I spoke to a former student recently; I tutored him in his first semester at Notre Dame and was excited for the opportunity. He revealed that he has changed his major from biochemistry to political science. Remembering how happy he was to become a doctor, I asked him what motivated him to make that change.
He described the challenges of keeping up with some of the more difficult first-year science courses. However, it was his last words that stayed with me: “Besides, it was just a lot of memorization, and I didn’t think it was that much fun.”
I’ve heard this rejection many times, from many students, whether or not they did pursue a STEM major. It’s a familiar story, too, because my husband had a similar experience and left his biology major during his sophomore year. He was doing well in his classes, but he was bored and frustrated with all the memorization.
The problem
Retention in science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses remains persistently low, due to a range of reasons including reduced student motivation and interest. after they started a STEM curriculum. And no wonder—even with mountains of evidence supporting the importance of active learning, little has changed in college science education.
Most college STEM courses are still taught in a lecture format. That format has ripple effects for the nature of testing in STEM, targeting low-level cognitive work. For example, a recent study found that, in biology courses across all types of institutions, only 7 percent of all test questions test scientific reasoning skills, with more questions than questions about scientific facts.
Remembering facts from a course and answering test questions about them—obviously the basic skills needed to get a science degree—provide a valuable foundation of knowledge, but they are not the same as the skills needed to succeed in a science career. Working scientists need a strong knowledge base, sure, but they also rely heavily on skills like asking good questions, planning investigations and analyzing and evaluating data.
If we want to motivate undergraduates to study science and pursue the field, we need to treat them clearly as scientists, not just memorizers of scientific facts.
Working in a research lab, or completing an undergraduate course-based research experience (CURE), are rightly considered important ways to strengthen scientific identity. But what about faculty who don’t use labs or don’t have the budget, resources or money to teach a CURE course? Anyone who teaches college science has a role to play in helping students develop a sense of science—as well as promoting retention, learning and subsequent career-related outcomes.
Science skills should consider how students can see and practice asking and answering science questions in a way that is most authentic to their studies. Here, I focus on ways that non-lab courses can use basic science books to draw students into the business of science in a way that resembles the work of scientists. Although these methods are very easy to use in small classes, I will also provide ideas on how to get larger lessons to incorporate the same principles.
Starting Small
The first step in inviting students into the scientific community is simply to encourage them to ask questions about what they see. I’ve written before about a sequence of questions you can use to teach graph interpretation skills, building from the basics (“What’s on the x axis?”) to more comprehensive interpretations. The final question in that series is “What questions might this data or explanation raise for you?” Building the habit of asking that question about data can introduce the idea that, in science, one answer often opens up many questions.
Encourage students to notice and ask questions about unusual patterns in the graph—eg, “Why is there a spike in cortisol levels in the morning?” Although small, these two encourage a closer look at statistics and the idea that scientific data is interesting and open to new questions.
In The Art and Science of Learning, a class I co-taught with James Lang, students read a well-known study of taxi drivers in London, which describes a brain region important for structural images that appears to increase in size over time behind the wheel.
At first glance, students accepted and were (rightly) impressed by the findings. After being forced to spend a lot of time studying graphs, and after being forced to come up with a question about the data, one student revealed that two of the subjects in the study drove longer taxis than the others.
“What if they just had different brains?” asked the student. As we continued to discuss, we realized that this student was asking what these external drivers were, and what that would mean for the integrity of the conclusions—an important discussion in science courses and a complex question for an 18-year-old.
This highlighted for me the importance of pushing students to keep looking at the data beyond the obvious conclusion, and encouraging automatic questioning behavior.
You might get into the habit of asking the following questions after each paper you discuss or read as a class or each graph you spend time with. If the paper you are reading found a drug effect, what are some possible explanations for that effect? If a trend line has had a rare but consistent bump somewhere unexpected, what could have caused it?
Since this is probably a new activity for most students, help them build muscle in low-impact ways. Perhaps each student writes the next question on an index card as an exit ticket, or small groups work together to develop the following questions during class time.
Approaching Experimental Design
Once students are more comfortable asking questions and have seen many test designs, you can move on to thinking about how they can find the answer to those next questions.
Ask your students: What data would you need to distinguish between the two definitions? And how can you get that data? Again, provide plenty of non-threatening practice for this activity, such as using writing/pairing/sharing activities, before grading anyone on those skills.
An ongoing assignment in my upper-level Food and Mind course, which always focuses on a piece of basic science literature, asks students to 1) check that the author’s conclusions are supported by their data, 2) ask a question raised by the data and 3) suggest an experiment that will help them answer their question.
The first iteration of this exercise is reliably bad, as students go to a new and uncharted territory for many of them. With feedback, however, and continued practice of related skills during class, they greatly improve future endeavors. It is exciting to see the progress as students gain more confidence and skills.
At the end of the semester, students are ready to do their final assignment: a grant proposal that closely mimics the National Institutes of Health proposal, and a literature review on a subject related to the course, followed by three specific related objectives, each objective defining a question and assessment. This is often fun to learn, as students begin to fully enter into scientific ownership, flex their new experimental muscles and share insightful questions and ideas.
One of my favorite days of class each spring is when I hold a mock reading class at the end of the semester. Before that day, I introduced them to this key part of how grants are evaluated and how grants are awarded by a peer group. Each student writes a short paper before the class, asks the following question and proposes a test to answer it. They first work in a small group and then choose one of their ideas to refine within their group before presenting it to a panel made up of their classmates. Each group presents its polished idea, and spends an hour debating the merits of various proposed tests, ultimately voting on the strongest one. The author of that proposal gets a “sponsorship” (usually in the form of a little door swag).
A trick I added to that job one year, in the throes of preparing for a late-night class, was to replace their regular tents with tents I named “Dr.’s Last Name,” and refer to them as such for an hour. What I thought would be an interesting joke turned out to be a surprise and eyes filled with joy. Many students have asked to keep those tents, and one reached later, from a little past Ph.D. program, to share a picture of it, which they have stuck to for six years now and keep taped above their desk as a reminder and motivation.
A bonus of focusing on these science skills is that they don’t always focus on the same students who do well on standardized science tests. Students who may have achieved above-average grades in their STEM curriculum thus far may discover intelligence or analytical skills they didn’t know existed and have the opportunity to excel in these careers. And all students have the opportunity, even in small ways, to see themselves as members of the scientific community with something to contribute.
Let’s go back to my husband’s story. After a major change in industrial management, he realized that another course would complete the small biology and he enrolled in a course, of all things, the pathogenesis of bacterial cells. In that course, he read scientific papers, did psychological tests and was asked to think about using experiments that might happen in the future.
In that class project, he found what he had hoped to find when he studied biology. In the spring, he not only started working in the professor’s lab part-time but decided to stay in school for an extra semester, take a biology course and finish with a double major. Today, he is an adjunct professor at Notre Dame, working to provide first-year students with the kind of introductory biology courses that can develop the excitement and interest that carry them through the challenges of a demanding academic schedule.
If we want to solve our leaky pipeline in STEM fields, if we want to increase persistence in STEM majors, if we want more students to become scientists, then we need them to see themselves as part of the science business. While they need a solid foundation of STEM knowledge, think about how you can bring that into a healthy balance with a situation of asking questions about scientific data and thinking skills about how to answer those questions. It’s time to start treating students like future scientists, both early and early in their college careers.
