Treat Your Students Like Scientists

I spoke with a former student recently; I taught her in her first semester at Notre Dame and was delighted for a chance to catch up. She shared that she had changed her major from biochemistry to political science. Remembering her excitement about becoming a doctor, I asked what spurred her to make that change.

She described the challenges of keeping up in some of the notoriously tough first-year science classes. It was her final statement, though, that really stuck with me: “Plus, it was just a lot of memorizing, and I didn’t think it was all that interesting after all.”

I’ve heard this refrain many times, from scores of students, whether they did or did not persist in a STEM major. It’s a familiar story, too, because my own husband had the same experience and switched out of his biology major during his sophomore year. He was doing well in his classes, but he was bored and disillusioned with all the memorization.

The Problem

Retention in science, technology, engineering and math majors remains stubbornly low, for a list of reasons including decreased motivation and interest of students after they start a STEM curriculum. And it’s no wonder—even in the face of mountains of evidence supporting the value of active learning, little has changed in collegiate science education.

Most college STEM courses are still taught in a lecture format. That format has ripple effects for the nature of assessments in STEM, orienting them towards lower-level cognitive work. For example, a recent study found that, in biology courses across institutional types, only 7 percent of all exam questions test for scientific thinking skills, with most questions instead asking about science facts.

Memorizing facts from a lecture and answering exam questions about them —arguably the primary skills required to navigate an undergraduate science degree—does offer an important foundation of knowledge, but bears little resemblance to the skills required to succeed in a scientific career. Working scientists need a solid knowledge base, certainly, but also rely heavily on skills like asking good questions, planning investigations and analyzing and evaluating data.

If we want to motivate undergraduates to learn science and persist in the field, we need to explicitly treat them like scientists, and not just like memorizers of science facts.

Working in a research lab, or completing a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), are rightly touted as important avenues to strengthening a science identity. But what about faculty who don’t run labs or who lack the budget, resources or remit to teach a CURE course? Anyone teaching collegiate science has a role to play in helping students develop a science identity—and fostering the retention, learning and career-related outcomes that follow.

Science faculty should think about how students can see and practice asking and answering scientific questions in a more authentic way in their courses. Here, I focus on ways that non-lab courses can use primary scientific literature to draw students into the scientific enterprise in a way that more closely resembles the work of scientists. While these techniques are easiest to implement in smaller classes, I will also offer ideas along the way for larger courses to incorporate similar principles.

Starting Small

A first step in inviting students into the scientific community is simply encouraging them to ask questions about what they see. I wrote previously about a sequence of questions you can use to teach habits of graph interpretation, building from the basics (“What’s on the x axis?”) through more holistic interpretation. The final question in that sequence is “What questions might this data or interpretation raise for you?” Building a habit of asking that question about data can introduce the idea that, in science, one answer often opens up more questions.

Encourage students to notice and ask questions about seeming anomalies in a graph—e.g., “Why is there a jump in the cortisol level in the mornings?” While small, this both promotes close observation of figures and the idea that scientific data is fascinating and open to new questions.

In The Art and Science of Learning, a class I taught with James Lang, students read a well-known study of taxi drivers in London, describing a brain region important for structural representations of the environment that seems to grow in size with time behind the wheel.

At first glance, students accepted and were (correctly) impressed by the findings. After being prompted to spend more time reading the graphs, and after being forced to come up with a question about the data, one student pointed out that two of the subjects in the study had been driving taxis far longer than the rest.

“What if they just had different brains to begin with?” the student asked. With some further discussion, we realized that this student was asking whether these drivers were outliers, and what that would mean for the integrity of the conclusions—an important conversation in scientific studies and a sophisticated question for an 18-year-old.

This highlighted for me the importance of pushing students to keep looking at data beyond the obvious conclusion, and of encouraging a default behavior of asking questions.

