Connected Science: Strategies for Integrative Learning in College

PART I

CONNECTED SCIENCE

Why Integrative Learning Is Vital

1 Fostering Integrative Capacities for the 21st Century

Tricia A. Ferrett

I open with two stories to help frame the purpose and contributions of this book. These stories will provide concrete anchors for a more extended discussion of an approach to undergraduate science education—connected science learning and teaching.

Alice’s Senior Biochemistry Thesis

Several years ago a student from Africa did her senior thesis on the design of new drugs for HIV AIDS. Alice had a strong biochemistry background, and she was drawn to the moral purpose of her topic. As she evaluated the pros and cons of first- and second-generation drugs, she learned not only about research on chemical structure and function relationships at the molecular level but about side effects and drug effectiveness in the human body. It was clear—human issues, not just scientific ones, were guiding research in the science of AIDS. Alice worked mostly alone, with my guidance as a chemistry instructor. As instructed, she became immersed in the scientific research literature and began to integrate her prior learning of chemistry. But while she was drawn to the human context, she was never entirely at ease with bringing it into her thesis. She had been explicitly asked to do the chemistry deeply. One day Alice said, what about if I do just a little bit of context in the introduction? Alice was good at reading faculty signals; she knew to keep the human stuff off to the side. When I suggested she steer her paper and conclusions in a creative and synthetic direction that grabbed her, she was tentative at first. What would that mean? Would she be sacrificing the science in doing so? Is that allowable for the senior thesis? In the end, Alice chose to propose a specific next-generation drug that overcame some difficulties encountered in earlier versions. Once she hooked onto this approach, she blossomed with a larger purpose to her work. Her motivation and creativity rose. Her scientific thinking was strongest here. Alice stepped over the threshold to create something that was uniquely hers—the structure and rationale for a new HIV drug.

Jeff’s First-Year Study of Sustainability

Jeff was a first-year student in a learning community facilitated by Xian Liu and Kate Maiolatesi that integrated first-semester English language and literature with an introduction to sustainability studies. In teaching an honors course integrated across disciplines, the two instructors were committed to creating an atmosphere of community. They began with a kayak trip on a local river, where students were introduced to the concepts of complex ecological systems, aquatic ecology, and each other. In the trip, Jeff and his classmates began to develop a sense of each other’s needs while engaging in the science. As the course progressed, Xian and Kate gave the students the option of doing a community-based project at one of two local sites—the community food bank’s vegetable farm or an alternative high school. Half the students chose to work on the farm, which donates healthy produce to a local food bank used by low-income families. Other students worked as consultants for the high school director, researching how to make the campus green, the energy renewable, and the lunches healthy. Both options combined science, sustainability, community service, and links to social justice. At the end of the semester, Jeff believed that the learning community worked so well, in part, because students quickly became friends and spent deep time together learning in part through real-world experiences. Once Jeff came to understand the complexity of issues around sustainable living and the scientific concepts underlying personal choices, he wanted to take this to the next level. Fortunately, his college was preparing to offer a formal sustainability studies program. His excitement built as he discussed his next steps with Kate and Xian. Jeff proposed the development of a campus sustainability center. The instructors agreed to have a cohort of students design a two-room green building to house the program and its classroom while linking to the community through demonstration projects and an on-site organic farm. Their vision also included teaching some introductory science labs at the farm. The green building would be accessible to those outside science and the program. The instructors and students imagined a busy, cool place to hang out, work, connect, and learn—a science in action community place.

What do these stories have to teach us about the promise and practice of college science learning, and its role in preparing students to live, work, lead, and learn in the complex and changing world of the 21st century? The first story departs subtly from traditions for college science teaching in order to move toward a more connected science. A senior worked on an integrative capstone exercise—integrative within the discipline, that is. Working alone, she drew from the original scientific literature, approaching the science with a critical eye while integrating and applying chemistry she had learned. Yet she was unpracticed with regard to letting a larger purpose steer her science learning. The integrative nature of her topic was notably understated in the final product. Her hesitation to include context shows the barriers to integration that instructors create when we project compartmentalized disciplinary norms onto our curriculum and students. Admirably, Alice displayed a deep engagement with her science and took her learning to a new level through the creative move of application.

