Classroom

A small but growing number of scientific faculty positions are focusing on the science of teaching.

When she was first hired to change the culture of teaching in the University of Queensland’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, her first move was to choose the undesirable office next to the men’s toilets. For example, a graduate student in her group applied theoretical statistical physics to model the messy data on student behaviours in physics lab courses. The latter proved useful when the institution had to pivot to full online learning in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns. She says she was “pretty great” at neuroscience research, and that there is no reason to think that other education-minded scientists failed at the bench, either. These specialists understand their science discipline better than do scholars who trained in education only, and they can serve as formal or informal resources for colleagues who want to improve in the classroom. At a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research last July, she saw her former postdocs and graduate students who now have teams of their own. “It’s important to get some professional qualification in this space,” advises Susan Rowland, deputy executive dean for the faculty of science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. To prove her worth, she says, it was crucial to operate in the ‘currency’ that other faculty members valued: papers, grants and visible public impact. In 2007, he moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he set up a Can$11-million (US$8-million) Alberts is a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, past president of the US National Academy of Sciences and author of the prominent textbook The Molecular Biology of the Cell. Wieman says that, rather than relying solely on lectures, teachers should facilitate “learning to think in a different way, and there’s real expertise in how to guide people to do that”. The discipline of physics has a long history of engaging with education research, says Wieman.