University holds Symposium on Teaching Excellence in the Sciences

Hopkins had its first Symposium on Teaching Excellence in the Sciences on Friday, Jan. 20 to discuss how to move forward with the Gateway Sciences Initiative, a movement aiming to improve the way that introductory science classes at Hopkins are taught. About 400 people, including leaders in science education from around the country, Hopkins faculty, staff and students attended the symposium.

President Ron Daniels set the tone for the symposium by discussing the problems with the lecture format of most introductory science classes that are imperative for students' success in further science classes.

"A reliance on a large lecture, in one way a kind of dump of knowledge techniques, we know that these courses create a climate that is often closer to a game of survivor than it is to a moment in which we see that this is the student's first introduction to these great disciplines," he said.

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Lloyd Minor spoke next, praising Hopkins for its high STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) retention rate. According to Minor, 63 percent of Hopkins students are interested in STEM majors when matriculating at Hopkins, and 57 percent of these students graduate as a STEM major, which is a 90 percent retention rate.  Although this rate is higher than that of many other schools, Minor said that there are many ways that Hopkins's science classes could be improved, which is the goal of the Gateway Sciences Initiative.

"We knew that Johns Hopkins must be doing something right, but that didn't mean that we were satisfied with where we were, or what we could be. Large and passive lecture courses still dominate the gateway science courses here, as elsewhere," he said. "We should excel at gateway science education, so we committed ourselves to discovering how we could improve gateway science teaching at Hopkins."

Minor went on to discuss the need to make science classes more interesting, like they used to be in primary school, and not just prerequisites for science students to check off the list.

"By the time these kids get to college, the fun science fair projects and experiments like exploding soda can volcanoes have been replaced by the lecture hall," he said. "Lost in the grime and facts and formulas is the thrill of discovery."

Yale University's Director of the Center for Scientific Teaching  Jo Handelsman gave the first keynote presentation on "National Trends in the Transformation of STEM Education." Her talk focused mostly on how the lecture system should be replaced with more active learning to keep students engaged with the class material to ensure that they actually learn.

"You can't live in the modern world without being able to process scientific information and know where it came from," she said.

She stated that the United States is going to need one million STEM workers, which will not happen if 60 percent of students continue to leave their STEM majors. Retaining women and minorities in STEM majors is even more of a problem today.

Handelsman believes that students are abandoning these majors because of poor teaching and an emphasis on facts instead of active learning. In her talk, she advocated for evidence-based teaching classes where a backward design is used, which would mean that learning goals would be the most important part of the class.

"We do have the ability to change, and yet, we have been stuck in medieval methods for many centuries," she said.

Princeton University's Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, David Botstein, was the next keynote speaker with his presentation on "Integrated Introductory Science Curriculum for Undergraduates at Princeton." His introductory science curriculum at Princeton is a two-year program that combines the core science classes and provides students with the math background that they will need in a STEM career, focusing on the most fundamental ideas while using up-to-date methods so that students want to learn. The program at Princeton does not include pre-med majors due to their strict requirements, which does not allow Botstein and the faculty room to be creative.

"The quickest way to kill a course is to require it," he said.

Botstein's presentation was followed by the student panel, which was led by Associate Research Professor of Chemistry Christopher Falzone. The panel featured Bloomberg School of Public Health graduate student Jeff Goldsmith, sophomore Jackie Heath, School of Medicine student Jason Liebowitz, senior Fareedat Oluyadi, School of Nursing student Samantha Schneider and graduate student Matthew Walters. Panelists discussed subjects such as what makes a course effective, ways to develop critical thinking skills in classes, such as clickers, the competitive pre-med environment at Hopkins, information retention, group learning and covered grades.

According to Vice Provost for Research Scott Zeger, who is on the Faculty Steering Committee for the Gateway Science Initiative, the highlight of the student panel was when Heath challenged Botstein's views on pre-med students.

"I was very impressed by one of our students who stood up to Dr. Botstein," Zeger said. "I thought it was good for Johns Hopkins pre-med students to stand up for themselves. [It was an] interesting and diverse group of people. To get the most out of the initiative we need to increase the student involvement in the conversation."

Heath expressed many of her opinions during the panel, such as her dislike of covered grades because they cause students to not work as hard, and how Hopkins students meet the expectations of the "pre-med mentality.'"

"We all had very distinct opinions and I think it was cool that we got to represent the undergraduate to the pre-professor opinion, so the line-up was really interesting," Heath said. "I think that we were able to answer a lot of questions that the professors had and they could see it coming directly from the students instead of other professors. . .we had less of a bias in our answers."

Goldsmith hopes that the panel was useful to the professors who are designing better classes, as he hopes to become a professor. However, he thought that the panel could have been more diverse.

"I think it's very easy for professors to be disconnected from the reactions that students have …that's not a good thing when you're trying to change the way for how classes are being taught, so having that perspective hopefully is useful to some faculty members," he said. "The people in the student panel are sort of, by default, people for who the current curriculum works for.  We may have not had as many contradictory opinions as could have been useful."

Vice Dean for Undergraduate Education Steven David thought that it was important to include a student panel, as the students are the people who the Gateway Sciences Initiative will affect the most.

"You don't want to simply talk down to people without talking to people who were the customers," he said.

After a lunch break, which featured posters describing some of the programs that will be put into place through grants provided by the Gateway Science Initiative, Harvard's Area Dean of Applied Physics   Eric Mazur presented his "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer." Through his classes, he focuses on helping students really learn the information instead of memorizing lectures and forgetting the information once the class is over.

"It's no longer about remembering information, it's about how to use it," he said.

The symposium then broke into brainstorming sessions, which were "Reforming Pre-med Culture and Learning," "Employing Active and Diverse Educational Methods in Gateway Science Courses," "Role of Gateway Science Courses in Encouraging STEM Career Choices" and "Using New Technologies to Enhance Learning in Gateway Science Courses."

The final keynote speaker was UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski who presented on "Culture Change at UMBC: The Meyerhoff Scholars Program and First-Year Science Course Redesign." Hrabowski described his program, which has been very successful in improving the rate that minorities succeed in STEM classes by providing them with support and making sure that they succeeded in essential gateway courses.

"Building community among students makes a big difference," Hrabowski said.

Minor concluded the symposium by restating how important gateway science courses are for success in STEM majors.

"My vision for this initiative is that it will contribute to the development of the learning assessment and the learning outcome measurements, the science of learning as a scholastic discipline," he said.

Biophysics professor Jon Lorsch, who was the Chair of the Committee for the symposium, thought that the event was very successful, and was pleased to see so many people invested in working on Hopkins's curriculum.

"It's ironic that K-12 education is ahead of grad and undergrad education in that arena, so it's time to catch up and see if there's better ways to teach students than having them sit in giant lecture halls," he said.

Heath also thought the symposium was successful from a student's perspective, as long as the professors in attendance learned from the keynote speakers.

"I think the first thing is that the professors have to want to improve their styles, they have to want to change. As long as the lecture system is loved and respected by some, it's been proven through data, statistics. . .that it's not as effective as when you incorporate active learning," she said. "The first step is that the professors would have to really be genuinely interested in learning about how to change and actually enforcing the changes. I just hope that these changes they're talking about actually do start to happen . . .it's one thing to have these great ideas but it's another thing to actually implement them."

David also thought that the symposium went well, especially because it highlighted something that affects many Hopkins students.

"I think the most important thing is recognizing that this is important, that this matters, that undergraduate education is important, and nothing is more important than the gateway science classes because so many students pass through them at one time or another," he said.