The second story stretches a bit further toward a vision of the possible for science learning and teaching—a vision that connects science learning in more concrete and intentional ways to human issues. In Jeff’s story, nature itself integrates issues related to sustainable futures first. On the human side, science informs our choices, but human nature comes into play when making those choices, as do political and economic needs. A sustainable lifestyle depends on the laws of conservation, recycling matter and energy, biodiversity, adaptation, population dynamics, and carrying capacity. From the beginning, students in the learning community are given the permission and support to connect, explore, and guide this work with purpose. The fact that their work matters to someone else produces higher student engagement, motivation, and commitment. Furthermore, this learning community has dismantled not only the intellectual boundaries between disciplines but physical boundaries as well. The classroom has become more porous and linked to the community. The learning community is critical in producing an environment in which the students’ engagement, scientific understanding, and integrative capacities grow individually and together, over the semester. This book articulates scholarly evidence of student learning for a more coherent approach to undergraduate science education, which we call connected science learning and teaching. This approach borrows from, builds on, and synthesizes elements from prior and existing science reform movements and projects while articulating a unique educational philosophy that emphasizes the building of integrative capacities in our students. We show, very concretely, how the elements of connected science come together in various contexts and settings, and how a more systematic and scholarly examination of how this happens and with what outcomes can strengthen work in these directions.

Why Connected Science?

Why is connected science important in higher education today? The need to prepare students to engage with complex problems facing our global society in the 21st century is argued eloquently, with regard to general education ideals, by the Essential Learning Outcomes from the Liberal Education and America’s Promise campaign of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U, 2007). These general education ideals articulate four categories of learning outcomes: knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning. One of these categories, integrative learning, involves synthesis and advanced accomplishment across generalized and specialized fields (p. 3). Across the three other categories, there is also a persistent emphasis on engaging the big questions, both contemporary and enduring, for local and global communities through a focus on projects, problems, and issues. Connected science fits naturally into this larger framework for a 21st-century liberal education for college students. Furthermore, our students must not only interpret the world, but take up a place within it as citizens, at work, and as whole persons, as is argued in A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice (Sullivan and Rosin, 2008), from the Carnegie Foundation. This requires teaching for practical reasoning, a long tradition that has been overshadowed by the advance of specialized theory and abstract analysis, say William Sullivan and Matthew Rosin. The book discusses an engineering course in which students grapple with the perspectives of engineers in other cultures and a human-biology course that deals with the science and ethics of death. We concur with the general argument for a stronger marriage between the abstract and the practical in higher education. These engineering and human biology examples qualify as connected science.

This is an opportune time for connected science. For science educators, preparing our students to engage with complex problems by practicing analysis and action in the real world is critical at this point in earth and human history. As students like Jeff and Alice confront the science-rich issues of climate change, disease, and sustainability, there are overwhelming reasons to connect their science learning to human experience and practical reasoning. This does not mean compromising on the rigor of the science or the depth of students’ understandings about the natural and physical world. It also does not mean stepping away from the impressive standards for objectivity, process, and evidence that science has developed over the last few centuries. It does mean that we have a chance to further engage student interest and motivation to learn, drawing on their and our passions, experiences, and aspirations. Connected science will allow us to learn science together with our students, applied to things that matter in a larger sense. We can more often choose to learn science for something—in service of a cause—so students gain concrete experience in dealing with difficult multidimensional problems. Connected science also aims to base student learning of science on the science of human learning, make use of interdisciplinary and integrative content and pedagogies, and build programs that support in-depth approaches over time. I will elaborate below on integrative learning, its relationship to connected science, and more specific student learning goals for connected science. We, the authors of this volume, want to help students learn science knowledge and processes—and to practice complex analysis and sometimes act on this analysis in the world around them. As teachers, we don’t mean to thin out the science learning, but rather to deepen and add more texture through integration, application, practice, and action.

Historical Foundations for Connected Science

Aspects of connected science teaching and learning at the college level are not entirely new, in aspiration or in practice. In my own life as a scientist and teacher, I have developed a strong attachment to the language of former Carleton College president and Antarctic explorer Larry Gould (1945): [T]he true spirit of liberal or humane studies is not inherent in any special or sacred field. There are quite as great cultural values to be derived from the study of chemistry or geology as from that of Latin or Greek, if inspired teaching guides the students (np). Gould’s leadership gave the sciences a place at Carleton as a liberal art. Gould helped our college begin a move from science and the liberal arts to science and the other humanities. This move linked science to the human domain, on more even footing with academic disciplines that are more traditionally connected to the study of human endeavors.

Several decades later, issues courses at liberal arts colleges sprang from the 1960s call for relevance in higher education (Hudes and Moriber, 1971). More than 40 years ago, Isidore Hudes and George Moriber wrote eloquently about the need to make young people aware of … problems faced by everyone in society … by developing a course around those areas which are expected to dominate mankind for the next decade and beyond (p. 162). Even in 1971, these authors were calling for college science courses that were interdisciplinary in nature and centered on environmental pollution, conservation, population control, and ecology. By 1989, Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 1989) argued that science literacy was crucial for all citizens who live in a world increasingly filled with science and technology and an array of problems facing humanity. This call to connect science learning to compelling issues of societal concern came well before the world became as connected and globalized as it is today. The science for all movement led to courses for majors and nonmajors that helped students become conversant with public issues with a significant science context.

