I’ve been adopted by a physics class in the Adopt a Physicist program (like Swans on Tea has), and they’re asking me about my career (here’s Swans on Tea’s response to a similar question). So, this is as good a chance as any to write about my favorite analogy, and what my career has to do with acidophilus bacteria.
One of the students asked me:
I have taken a lot of math and science courses in high school, and I will be taking a general psychology course next semester.
As of right now, I’m thinking of double majoring in biology and psychology. I have a lot of ideas of what to do with that, like being a forensic scientist, a behavioral analysist, or (recently) a shark biologist/behavioralist.
Have you always been interested in psychology/physics? And did you know what you wanted to major in and become before you got to college?
I replied:
I think that double majoring (as long as it gives you the chance to explore subjects outside of your majors and not sacrifice your entire life) is a great idea, because it gives you experience in more than one thing. Today’s careers are multidisciplinary.
I’ve always been interested in psychology and physics. I’m curious about how the world works, and about how people work. There are a lot of people, I’ve found, who have that dual curiosity. More than you’d think.
I was very conflicted about my major. I went to college as a physics major and switched to psychology. I felt that I didn’t “have what it takes” to be a physics major. In retrospect, I believe that being the only woman in the class had something to that. Two years after I dropped the major, I found out that I was one of the best in the class.
In my junior year I began to take a lot of science and physics classes again. I finished my psychology thesis while enrolled in junior-level physics classes, and wasn’t taking any psychology at all. I’ve always been pulled strongly between the two. It wasn’t until I found out about all the interesting careers out there (like science writing and science education) that I realized that what I wanted to do — to blend psychology and physics in some way — was possible.
The analogy I give with my career path, which I believe is true of many, is that it’s like how a bacteria finds food. They don’t know where the food is, but if they move a little to the right, they sense that they’re closer. They move a little bit north, and they get even closer. So they wander around, “sniffing” their way, and eventually find the food. They don’t take a straight-line path. In math terms, what they sense is a “gradient” (or change) in acidity, or heat, or sweetness. Similarly, we as people don’t know where it is that we want to go. We just sniff it out and realize it’s a little “sweeter” in this direction, and wander around until we bump into something we like.
Don’t sweat finding the right path. Follow your curiosity and do what you like and good things will grow from it.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
This just in from another blog (Discovering Biology in a Digital World): Researchblogging is a great resource for the classroom.
She writes:
How does this work?
Bloggers who write about scientific literature use a special icon to identify those posts. They also register at the Researchblogging web site with their credentials and favorite topics. When those bloggers write about a research paper, the information gets referenced in Researchblogging.
How would I use this in my class?
Send your students to Researchblogging.org. They can search for articles by keyword or by topic and get a set of links to blog articles on those topics. Each article will contain at least one link to a scientific paper.
Let’s say you have a student who’s interested in the genetics of Neanderthals. Your student could enter the phrase ‘genetics of Neanderthals’ in the search box, click the search link, and get a link to a very nice, informative, post on FOXP2 by Daniel Daza. Plus, you have all the links to the articles themselves (or at least abstracts) so the student can go look up the original work after they’ve used the blog post as a starting point.
In my classes, I used to assign Scientific American articles or the summaries from Nature or Science, as starting points, but I think students would probably prefer blog posts. I might be prejudiced, but I find bloggers are usually less stuffy and more fun to read.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
In case any of you have missed it… Obama is increasingly the candidate who is the most science friendly. You can see a redux of his detailed plan for science and technology and the letter from 61 Nobel Laureates endorsing Obama . You can see more on the candidates’ positions on science & technology on the dedicated blog from Discover magazine – A Vote for Science.
My conservative Christian salvation-army family was visiting this weekend and we all delicately avoided questions of politics. I know they’re all voting for McCain, in part because of the McCain campaign’s support of intelligent design. A canvasser came to the door during their visit to ask who we were voting for, and my mother and I both whispered “Obama.” My aunt called out after him, “We all love each other, but we don’t talk politics.”
But, I mean, <sigh>, it’s a bit tough. Surprisingly, though, my uncle has taken me up on my suggestion to listen to Point of Inquiry (the podcast of the Center for Inquiry, devoted to rationalism). That’s a very thoughtful show, that doesn’t disparage people for their beliefs, simply promotes a rationalist view of the world. In particular its areas of interest are:
- Pseudoscience and the paranormal (Bigfoot, UFOs, psychics, communication with the dead, cryptozoology, etc.)
