Transcriber: Helena Jonsson Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
I'm a science professor, so I feel obliged to start with a little quiz
to gage your prior knowledge.
Who can name the Earth's three soil layers?
Three simple machines found on a bicycle?
How about three behavioral adaptations
used by living organisms to survive the winter?
If you can't answer all of these, please don't feel too bad.
I typically speak among fellow science faculty, most with Ph.Ds,
and I've never met anybody
who can answer all three of these questions.
And this is in spite of the fact
that they come from our state's science standards of learning,
for the third grade.
(Laughter)
But here's a better question, I promise.
Why are so many young people coming
to our colleges and universities in droves,
filled with a passion and an aptitude for the STEM fields -
science, technology, engineering and math -
and then a full 60 percent of them are dropping out of those majors
within the two first years?
And those percentages are even higher for women
and under-represented minorities.
This is happening at a time when experts predict
that in the United States we may need as many as a million more people
in the STEM workforce, this decade.
The President's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology
consists of some very smart people -
university presidents, founders and CEOs of technology companies, Nobel laureates.
And they were pretty quick to realize that all we need to do
is improve retention in STEM with about ten percent,
that is, graduate just half of those young people who come to our universities
in love with science in their chosen majors,
and we will easily have a million more STEM graduates.
But to do so means that we, the science faculty,
need to start bringing something very different to the classroom.
And thanks to some excellent national data
and what I've learned from my own students,
I think I know what that something is.
First of all: humility.
And I recognize, humility does not come easily
in a learning environment like this one, with all eyes on the sage on the stage.
And it seems to be our job just to show how much we know.
And so we talk at our students, fill their heads with facts,
and then complain that they don't remember all these facts
that they were taught in their prior science classes,
using exactly the same approach.
In contrast, welcome to my class, taught by a method called Scale-Up
developed by Robert Beichner at North Carolina State University.
In Scale-Up, students work in teams on projects and problems and case studies.
And where am I?
I'm there, somewhere in the back, I promise. And that's the point.
In Scale-Up the focus is on the students and their learning,
and not so much on the professor.
Even in my sophomore level class, my students are doing graduate level work,
and they are remembering what they are learning.
Now, the irony is not lost on me,
that I'm talking at you about not talking at our students.
And there is a place for lecturing.
In fact, I think ten minutes is about the sweet spot
to inform and inspire.
But trust me,
if we were going to be together for any longer this evening,
we would all be donning headlamps, heading outside to take apart a bicycle,
or look for evidence of hibernation and dormancy in the natural world.
Just as no one becomes a great musician simply by listening to the masters,
and no coach would ever do the work-out for his athletes,
our students do not become scientists
just by listening to us talk about science
nor do they get very excited doing so.
We, the professors, are the ones finding the information
and evaluating and synthesizing it, and depriving our students of learning
some of the most important work that scientists do.
As my student, Whitney, has said:
"In Scale-Up, we are all teachers and all students.
We learn, and then we share. That has to be my favorite part."
That has to be my favorite part too. But it certainly takes some humility.
Second: common sense.
We science faculty complain
that we can't cover all the information in the text books,
and they seem to get a little bit thicker with every edition,
and yet we keep trying to do that.
In the field of cancer biology, where I work and teach,
there were nearly five thousand relevant articles published, just this past week.
There's no way I can cover all that.
And a little common sense tells us that our role as domain expert
is no longer simply to pass information on to our students.
That hasn't been our job since the invention of the internet,
or maybe, I would argue, even the invention of the printing press.
But there is one fact that I really instill in my students,
and that's that in the United States the lifetime incidence of cancer
is one in three for women and one in two for men.
And then I invite them on a journey with me
to discover what we might do to change this sobering statistic.
Employers are telling us to use a little common sense as well.
Whenever we ask them what skills and qualities
that they are looking for in recent college graduates,
the list always looks very much like this one.
And then when we ask those same employers
how many of our recent graduates
are coming to the workforce with these skills,
they're telling us: very few.
And yet, we are not helping students learn
team work or creativity or ethics in our traditional science classes.
We're too busy filling their heads with facts
that they're not always remembering anyway.
And so we need to make sure we're teaching the right stuff,
and that we're putting the learner on the center stage.
But most importantly,
our students need to be motivated and see themselves as scientists.
Educational researchers have been studying my cancer biology class
to see why the students are so highly motivated.
In cancer biology the students work in teams to produce a public work
that shows a deep understanding of, and adds value to what is known
as the six hallmarks of cancer.
One team produced a gallery quality series of paintings,
one depicting each hallmark paired with another,
illustrating a promising new molecular therapy that they had researched.
Another team published a storybook
to explain the hallmarks to children who were dealing with cancer.
A third, well, they pretty much ignored my assignment entirely,
and they embarked on an independent research project
to debunk a prevailing theory
about what is known as the role of genomic instability in cancer.
And that work is presently in its final stages of preparation
for publication.
These students are working like crazy.
They're taking some real risks,
and I don't think they're doing it just for a grade.
The educational research has shown
that there are a number of factors that contribute to their high motivation,
but the single most important by far turns out to be
that they know that I care about them - really.
I think, for my students,
caring means having permission to bring their whole selves to the class.
My students blog weekly,
and it's there that many choose to share their personal cancer stories.
Like Kathy who took us all on her family's eight-year journey
as her dad battled metastatic Stage IV renal cell carcinoma.
Because, as Kathy wrote:
"Cancer should always be told in the first person."
This is not unique to my class.
The 2014 Gallup-produced study
of what correlated with success and well-being among college graduates
found no difference between public and private institutions,
very few demographic differences.
But the study found this:
the odds of college graduates being engaged in their place of work
were significantly higher if they had had even one professor
who made them excited about learning,
cared about them as a person,
or encouraged them to pursue their dreams.
And the number of college graduates who report having had these experiences
is shamefully low.
What business do we have in higher education,
if we are not doing this, at the very least?
Humility, common sense and caring.
This is what I believe we need to bring to the classroom,
to improve retention in STEM.
And that leads back to the big question:
where will we find a million more STEM graduates?
That's the easy question.
I say to my fellow science faculty: we are looking right at them.
The real question is:
what will we start doing differently "with" them?
As Jay Labov, of the National Academies, has said:
"Improving science education is not rocket science,
it's actually a whole lot harder."
(Laughter)
But, isn't this what we owe to society, and especially to our students?
And finally, to my dear, dear students,
I say to you:
please do not give up. We need you.
And change is coming - that I promise you.
Thank you.
(Applause)