"Engage to Excel": Science magazine commentary advocates STEM pedagogy reform

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Science magazine this week adds to recent public discussion of the engagement approach to science-literacy promotion and STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education. In a commentary, physicist S. James Gates Jr and chemist Chad Mirkin, members of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), argue for "approaches that engage students actively."

The authors recommend "case studies, problem-based learning, peer instruction, and computer simulations." To name what they're arguing against, they never use the term "deficit model," the approach built on the implicitly debunked assumption that one-way lecturing reduces a captive audience's deficit of science understanding.

Gates and Mirkin contributed to PCAST's recent report Engage to Excel: Producing One Million Additional College Graduates with Degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. That report proposes five "overarching recommendations to transform undergraduate STEM education during the transition from high school to college" and during the first two undergraduate years:

1. Catalyze widespread adoption of empirically validated teaching practices.

2. Advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery-based research courses.

3. Launch a national experiment in postsecondary mathematics education to address the mathematics preparation gap.

4. Encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversify pathways to STEM careers.

5. Create a Presidential Council on STEM Education with leadership from the academic and business communities to provide strategic leadership for transformative and sustainable change in STEM undergraduate education.

The PCAST report regularly emphasizes empirical pedagogical validation. At one point, for example, it not only declares that "extensive research on how the human brain learns indicates that diversifying teaching methods enhances critical thinking skills, long-term retention of information, and student retention in STEM majors," but also offers nine footnotes for the claim. The report also sticks closely to a key word in the name Engage to Excel. For example: "Students in traditional lecture courses were twice as likely to leave engineering and three times as likely to drop out of college entirely compared with students taught using techniques that engaged them actively in class." Also: "STEM faculty ... can make their courses so engaging that students will be inspired by STEM fields and persist in STEM majors despite the workload."

As reported earlier, the Washington Post recently spotlighted an "evolving vision" of college science education by reporting on a "lecture backlash" that reflects the contrast between the deficit model and the engagement model. Earlier still, Yale astrophysicist Priya Natarajan's Washington Post commentary on science education reform had complemented similar calls from January in Science by Bruce Alberts, the magazine's editor-in-chief.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.