Speaker
Prof.
D.A. Bonn
(University of British Columbia)
Description
Recent work on first year labs at UBC have focussed on teaching students widely-applicable
data handling skills: especially, understanding uncertainty, statistical
tools, and graphical techniques. In the past year we have also targeted
students' critical thinking, with a relatively simple framework that
asks students to make quantitative comparisons, reflect on those
comparisons, and then act on them. These iterative loops force students
to improve their experiments and/or re-think the models they are
testing. We have found that these expert behaviours become a
habit-of-mind even after the explicit instructions to iterate are
removed. More importantly we find that when combined with experiments
that force them to confront problems with models, these iterative
comparison loops lead to striking improvements in the quality of
students' reflection on data and models. These gains are also found to
transfer into their behaviour in second year, a striking instance of
transfer.
Author
Prof.
D.A. Bonn
(University of British Columbia)
Co-author
Dr
N.G. Holmes
(Stanford University)
