments. According to McConnell, this is the collaborative, active-learning process by which students move from information recipient to critical thinker. While he stresses that getting students to learn fundamental concepts is always a priority, McConnell believes this type of environment addresses other critical factors that can dramatically enhance the learning experience. “Are the students excited? Are they motivated? Do they place value on what they are learning? Those are the factors that make all the difference,” he says. For more information:
Making students accountable for their own success Two decades of teaching science at almost every level imaginable have taught Kay Sandberg a thing or two. The first is to never turn your back on a room full of 9th graders. Perhaps more useful in her current role as a teaching associate professor in the Department of Chemistry is the teaching philosophy she has developed over the years: If you make students more accountable, they become more responsible for their own success.
Sandberg, who teaches introductory chemistry courses to non majors, practices this philosophy by regularly challenging her students both inside and outside of class. In her early days of teaching chemistry service courses to non-majors, this meant written class exercises and homework that added up to some 400 sheets of paper to be handed in and graded after every lecture. As new teaching technologies became available, Sandberg was a consistent “early adopter” willing to try new ways to interact with her students. She was the first person ever to incorporate WebAssign into an organic chemistry course. She has now taught nearly 120 classes using WebAssign and many homework and test questions she originally wrote are now used in classes across the country. She was also an early adopter of homework message boards and in-class electronic responders, or “clickers.” Sandberg uses these technologies to encourage her students to think about and discuss ideas and theories, whether to answer a question posed to them during class or to solve an especially challenging homework problem.
“The technologies allow the students to learn, not only from me, but each other,” she says. “The students who get a concept quickly become even stronger by explaining it to others, and those who may be having a little more trouble are able to work through it with their peers.” As you can imagine, Sandberg’s courses aren’t for everyone. She’s widely known as a teacher whose courses are exceptionally challenging, but students who brave her courses gain a background in chemistry fundamentals they don’t soon forget. “I often have former students come back from taking the MCAT or the DAT (the national admission exams for medical and dental schools) and tell me, ‘This chemistry question came up, and I knew the answer immediately from your class,’” she says proudly. In addition to this kind of student feedback, Kay Sandberg has also been recognized consistently by students and colleagues for excellence in teaching. She was named to the NC State University Academy of Outstanding Teachers in 2001, was named an Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor in 2005 and received PAMS’ prestigious LeRoy and Elva Martin Teaching Effectiveness Award in 2007. For more information:
Providing greater opportunity to participate in science Any student of chemistry is familiar with titration, the process used to determine the unknown concentration of a known reactant. Countless students are introduced each year to this age-old method of chemical analysis in high school science and introductory college chemistry classes around the world.
If you recall the first time you performed your own titration, your most vivid memories of the experience are very likely visual: perhaps watching the numbers change on the pH meter or seeing your mixture suddenly change colors. But what if you couldn’t see? Visually impaired students are often forced to the sidelines when it comes to hands-on science education. Particularly when it comes to chemistry experiments, these students may have access to a very limited science curriculum or are discouraged from participating all together. Maria Oliver-Hoyo, an associate professor in NC State’s Department of Chemistry, and her team are trying to change that. Oliver-Hoyo heads the NASAL (Novel Adaptations of Sensory Activities in the Lab) project, an effort to transform chemistry laboratory instruction from the traditional, eyesight-dependent experience into one that engages the senses of smell, touch and hearing that will better engage visually impaired students and provide all students with a more complete experience. The effort involves adapting experiments to take advantage of existing technologies, such as talking thermometers and sound-emitting light sensors, and creating entirely new experiments, such as in the case of olfactory titrations. “Where the endpoint of a traditional titration is determined from a visual indicator, like a change in color, the olfactory titration endpoint is signaled by a change in smell,” Oliver-Hoyo explains.
These olfactory indicators tend to be powerful, familiar odors—like onions and garlic—that would be hard to miss. So far, Oliver-Hoyo’s team has developed and tested seven of these types of “sensorial experiments.” As Oliver-Hoyo explains it, there are two benefits of this type of research. The most obvious is that it breaks down barriers to STEM opportunities for a unique, underserved population. There are approximately 58,000 legally blind children in the U.S. and countless others with a lesser visual impairment. The second benefit is that it allows further exploration of multi-sensory, multi-channel learning that could improve the educational experience for all students. “Our ultimate goal is to have visually impaired students actively participating in a chemistry lab along non-disabled classmates and, in doing so, change misguided views about the potential, inherent in all, to contribute to and enjoy science,” she says For more information:
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