- Alternative medicine (faith healing, homeopathy, “healing touch,” the efficacy of prayer, etc.)
- Religion and secularism (church-state separation, the effects and proper role of religion in society, the future of secularism and nonbelief, etc.
My uncle said that he understands where “they” are coming from a bit more, now, and is considering writing an essay on the role of science and religion that can speak to both sides.
Here’s a nice post from Framing Science about how atheists’ condescending attitude towards religion is self-defeating.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
In the continuing vein of women and science (see my previous post Flirt Harder, I’m a Physicist in particular), I was just forwarded a link to L’Oreal’s postdoctoral fellowships for women scientists. I remember L’Oreal. I remember them from when I was at a conference for the American Physical Society (APS), talking with some colleagues at an exhibit hall. Some guy from L’Oreal came by and handed me some mascara along with a brochure. I jokingly asked why I got the mascara, and not my male colleagues. The L’Oreal guy laughed a little uncomfortably and my colleagues expressed their complete lack of interest in mascara.
I felt uncomfortable enough in that moment to have remembered it now, years later. Yet, it was actually pretty good mascara (I’ve still got it), and what the heck, I got something typically “feminine” in a typically male venue. Should I feel empowered by my gift of mascara? Maybe what was uncomfortable was that it highlighted my gender in a venue where we try to ignore such personal characteristics. See my earlier post on stereotype threat, where I discuss how we’re afraid of doing something that will reflect negatively on our gender when our minority status is highlighted.
Anyway. I think the L’Oreal fellowships are pretty great. They make money by exploiting our culture’s focus on women’s appearance, so why not give some of that money back to women who aren’t conforming to the stereotypes and are using their brains in science. Though one thing I found curious — they ask for (optional) a photo attachment on the application. Is that normal? They also highlight the achievements of women in science around the world.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Especially for K-12 teachers, check this baby out. The National Science Digital Library has Science Literacy Maps online. For a bunch of different topics (Math, Technology, Physics, Nature of Science) you can click to get a concept map of a set of topics. In physics, for example, you can click on waves to see a map of all the concepts related to waves. Even better – there is a link within each section to see a list of student misconceptions (with references) related to those topics.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I just posted a new episode of Science Teaching Tips — Running Hot and Cold. Thomas Humphrey is one of the smartest people I know (he’s a staff physicist at the Exploratorium, and studied under Richard Feynman at CalTech). Here, he talks about what temperature and color have to do with one another, and how this helps us figure out things about the world. I must say, the first time I heard him explain this was one of the first times I really got what blackbody radiation was all about, and what that T^4 term in those big ol’ equations really meant.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I just read an interesting article (Shmader and Johns, Converging Evidence That Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 3, 440 – 452) about why worrying about stereotypes can make women and other minorities perform poorly on tests. They gave subjects a test of working memory (matching equations and words). They were told this was a test of quantitative capacity. For half the subjects, they also said that gender differences in math performance could be related to differences in quantitative capacity. That created a condition called stereotype threat — the fear that your behavior is going to confirm existing negative stereotypes of your group.
They found that – for both women and latinos – the stereotype threat condition caused a decrease in working memory capacity. In the non-threat condition, women and men, latinos and whites performed equally on the task. Men’s and whites’ scores were not affected by the different conditions.
They wondered whether it was just that women and latinos became more anxious due to the threat condition and that this emotional response affected their test performance. That doesn’t seem to be the case — women didn’t become more anxious (though latinos did). Even if they’re not aware of feeling threatened, the mere presence of the negative stereotype may consume critical cognitive resources. Other research has shown that subjects show physiological signs of stress when under stereotype threat. Perhaps that interferes with the ability to remember items.
