UNL's Department of Physics and Astronomy has invited Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman from Stanford University to give a talk about Taking a Scientific Approach to Physics Teaching and Learning. Carl Wieman holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and of the Graduate School of Education. He has done extensive experimental research in atomic and optical physics. His current intellectual focus is now on undergraduate physics and science education. He has pioneered the use of experimental techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of various teaching strategies for physics and other sciences, and recently served as Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Abstract:
Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, sci-ence and engineering have advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, sci-ence and engineering education have remained largely medieval. This is starting to change as a result of recent research on the development of expertise and on the teaching and learning of science at the university level. Research on how people learn combined with classroom experiments is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning of physics at the university level than the traditional lecture and exam. I will discuss these data and the underlying principles of learning they illustrate--principles that apply generally to the develop-ment of expertise in physics. I will also touch on our re-search on the consistent set of decisions used by good physicists (and surprisingly, other science disciplines) in solving problems. Practice making these decisions in au-thentic situations and getting feedback on those decisions is the key to learning to think like a physicist. This applies to both classroom instruction and supervision of research students. This research is setting the stage for a new ap-proach to teaching that can provide the relevant and effective physics education that is needed by all students that is needed for the 21st century. It also provides a better way to evaluate teaching quality.
Time: Today (9/19) at 4:00 pm
Place: JH 136 Refreshments will be served in JH 1st floor vending area at 3:30