Center to put teaching on a par with lab skills

When it comes to churning out crack scientists, mathematicians and engineers, no one does it better than the American research university.

For the past 50 years, the 100 or so research universities in the United States have produced the bulk of Ph.D.-level scientists who populate the faculties of all U.S. colleges and universities. And while these scientists are at the top of their game in the laboratory, less is done to prepare them to address the other vital part of their jobs: to teach science effectively to ever-widening audiences.

Now, with the help of a five-year $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, UW–Madison will become a working laboratory for helping graduate students and faculty develop teaching skills that are a match for their skills in the lab.

The mission of the new center is to develop “a national science, engineering and mathematics faculty with teaching skills that will enable all college students to be scientifically literate, and which will promote a public better prepared to live in a high-tech world,” says Robert Mathieu, a professor of astronomy and the principal investigator of the new initiative, known as the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning.

CIRTL is a partnership of UW–Madison with Michigan State and Penn State universities.

Students taking science, math and engineering at the undergraduate level, says Mathieu, have become much more diverse. And college faculty are encountering new constituencies as they spend more time reaching out to the public, working with distance learners and preparing future K-12 teachers.

“There is little in present graduate training that prepares future faculty for this broad set of challenges,” Mathieu says. “We have come to recognize the importance of all these teaching opportunities, and our center will give present and future faculty the skills to help all students learn science.”

“If we can change the way graduate students are trained, it is possible to change the way science is taught throughout the nation,” says Provost Peter Spear. He emphasized that the leverage potential for CIRTL is enormous: “The graduate students trained at 100 research universities become the professors of science, engineering and math at the nearly 4,000 institutions of higher education in the United States. Improving graduate training in teaching and learning at a relatively small number of universities can change the entire landscape of higher education.”

A key concept to be employed by CIRTL, Mathieu says, will be to treat the improvement of teaching as a research problem. “We hope to develop science faculties that continuously inquire into their students’ learning. We would like to produce faculty who hypothesize, experiment, observe, analyze and improve student learning throughout their careers,” he says.

A second CIRTL strategy will be to create faculty and graduate student learning communities that support the development of teaching skills through collaboration and shared learning. “We will create a national network of learning communities, with each institution supporting the innovative teaching and learning activities of their graduate students and faculty as an intrinsic part of their life as a member of their academic community,” says Aaron Brower, a professor of social work and an expert on academic learning communities.

CIRTL will provide graduate students with on-the-job experience in a variety of colleges and universities by facilitating internships at the Madison Area Technical College, Edgewood College, UW-Whitewater and Beloit College, as well as on the UW–Madison campus.

A key goal of CIRTL, according to Andrew Porter, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, is to help ensure that math and science are taught well not only to the select few undergraduates who go on to advanced degrees and careers in the sciences, but also to those students who will encounter only a minimum of science and math coursework.

“We want all students to profit from improved instruction in undergraduate math and science, not just those pursuing a major,” Porter says. “We know that students of color and women, for example, are less likely to take math and science courses as undergraduates, and even when they do, they are less likely to pursue further study in those disciplines. CIRTL will research and implement ways to modify teaching approaches to serve a variety of learning styles, and thereby enhance success in science courses for diverse audiences.”