Riding the wave of change in the curriculum and academic role in STEM

Professor Pauline RossAssociate Dean (Education)Faculty of Science

National Teaching Fellow

We are all trying to create the STEM curriculum future

At a time when content everywhereAt a time when we are awash with dataAt a time when Bachelor of Science with noready career map comes with substantial costs

Gone are the days when the purpose was to deliver content

Lots of commentary out there

About the value of content.. just days ago………..

There’s a growing sense of confusion about what we actually mean when we speak of a “twenty-first century education”

People associate being a twenty-first century worker with knowing less and talking more.

Fundamental duty to teach students content: facts and principles.

“The science curriculum’s focus on inquiry-based learning, and the de-emphasis of knowledge would indicate that the curriculum shaping process has been heavily

influenced by modern educational fads which are pushed on the community largely by university education faculties”.

“Review of the Australian Curriculum” (Donnelly and Wiltshire 2014 p.184)

Value of content…. years ago…………..

New content answer is

All Australian universities should re-introduce clear Math pre-requisites for STEM

Positive relationship between mathematics studied at high school and performance at university

Predict the answer?

Predict the consequence?

How do we get unstuck?

But are these the answers

What answer should we tell our deans and government about the creation of a 21st century STEM curriculum?

Let’s start tell each otherTwo truths and a lie about what should be in a 21st century STEM curriculum

What we know - multiple applied skills

1. Backbone of quantitative, analysis and experimental design skills

2. Coding, Digital, VR and mixed realities3. Apply their knowledge, relevance and

solving real problems with community and industry

4. Conceptual understanding in 2 disciplines, apply in an interdisciplinary context

5. Communication – oral and written, specialist and non-specialist, social media

6. Global mindframe7. Capacity to influence the future

How we do this - Learning Sciences tells us

1. Conceptual frameworks2. Inquiry and research3. Productive failures4. Assessment

1. Conceptual understanding

1. The breath vs depth issue - deep understanding vs comprehensive covering (Gardner Project zero, Pellegrino 2006)

2. Big or unifying ideas in the disciplineBiology - scale, surface area (Ross et al., 2010)

Chemistry - e.g concentration, periodicity in organisationPhysics - uncertainty, matter cannot be created or destroyedALL - evidence and hypothesis testing

3. Threshold concepts – “integrated” “ah ah” (Meyer and Land 2005)

4. The desirable difficulty (Bjork 1994 )

5. Eustress (Frydenberg 1997) and Resilience

6. Zone of educational flow ( Csikszentmihalyi 2011)

Language and rituals of Science content

AbstractRepresentation - Microscopic, macroscopic, symbolicVolume

Research says content is accessible when we:

1. Start with what students understand2. Draw on the misconception literature 3. Use multiple modal representation of concepts i.e. make models, use role

plays, tell stories, create cartoons, observe animations, use digital media –4. Take an understanding first approach, avoid scientific language until

understanding has been reached, then… use the language 5. Encourage metacognition e.g. peer to peer and quizzes6. Use active learning collaborative strategies7. Provide timely feedback

2. Inquiry and research

Inquiry is about the “doing of science”Students repeat research or do discovered relevant research through collaborative explorationsCreate and test hypotheses , collect data and defend an explanation – deep engagementUnderstanding science becomes about knowledge creation and creativity

3. Design for failure

Productive failureCreate learning environments where students need to work it out

Outperforms direct instruction (Kapur, 2010, 2012, Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012)

Direct instruction - difficult concepts is critical - as is active learning

It’s knowing when and why to shift

What is Productive Failure?Way of structuring learning to:

• Afford opportunities to activate and differentiate prior knowledge (formal and intuitive)….to generate, explore, critique, and refine representations and methods for solving complex problems

• Such a process invariably, leads to failure…

• This may precisely be the locus of deep learning…provided some form of instruction that builds upon student-generated solutions follows

18

Year Mike Arwen

Dave Backhand

Ivan Right

1988 14 13 131989 9 9 181990 14 16 151991 10 14 101992 15 10 161993 11 11 101994 15 13 171995 11 14 101996 16 15 121997 12 19 141998 16 14 191999 12 12 142000 17 15 182001 13 14 92002 17 17 10

What to do?

Who’s the most consistent?

Mike, Dave or Ivan?

Standard Deviation

Study done with students in Singapore – Try 1

Study done with students in Singapore – Try 2

It’s Mike

4. Assessment?

As shown by our assessments type and weighting we value rote memorisation (only have time to create?) i.e. how much content has been remembered

We maintain standards by norm referencing (even when the policy says the opposite)

Assessment drives learning

Assessment

InstructionCurriculum

Theories of

Learning and

Knowing

Evidence Centered Design (Pellegrino 2015)

Exactly what

knowledge do

you want students to

have and how do you

want them to know it?

