Scientific Teaching

First Edition

Publication Date: December 15, 2006

Hardcover ISBN: 9781429201889

Pages: 208

Seasoned classroom veterans, pre-tenured faculty, and neophyte teaching assistants alike will find this book invaluable.

HHMI Professor Jo Handelsman and her colleagues at the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching (WPST) have distilled key findings from education, learning, and...

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Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Scientific Teaching

2 Active Learning

3 Assessment

4 Diversity

5 A Framework for Constructing a Teachable Unit

6 Institutional Transformation

Scientific Teaching Workshops

Workshop Contents

I Scientific Teaching

II Active Learning

III Assessment

IV Diversity

V Institutional Transformation

References

In the first four chapters, Handelsman, Miller, and Pfund provide an overview of the landscape of scientific teaching and its three facets: active learning, assessment, and diversity.

Each chapter includes specific examples for classroom teaching, in addition to research findings.

Chapter 5 puts scientific teaching to work by helping the reader build a framework for instructional materials that focus on what students will learn.

The last chapter offers strategies to enlist collegial support and integrate scientific teaching into faculty culture.

HHMI Professor Jo Handelsman and her colleagues at the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching (WPST) have distilled key findings from education, learning, and cognitive psychology and translated them into six chapters of digestible research points and practical classroom examples.

The recommendations have been tried and tested in the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology and through the WPST.

Scientific Teaching encourages the reader to approach teaching in a way that captures the spirit and rigor of scientific research and to contribute to transforming how students learn science.

Jo Handelsman

Jo Handelsman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.  She served on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1985 until moving to Yale in 2010.  Her research focuses on the genetic and functional diversity of microorganisms in soil and insect gut communities.  She is one of the pioneers of functional metagenomics, an approach to accessing the genetic potential of unculturable bacteria in environmental samples for discovery of novel microbial products, and she recently served as President of the American Society for Microbiology.  In addition to her research program, Dr. Handelsman is also known internationally for her efforts to improve science education and increase the participation of women and minorities in science at the university level.  Her leadership in education led to her appointment as the first President of the Rosalind Franklin Society; her service on the National Academies’ panel that wrote the 2006 report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering”; her selection by President Barack Obama to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring; her position as cochair of a working group that produced the 2012 report to the President, “Engage to Excel: Producing One Million Additional College Graduates with Degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” about improving STEM education in postsecondary education; and Nature listing her as one of the “ten people who mattered” in 2012 for her research on gender bias in science.

Sarah Miller

Christine Pfund

Christine Pfund, PhD, is a researcher with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW).  Dr. Pfund earned her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology, followed by postdoctoral research in Plant Pathology, both at University of Wisconsin-Madison.  For almost a decade, Dr. Pfund served as the Associated Director of the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning and the codirector of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, helping to train future faculty to become better, more effective teachers.  Dr. Pfund is now conducting research with several programs across the UW campus, including the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and the Center for Women’s Health Research.  Her work focuses on developing, implementing, documenting, and studying research mentor-training interventions across science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM).  Dr. Pfund coauthored the original Entering Mentoring curriculum and coauthored several papers documenting the effectiveness of this approach.  Currently, Dr. Pfund is coleading two studies focused on the impact of training on both mentors and mentees and understanding specific factors in mentoring relationships that account for positive student outcomes.