-Nature
More than 40% of women with full-time jobs in science leave the sector or go part time after having their first child, according to a study of how parenthood affects career trajectories in the United States. By contrast, only 23% of new fathers leave or cut their working hours.
-CBE Life Sciences
The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one addresses the relationships between active learning and teaching evaluations; one presents an observation tool for documenting metacognition in the classroom; and the last explores things teachers can say to encourage students to employ scientific reasoning during class discussions.
-AAPT
College instructors are often afraid to use active learning instructional strategies because they fear that students may complain and/or give them lower evaluations of teaching. In this paper, we present data from a survey of 431 physics instructors who had attended the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop and who attempted to incorporate active learning into their introductory course. Nearly half of respondents (48%) felt that their student evaluations increased, one-third (32%) felt that their student evaluations had not been impacted, and one-fifth (20%) felt that their student evaluations decreased. Thus, contrary to common fears, for these instructors the most likely result from the incorporation of active learning was an increase in student evaluations.
To help prepare future faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to teach undergraduates, more research universities are offering teaching development (TD) programs to doctoral students who aspire to academic careers. Using social cognitive career theory, we examine the effects of TD programs on early-career STEM scholars’ sense of self-efficacy as postsecondary teachers.
There has been little attention given to teaching beliefs of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), even though they represent the primary teaching workforce for undergraduate students in discussion and laboratory sections at many research universities. Secondary school education studies have shown that teaching beliefs are malleable and can be shaped by professional development, particularly for inexperienced teachers. This study characterized inexperienced GTAs’ teaching beliefs about student learning and how they change with a science-specific pedagogy course that emphasized student learning.
Embedding active learning is a common mechanism for meeting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education reform goals. Researchers have identified student benefits from such strategies, yet these benefits may not be universal for all students. We sought to identify how students at a nontraditional university perceive introductory biology and chemistry courses, and whether perceptions relate to course type, performance, or student status.
Telling is a time-tested and efficient way to communicate information. Just try to keep the strengths and weaknesses of lecturing in mind. The most effective teaching involves looking to communicate information in inefficient ways — that is, in ways that make students work to understand the information, and not just listen passively. A big benefit of engaging students in active learning is that it reveals — to us and to them — what they don’t yet understand. With lecturing, we can tell them all we want, but whether they’re listening is anyone’s guess.
Telling is a time-tested and efficient way to communicate information. Just try to keep the strengths and weaknesses of lecturing in mind. The most effective teaching involves looking to communicate information in inefficient ways — that is, in ways that make students work to understand the information, and not just listen passively. A big benefit of engaging students in active learning is that it reveals — to us and to them — what they don’t yet understand. With lecturing, we can tell them all we want, but whether they’re listening is anyone’s guess.
Big data and automation are the future, but Americans need to understand the technology lest they become pawns of Silicon Valley. When it comes to big data, automation, robots and machine learning, for instance, change happens almost daily, and the learning curve is steep. Millions of people across this country are sitting in the dark on some of the most critical issues of our day because the “magic” behind these technologies – that magic being engineering – is a foreign language.
The majority of students who enroll in undergraduate biology courses will eventually be employed in non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) business occupations. This work explores how representations of industry in undergraduate biology textbooks could impact STEM learning for these students and their ability to apply this learning in their chosen work.