Myself, I know that when I’m in a position of stereotype threat (which happens all the time… I mean c’mon, I’m a woman physicist, and one with a relatively shoddy physics background at that) I become very aware of it. Just the other day I found myself the only woman in a room of men discussing gender differences in physics classes. I stayed quiet. I didn’t want anything I said to become indicative of “what women think.” I also find myself discussing physics with groups of men quite often. I’m very quiet in those conversations too. Of course, worrying about “looking stupid” is tied up with many other factors (my personal ego, the culture of physicists, group dynamics), but it’s also tied up with my gender, even if only implicitly. I’m not one of those super-brilliant female physicists. I’ve got my PhD, I’m no dummy, but I don’t compete well with the fast-and-furious discussions of physics. In part, I often feel I have fewer cognitive resources at my fingertips, and maybe that’s what this study is highlighting. I could participate in the physics discussions at a slower rate, with a book and some time to think about it. I don’t pull things out of my head if I haven’t been thinking about them recently, the way that I see the men around me do.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Sciencewomen just posted a fabulously detailed blogroll of all the women blogging on science topics.
A great resource. I wonder how the proportion of women blogging about science compares to the proportion of women employed in the sciences? There certainly seem to b a decent number of us blogging about physics, considering the dismal number of women in physics.
See my next post for some thoughts about being a minority in the sciences and how it makes me feel stupid.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
There was an interesting post, and comment thread, over at Built on Facts — on How to Be a Good TA. I’ve been wanting to respond to it for two weeks and have been too busy. It is interesting that this discussion came up just as I was forwarded a great article about TA Training — Growing a Garden without Water: Graduate Teaching Assistants in Introductory Science Laboratories at a Doctoral/Research University (Luft et al, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, vol 41, pp 211-233, 2004). That article delves into the dearth of training giving to graduate TA’s, who bear a large brunt of the work of communicating science to undergraduates [I'll send you a copy if you ask]. They write:
In the past 3 decades there has been a rising concern about the instructional support afforded to Graduate TAs, and an acknowledgment by faculty that expertise in teaching does not occur instantly in higher education.
No kidding. Even faculty don’t often get this kind of training. And then they’re supposed to teach the next generation of worker bees. (One of the exemplary training programs is called Preparing Future Faculty). TA’s are called on to make all sorts of decisions about their courses (curriculum, what concepts to emphasize, how to evaluate students) and faculty aren’t guiding them very much. Faculty aren’t often well-informed about undergraduate education reforms, anyhow, which suggest that there are better ways to teach and assess students how we were traditionally taught.
The blog post from Built on Facts, in some ways, exemplifies these problems. I have no doubt that Matt is a great TA. He understands that it’s important to engage students in the process of learning. But many of his comments suggest that being a great TA is just about doing traditional instruction the best that you can. Here is what Matt said about his extensive experience as a graduate TA:
What (students) need in recitations is only so much theory as is needed for an understanding of the concept, with lots of worked example problems. Lots of them. Do them as interactively as possible, so that instead of just working through the problems yourself in front of sixty glazed-over eyes the students are actively involved in figuring things out. …
Put real thought into how you present your lectures. What seems beautiful and elegant to you might be obscure and overly complicated to a new student. Try to be clear with concepts and buttress each new idea with a concrete example problem. A real one, not a toy problem that’s orders of magnitude easier than what they’ll face on the homework.
He also suggests giving students extra practice in working problems by giving quizzes and review sessions.
I think a lot of these methods would work if there was good evidence that lectures work. But so far, the evidence suggests that students don’t learn by telling, they learn by doing. As long as you’re up there in front of the blackboard, you’re stuck in a classroom structure where information is supposed to travel from teacher to student. I don’t think that’s the best approach, based on the evidence. Get the students talking to each other, working through problems, discussing and arguing. Then act as their “guide on the side” (not the “sage on the stage”) to help them learn. You can’t teach anybody anything.
Now, I’m really not slagging on anything that Matt’s saying (or any of the other good suggestions in the comments of his post), just that the initial structure of the teaching environment he’s using is flawed. For instance, I can’t argue that it’s good to give clear explanations, to think about your lectures in advance, and to give example problems. I love his suggestion of giving quizzes — research shows that the act of trying to recall information increases your memory of it (even if you don’t get the answers), so taking as many tests as you can is a really good thing. But the “good lecture” techniques only go so far. Students plead for us to give them example problems often because they want to see something that “looks like” the homework so that they can follow it as a recipe.
The comments to Matt’s post suggest that at least the better students don’t want those boring example problems, though — like Matt says, they want “real” problems — interesting, tough problems that get them engaged in solving it. I’ve seen that desire in our physics majors here as well. What would be great is if we could really model to students how we go about solving such a problem — taking wrong turns, thinking back to worked examples, looking at limiting behavior, etc. But that takes a very long time, and is hard to do justice in front of a class.