With the more recent focus on engaging students from underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, the science for all notion has expanded to include a much-needed diversity dimension (Seymour, 2002). Several US reports articulated visions for this movement (NSF, 1996; NRC, 1996, 1999), including a call to discover which teaching techniques were most effective in engaging a more diverse set of learners. These issues of social justice deeply motivate a number of STEM reform movements, including our work in connected science.

This sense that undergraduate science education must respond more directly to the needs and problems of humanity has only grown in the last 20 years (Hake, 2000). For example, numerous reports from educators and scientists in the United States call for more interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the undergraduate science curriculum (PKAL, 2002). Again, the argument is that we need to prepare students, as citizens and scientists, to address the local and global problems of the 21st century. For almost two decades, communities of innovation have grown and developed around the development of teaching science in context or with pedagogies that more closely mimic authentic scientific inquiry and active learning. Groups like SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities), ChemConnections, Bio-QUEST, Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)—all of which have created or supported projects that teach science in a real-world context relevant to students—have contributed to substantial progress in the areas of faculty development and curriculum design. In addition, a range of pedagogies of engagement in science (Mestre, 2005) are being used and studied: guided inquiry (POGIL, 2013), problem-based learning (PBL, 2013), learning communities (LC National Center, 2013), team-based learning (TBL, 2013; Michaelsen et al., 2004), peer-led team learning (PLTL, 2013), case studies (National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, 2013), and others. A recent article does a nice job of comparing three of these pedagogies of engagement in science—PBL, POGIL, and PLTL—and synthesizes results in a format useful for instructors who are making pedagogical decisions in their own contexts (Eberlein et al., 2008). Finally, PKAL’s Pedagogies of Engagement project (Narum, 2008; PKAL, 2008) has worked with pedagogical pioneers in STEM fields in order to design professional development opportunities for existing networks of faculty and web resources that disseminate and synthesize reform lessons—from a pedagogical perspective, and has established a partnership with the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) to facilitate delivery of resources for faculty (SERC, 2013).

Interestingly, only a few of these major projects have significantly challenged the traditional content of science teaching. Teacher concern with the issue of coverage is a formidable barrier to the reforms that call for science learning in context and with more engaged pedagogies. Even the narrower issue of how to balance the teaching of science content and process can send college science instructors into a tizzy. These tensions have made the pace of science reform slower than it might have been in less established disciplines like political science or sociology, where the norm is to expose students to a full set of evolving and conflicting theories in the context of modern or enduring issues. The sciences justifiably take great pride in the large knowledge base and methodologies that have been developed; the degree of consensus in these disciplines is relatively high with regard to methodology (the scientific method) (Donald, 2002). Science instructors are quite serious about sorting out the big ideas in their fields as they prioritize and emphasize course content. However, the explosion of information and knowledge in the sciences and elsewhere, driven by revolutions in technology and biology, make the goal of broad coverage increasingly unrealistic for today’s students. Related to this concern, biologist Craig Nelson has eloquently discussed what he thinks is a false dichotomy between teaching science content and process (Nelson, 1989). He argues that students who understand and engage in the processes of science more deeply are better situated to understand the scientific ideas. Nelson thus argues for a both-and approach to what he sees as the mythical dilemma between content and process. Wherever one stands with regard to this dilemma, similar challenges apply to connected science, further amplifying the coverage problem perceived by many science educators. Furthermore, none of the major reform efforts have argued clearly enough for a coherent approach that intentionally aligns science context, content, and pedagogy around a well-articulated educational philosophy. In an article that tracks the processes of change in US STEM education in higher education (Seymour, 2002), Seymour notes that [l]earning is enhanced when all the main elements in a class fit coherently and overtly together: class content and activities, lab work, assignments, the text, media, and other resources (p. 96). Seymour goes on to note the complexity of the human social system surrounding learning, and puts forth a theory: Attempts to alter single elements in a complex social system will not be effective; each element must be aligned with the others for system changes to prevail (p. 96). We believe this notion of alignment is a theory well worth testing as reform in undergraduate education moves forward. The next stage of reform must not only address the changing world of the 21st century for our students, it must also attempt to link elements of courses and programs in a coherent way. Connected science teaching and learning is, in part, an expression of both of these aspirations.

