faculty focus
A new model of science teaching
Science classes at university are on the downward slide but plans are afoot to refresh how the disciplines are taught. By Geoff Hanmer
University science subjects in Australia have experienced a long running decline in enrolments relative to other subject options. The proportion of university students studying in subject areas such as mathematics, physics and chemistry remains between one-third and one-half of what it was twenty years ago.
The lack of scientific literacy in the general population is a concern for policymakers and academics, who continue to wonder why more students don’ t enrol in science.
Part of the reason may be that most science teaching at university level is stuck fast in discipline-based models that no longer have direct relevance to the sorts of jobs science graduates are likely to get.
The decline of the Australian manufacturing sector, and the consequent reduction in demand for employees with general science degrees, means that science graduates are now entering a vastly different job market, one where direct use of laboratory-based skills is far less important.
In a market where physics graduates may end up in the finance industry, and chemistry graduates may have a marketing role in the pharmaceutical industry, a substantial part of their university education still concentrates on equipping them to work in the lab.
Despite the fact that nearly all scientific progress since Einstein has been about scientists working together in multidisciplinary teams( the discovery of DNA is a good example), students are mostly still educated in single disciplines such as chemistry, biology and physics at university.
To academics, the difference between biological chemistry and chemical biology may be all-important, but to their students, and many university managers, this is a distinction that is more like a demarcation dispute than how to do science better.
Current science education facilities at most Australian universities are discipline-based.
Some universities still have separate teaching laboratories for inorganic and organic chemistry, more or less guaranteeing that these labs will sit idle most of the time.
In extreme cases labs are dedicated to experiments that are carried out once a semester, or in some cases, once a year. Space audits often show utilisation rates for UG laboratories to be less than 15 per cent, which is grossly inefficient, especially considering that these capital intensive facilities are in most cases utilised for only 26 weeks in the year.
The cost of providing facilities for discipline based practical science teaching is huge.
A typical discipline-based UG science student will generate a requirement for about 12m sq. usable floor area( UFA) of space on campus, compared to a business, law or arts student, who may account for less than 5 m sq. UFA.
Not only that, but the laboratory component of that space is amongst the most expensive space the university will build and operate. The capital investment in facilities to support a discipline based science undergraduate may be in excess of $ 200K, whereas the capital cost of providing facilities for a business, law or arts student is less than $ 50K.
At the current monetary value of grants available for a commonwealth-supported science undergraduate, the university will probably not even be able to pay back the value of the capital invested to educate the student, let alone staff and consumables.
Not only that, but there is plenty of evidence that students do not enjoy a lot of practical science teaching, and find it irrelevant to their likely future employment.
The Australian Council of Deans of Science Report, Tertiary Science Education in the 21st Century is full of evidence showing how ineffective current teaching methods are.
Essentially, the report shows how little bang the students get for a lot of the university’ s buck. This is certainly not to say that universities should abandon science, far from it, but science needs a more sustainable model, both because much of practical science teaching is a poor learning experience, but also because it is economically unsustainable on current models and produces students with skills they typically will never use.
The obvious solution is a more multidisciplinary approach to university science teaching in general and to practical science teaching in particular.
The article will explore these issues and propose solutions, with examples of effective and efficient practical teaching laboratories both in Australia and overseas, including the UTS Superlab, Bond University and the Liverpool University Central Teaching Laboratories building. n
Geoff Hanmer is the master planner for La Trobe University.
www. campusreview. com. au April 2013 | 29