One idea that I’ve found really compelling is called Preparation for Future Learning. The idea is that sometimes there is a time for telling (for the “theory” part of the presentation, tying things together, giving out facts), but it is after a student has already struggled with the ideas. One way to do this is to give them a canonical problem and ask them to come up with the solution. For example, ask biology students to come up with a strategy for eagle conservation. That’s a huge, open-ended problem (they don’t have to be that unstructured) but after students come up with a bunch of (poor) strategies, they are better equipped to hear and understand a lecture about conservation techniques.
TA’s aren’t well-trained and teaching is undervalued
But when would a TA learn these kinds of techniques to teach? The article I mentioned at the top of this post (about TA training) argues that it’s not enough to know the content (in this case physics) — you also have to have Curricular Knowledge (instructional methodologies) and Pedagogical Knowledge (how to take the content of your particular discipline to the learner). And graduate TA’s are taught neither of these — they’ve been prepared for research careers, for the most part. Teaching is often seen as a lower-tier calling than research. Thus, TA’s aren’t rewarded for working on their teaching, and their faculty mentors aren’t well prepared to help them in these endeavors. TA’s feel that teaching is important, but an interest in teaching doesn’t really help their professional development as scientists.
Here is a faculty’s comments on the lack of importance of teaching for a TA, from that paper:
Sydney did think that teaching was important, but there is a reason that it is not emphasized. He goes on to add that at the graduate student level it is perceived as being more prestigious to hold an RA appointment instead of a TA appointment. At the faculty level, research productivity is important in the yearly reviews, not teaching. Faculty may talk about the importance of teaching, but during the department reviews the focus is on research and funding. At the national level, grants are funded for research and not teaching. When grants are funded, they pay more for RAs, not TAs. Sydney pauses again and states that it is clearly a cultural thing.
TA training is poor
In keeping with these cultural expectations, TA training meetings aren’t sufficient to teach such a complicated and difficult task as teaching. Here is one TA’s comments on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of weekly training meetings, from that paper:
The staff meetings address what the lab is about. They are necessary, but are not done well.
Some TAs just like to talk and so we listen to them and they take up so much time. I just
don’t get a good view of what the lab is about from the staff meetings. I’ll ask a
question . . . and the laboratory coordinators can’t answer the question and I get frustrated.
I know that they try really hard, but it’s not exactly what I would want. I guess I need
more clarity than the other TAs and the 2-hour staff meeting is just not an ef?cient use of
my time. I end up going to Monday lab before I teach my sections to really get a sense of
the lab.
TA’s are left on their own
One other quote reminds me a lot of what Matt said about his teaching, since it sounds like he was pretty much on his own as he decided what to cover in recitations:
The lack of faculty involvement was also evident when GTAs discussed their preparation for teaching each laboratory. No GTA indicated seeking out the assistance of faculty members or even the laboratory coordinator when planning for their classes. Instead, as Samie stated, she often “. . . read through the laboratory manual, making sure that I understand the order of things
and what it’s asking. I interpret the lab, reword things, make the objectives clear, and think
of ways to introduce it to students and think over what I want to lecture on in the
laboratory. “
These sorts of decisions are fairly complicated for a beginning teacher to make!
The article concludes quite strongly:
In this study, GTAs and laboratory coordinators who were involved in preparing GTAs had limited opportunities to enhance their instructional abilities. The constraints of the working environment often led GTAs to make intuitive decisions, or decisions based on their own experience as students; thus their practices were often disconnected from the literature base in education.
The title of this article, ‘‘Growing a Garden without Water,’’ represents the expectations and potential of GTAs in the absence of adequate support to facilitate their growth. GTAs have an essential role in universities and colleges, but without proper instructional support they may not achieve their potential. Furthermore, it is estimated that by the year 2014, 500,000 new professors will be teaching American college students (Jones, 1993). Many of these professors will have served as GTAs. Improving the education of future students depends on the thoughtful, careful, and purposeful training of future faculty members. To meet the needs of the community, the garden must be properly tended by involved caretakers, and it will yield its fruits.
They say that rewards and incentives should be given for good teaching, and TA training programs should draw on the research base in education that informs us how we best learn to teach science.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
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