The Role of Assessment and Scholarship

Turning now to hard questions about what we really know about what has worked and why for students in the history of reform in undergraduate science education, I look first to the realm of educational assessment and project evaluation. Impressively, assessment work tied to these efforts has multiplied; we heartily endorse the continuity of this work. Much of the work rests on surveys where students self-report on their experiences and their learning. However, locating more in-depth research grounded in the analysis of actual student work is difficult and often context specific. Where assessment results on student learning do exist, they tend to be thin, dispersed, and difficult to access; some of the results exist, for example, only in project or evaluation reports. Synthesizing the results of projects and contexts is even more difficult. Generally, available results align with those from the science of learning. For example, students need to be actively engaged, they need to construct understanding in light of their prior knowledge and beliefs, and deeper learning is recursive and contextualized. In 2004, an article in Science discussed the notion of scientific teaching (Handelsman et al., 2004), calling for educators and others to apply the same level of rigor to teaching as we do to scientific research. In addition, these authors assert that Scientific teaching involves active learning strategies to engage students in the process of science and teaching methods that have been systematically tested and shown to reach diverse students (p. 521). DeHaan (2005) has nicely summarized some of the evidence to support active learning strategies, though not yet in a way that is linguistically appropriate for most STEM educators. Wieman (2007) succeeded in reaching a larger audience with his article on a scientific approach to science teaching and how research results can be applied to classroom teaching. Prince and Felder (2007) describe a range of evidence-based science teaching methods along with issues of implementation. Nonetheless, the upshot is that despite the most recent attempts at distilling the results of careful research, it is hard to study student learning rigorously and equally hard for STEM faculty to locate results that are accessible and robust in a scholarly sense. For the subset of results relevant to the approach of connected science, these problems are compounded even further. Thus, there is a pressing need for integrated and collective scholarship practiced by expert teachers and scholars from a range of scientific fields and spanning multiple contexts. To this end, our international author group of STEM instructors, supported by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and its complementary Integrative Learning Project with AAC&U (Huber et al., 2007), has focused on connected science within and across courses, programs, and institutions. Most of the authors first met each other during the yearlong 2005–2006 Carnegie Scholars program around the theme of integrative learning. Through our project work with senior scholars at the Carnegie Foundation, we have learned to complement our disciplinary expertise with methods for investigating student learning through a scholarship of teaching and learning. Scholarship like this has the capacity to address larger questions across a range of contexts and projects— through the lens of scientific experts who are vitally present in the classrooms where we design, teach, and study.

This book attempts to move existing work in assessment and scholarship to a new level, by coordinating and synthesizing research by multiple scholars who are tackling the nuances and complexities of connected science in real and varied classroom settings. Our collective research circles around this rich cluster of questions—what does connected science learning and teaching really look like, how might it look at its best, how does it work, and why? The case studies that the following chapters comprise put forth a set of diverse models from many fields of science, math, and engineering—along with scholarly evidence and synthesized insight. Through their case studies, these scholars encounter and study the expected, and quite often the unexpected.

Finally, we take note of the assessment climate in the United States and abroad, where a chasm is growing between the skills and knowledge valued in liberal learning and science learning and the things being measured, mostly in standardized ways. At the same time, much good work in assessment is aligned with institutional goals for student learning and recognizes the need to use methods that are grounded in more nuanced analysis of student work. Like others, we have started to address student learning goals that will be of high value as our students enter a connected, unstable, and global world. We also realize that outcomes related to these goals are hard to measure; they can easily be missed in standardized and traditional classroom testing. Our scholarship provides ideas for how instructors can naturally embed into course assignments and activities assessments for some of the learning goals tied to connected science, with examples.

We hope this book, a modest beginning, will help educators think about, tweak, and develop curricula using an evidence-based approach, starting from where they are in their relationship to connected science. In a practical sense, the scholarship in this book will illustrate a range of rich and generative ways to think about, design for, and assess science learning where the development of integrative capacities applied to real-world problems is an important goal. By example, we also aim to inspire others who hold a deep interest in student learning to integrate this kind of scholarship into their professional lives.

The Case Studies in This Book

Connected science is brought to life through the cases studies in this book. Some essays focus on connections between science learning and societal issues while others aim to have students integrate their science learning with professional functions or within a single discipline. Other authors study how teachers help students create something new through the integration of one or more perspectives or disciplines. Still others are studying the processes in which instructors engage as they create integrative programs. This group of scholarly case studies is a collection of multiple voices. Dogma, an exhaustive approach, complete coverage of the field—these are not our aims.

The case studies start with a group of essays that focus on student learning at the single-course level, yet through varied lenses. Matt Fisher writes about courses for science or engineering majors. He faces the quite thorny and ubiquitous coverage problem: he expects his students to learn deeply in the discipline while connecting this learning to real-world contexts. Fisher uses issues of public health—HIV AIDS, alcohol abuse, bird flu—to help his students connect their science learning in a biochemistry course to personal and institutional values. At his Catholic college, this is an approach strongly aligned with institutional mission. Fisher’s evidence aligns with Nelson’s argument above, though for Fisher the coverage problem involves a focus on values rather than science process.

Gregory Kremer at Ohio University considers ways to educate engineers with a broad vision of their profession and the key integrative skills required of them. He outlines the development and teaching of a capstone course in the engineering program designed to take students beyond disciplinary knowledge to consider rich real-world engineering challenges.

Mike Burke talks about "scientific