In case some of you didn't see the Charlie Rose show on science last week, here it is. The panelists are: Paul Nurse, Lisa Randall, Harold Varmus, Shirley Ann Jackson, and Bruce Alberts. I had a chance to congratulate both Bruce Alberts and Harold Varmus today for their excellent comments. Harold Varmus says he's been on the show several times but I don't see the show very often. Could someone please let me know the next time Charlie Rose covers a science topic?
These guys make a lot of sense. They point out that science education is a mess and that includes science education in the colleges and universities. I particularly like this comment by Harold Varmus.
I do think there's a problem in making science appear frightening and linked to a laboratory activity. As comments you've already heard suggest, science really is a process. A process by which you have ideas, you test them out, you look at evidence, you measure things, and you draw conclusions. And that's a process that applies to almost any phase of life.Science is a process. It's a way of knowing. That's what we should be teaching.
Too many people think that science is all about doing laboratory exercises but that's actually a very poor way of teaching what science is all about. Just about anyone can be trained in the methodology of a given discipline—like biochemistry—but it takes a lot more work to teach students how to think like a scientist.
My department is currently considering a proposal to dumb down our introductory courses and reduce the numbers of lecture hours in our 3rd year courses. This would be accompanied by an expansion in the number of hours spent doing laboratory exercises. The idea is to prepare students for a career in research as though the way to become a good researcher is to learn how to pipette and not how to acquire fundamental knowledge and learn how to use it to think like a scientist.
No comments:
Post a Comment