University Education

Here is an interesting article by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman:

New University Education Model Needed

This is really an introduction to a series to follow. He argues that the lecture model in university classrooms is inadequate because it fails to engage the students in critical thinking and other cognitive processes.

This is something I've noticed throughout my eight years (omgz) in higher education. As scientific knowledge and understanding become more important in everyday life as well as civic responsibility, non-science majors especially continue to disconnect in the lecture setting. At the University of Rochester, they have begun to overcome this problem with the workshop model. Rather than do homework sets alone or with classmates, students meet regularly with an instructor to work over challenging problems that lead thinking. This is in addition to regularly scheduled lectures where the professor introduced new concepts. The department of physics has invoked this in nearly every undergraduate course, and both as an instructor and student, I observed on many occasions how the information became clear during the workship sessions.

The contrast of this success with the huge lecture courses at Michigan State University is interesting. When the number of students enrolled in a single course reaches the 1,000 person benchmark, the workshop model isn't particularly feasible due to the limited number of qualified TAs and number of available classrooms at any given time. This is not to say it wouldn't work, but the already challenging prospect of reorganizing your physics education to fit a workshop model becomes even more difficult.

Wiesman goes beyond describing one solution, as I did, and speaks more to rethinking and reorganizing the education system. It's an interesting read.

...and the comments on that site are well-thought out and well-written. It's a miracle. What IS this site? I'm glad I found it.