You might make a habit of soliciting next questions after each paper you discuss or read as a class or each graph you spend time with. If the paper you’re studying found an effect of a drug, what are some possible explanations for that effect? If a trend line had a strange but consistent bump somewhere unexpected, what might have caused that?

Since this is probably a new task for most students, help them build a muscle for it in low-stakes ways. Maybe each student writes a next question on an index card as an exit ticket, or small groups work together to develop next questions during class time.

Tackling Experimental Design

Once students have become more comfortable asking questions and have seen more experimental designs, you can move toward thinking about how they might find an answer to those next questions.

Ask your students: What data would you need in order to distinguish between two explanations? And how could you get that data? Here, too, offer plenty of nonthreatening practice at this task, such as through use of write/pair/share activities, before grading anyone on those skills.

A recurring assignment in my upper-level Food and the Brain course, always focused on a piece of primary scientific literature, asks students to 1) evaluate whether the author’s conclusions are supported by their data, 2) ask a question that is raised by the data and 3) propose an experiment that would help them answer their question.

The first iteration of this assignment is reliably terrible, as students venture into territory that is new and uncharted for most of them. With feedback, though, and ongoing practice of related skills during class time, they improve a lot on future efforts. It’s a treat to observe the trajectory as students gain more confidence and skills.

By the end of the semester, students are ready to tackle their final assignment: a grant proposal that roughly mimics a National Institutes of Health proposal, with a literature review on a topic relevant to the course, followed by three related specific aims, with each aim describing a question and experiment. These are generally a pleasure to read, as students start to step more fully into a science identity, flex their new experimental design muscles and share insightful questions and ideas.

One of my favorite days of class each spring is when I hold a mock study section toward the end of the semester. Before that day, I introduce them to this key component of how grants are typically evaluated and how funding is awarded by a panel of peers. Each student writes a short paper before class, posing a next question and proposing an experiment to answer it. They first work with a small group and select one of their ideas to refine within their group before presenting it to the panel made up of their classmates. Each group presents their refined idea, and they spend the rest of the hour discussing the merits of the different proposed experiments, eventually voting on the strongest of them. The author of that proposal receives “funding” (typically in the form of small departmental swag).

A gimmick that I added to that activity one year, in the throes of late-night class-preparation punchiness, was to replace their usual name tents with tents naming them “Dr. Last Name,” and then to refer to them as such throughout the hour. What I thought would be an eye roll–inducing joke turned out to elicit gasps of surprise and eyes lighting up with excitement. Multiple students have asked to keep those tents, and one reached out recently, from partway through their Ph.D. program, to share an image of it, which they have held on to for six years now and keep taped above their desk as a reminder and motivator.

A bonus of focusing on these scientific skills is that they don’t always concentrate in the same students who excel at taking typical science exams. Students who may have gotten largely average grades in their STEM curricula so far may discover creativity or analytical skills they weren’t aware of and have a chance to shine in these activities. And all students have a chance, even in small ways, to see themselves as members of the scientific community with something to contribute.

Let’s go back to the story of my husband. After changing his major to industrial management, he realized that one more course would complete a biology minor and signed up for a course on, of all things, molecular bacterial pathogenesis. In that course, he read scientific papers, did mental experiments and was asked to reason through possible future experiments.

In that class work, he found what he was hoping to find in studying biology. By spring, he had not only started working in the professor’s lab part-time but decided to stay in school an extra semester, pack in the biology courses and finish with a double major. Today, he’s a teaching professor at Notre Dame, working to give first-year students the kind of introductory biology courses that can nourish the excitement and interest that carries them through the challenges of a tough course schedule.

If we want to solve our leaky pipeline in STEM fields, if we want to increase persistence in STEM majors, if we want more students to become scientists, then we need them to envision themselves as a part of the scientific enterprise. While they need a strong foundation of STEM knowledge, consider how you can bring that into a healthier balance with the disposition of asking questions about scientific data and the skills of thinking about how to answer those questions. It’s time we start treating students like future scientists, both more and sooner in their college coursework.