What will you

accept as evidence

that a student has the

desired knowledge?

What task(s) will the

students perform to

communicate to you

their knowledge?

Technology and analytics provides hope for meaningful and timely feedback

What do we tell the deans/government?

Science graduates are multiskilled including quantitative, prepared for all possible future careers Science students learn when taught well and in context through active and inquiry/research based learningScience learning is for all students, “let’s teach the students we have” Science graduates are the teachers of the future

What do we tell the government?

Science students learn when taught well and in context“we need to teach the students we have”

Science graduates are multiskilled (for a diversity of careers)Science graduates are the teachers of the future

What was your score?What did you learn?

Create the STEM curriculum future - academics

At a time when securing research funding is more competitive for declining resourceAt a time when research is critical for the country At a time when science academic has not trained to be a teacher/educatorAt a time when we are unclear about evidence of educational “quality”

Going are the days of solo TnR academic

Lots of commentary out there

But only some performance

• Variety of institutions• Research intensive institutions included: Sydney, UNSW, ANU, Monash, UQ,

Melbourne, • Research/Teaching institutions included: UTS, Western Sydney, UTas• Variety of STEM disciplines

• Variety of academic levels and roles, VCs, DVCs , E, D & C • Mainly Science

• ~40 interviews

Commentaries from a range of academics

Loss of expertise

“…with the current focus on research, there is not the same attention to the teaching and learning function in universities; there is a danger of ‘de-skilling’

academics

Teaching, Teaching and more Teaching

“So I've got these teaching people and I want to do my research so we'll just give more of the teaching to them. What else would they be doing anyway?”

“a reasonable workload is quite difficult to manage.”

Not at the higher levels – 3rd year

We're good for teaching the breadth and the basics, basic concepts in our discipline, but not actually for taking students right to the cutting edge of the research frontier.” Teaching at first year is the hardest because often they're

bigger classes, they're more diverse and that's where it's a challenge for teaching. I think they're just not up with the cutting edge in a particular area of

their discipline.

The “Ghetto”

are really scared aboutwhere you have a whole bunch of people who just do the teaching and a whole

bunch of people who just do the research because we can see how it would go that way.

“I think if you do that then you start to create a bit of a ghetto don't you.

In the Education GhettoIs everyone an expert?

Loss of expertise

they had to change research area…start doing it by yourself, not by joining an established group, which is already doing research, already has a direction, already has a track record of publishing, already has a track record of acquiring grants.

Grants are another thing that is a bit problematic. So, they don't want us to exist? That's what it felt like”

Loss of quality

A lot of those publications are not very… I don’t know the word is, not very good in terms of they don’t cited, they’re in poor quality journals, a lot of dross in the education literature”.

“I think - well, from the - our research colleagues look down upon it and think it's low level research. They think it lacks integrity…”

Students identify educational value

“ I can tell a good teacher by listening to what their students say about them. You run into students and you say oh what are you doing this semester? They say who have you got and they say and I say what do you think of them? How do you think that’s going? The students will tell you very very quickly whether sometimes a good teacher or not”.

Research TnR EducationExpertise Creators of new knowledge in 

science disciplinary researchCreators of new knowledge in science and education research

Creators new knowledge outside area of expertise –where they may not have training

Connections Deep and connected with a community (scholars and students)

Embedded but not leading, perhaps peripheral

Often less tangible

Progress Rapid Less rapid Slow

Reputation Dependent on quality constantly adapting

Dependent on research and teaching quality

Dependent on teaching and educational research. Need substantial upskilling to build

Funding Category 1 – although declining. ARC fellow

Harder to get cat1 funding, OLT fellow

no cat 1OLT fellow

Mobility Likely‐ flexible Unlikely dependent on position

Will not be recruited into RF

Metrics Well understood ROPE? Rescue? Less understood

Loss of …………..

Academic roles are differentiating and stabilising

1.Teaching and research academic 2.Research focussed academic

3.Education focussed academic4. Teaching focussed academic

1. Original model2. New model3. Newest model4. Teaching forever model

Let’s tell each otherHow do we identify “educational quality”

Rules are: Not allowed to use the following:AwardsLeadershipStudent evaluationsCharisma and good looking

What do we tell ourselves about academic role?

Being an academic in Science is about building expertiseBeing an academic in Science – move from one area of expertise to another is difficultBeing an academic in Science focussed on education means………….learning gain for students

Summary

Science curriculum create multiskilled backbone quantitative graduates prepared for all possible futures (watch discourse, tell the story)Science teaching disciplines integrated and transferrable understanding (watch the focus on: content, on-line, flipped and assessment)Science academics, whoever they are, need to create ecosystem learning (watch awards, leadership, certification)