Quality science education is in everyone’s interest, Wender says

BY MARK SHWARTZ

After teaching organic chemistry for more than three decades, including 10 years at Harvard University and nearly 20 at Stanford, Paul Wender is convinced that teachers ultimately are accountable to their students.

It's a lesson he learned all too well the day he was being prepped for emergency kidney surgery at Stanford Hospital. His surgeon wanted to allow several Medical School residents to observe the procedure. Being a scientist and a teacher, Wender readily agreed.

But when the doctor pulled back the curtain, Wender was in for a shock: "I will remember forever what I heard then: 'Professor Wender!' -- to which my response was, 'What was your grade?' A student from my undergraduate chemistry course at Harvard was now a resident at Stanford. Absolutely remarkable!"

Wender recalled this incident during his May 15 lecture, "Teaching Science: What Works" -- part of the Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching series sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

"We're all getting older, and about 70 to 80 percent of the students in my course are pre-med," he observed. "At some point in the future I'm going to need their skill, so it's in my best interest to make sure that they get the best possible education out of this."

In fact, it's in everyone's interest to make sure that all students receive a first-rate science education, added Wender, the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, of molecular pharmacology.

Grading on a curve

Wender has received numerous accolades from students during his career at Stanford, including the ASSU Teaching Award, the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, the Bing Teaching Award and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

What is his overall assessment of science education in the United States today?

"If you grade on a curve, we're doing pretty well," he noted. "But I would like to say that if we grade on an absolute scale, we need to do much better."

As an example, he described a video of graduating seniors at Harvard produced several years ago. The students were asked the following question: Why is it hot in the summer and cold in the winter?

"What was absolutely amazing was that two-thirds of the Harvard undergraduates got that wrong," he said. "I don't want to pick on Harvard, but they're representative of a K-12 problem that is not helped much by some of the things that go on in the post-12 period."

Although improvements are needed in fundamental science education, Wender was quick to point out that America has come a long way since 1863, when the first Ph.D. in science was awarded in the United States: "Right now in chemistry we're producing about 2,000 Ph.D. degrees per year, and they are driving the economy. It's incredible. They are powering up a whole lot of the other disciplines that rely on chemistry -- this molecular vision of the world -- to move forward into the 21st century."

America has become the world leader in science, he said, in large part because of federal subsidies -- which he said should be increased -- and because of our emphasis on entrepreneurship, which he would like to strengthen.

Flawed system

Wender urged his audience to use objective data in evaluating the success of teachers and students.

"A lot of stuff that we use when we evaluate teaching is kind of a touchy-feely kind of thing," he explained. "We need to introduce more metrics -- more ways of measuring what we mean by success -- and significantly better ways than the grading system, which I always have had problems with."

He first realized that the grading system was deeply flawed when he watched an undergraduate at Harvard suddenly snap during a chemistry exam: "He had to be taken to the clinic to calm him down. I realized then that this was not a system that works."

To ease pre-test stress, Wender now places a two-dimensional cutout of his cat in front of the lecture hall before handing out an exam.

"We all learn at different rates," he explained. "What happens with many students is that they get over-anxious about their grade, because they're not aware of the rate-of-learning problem."

To demonstrate this point, Wender presented a graph comparing academic performance among a classroom of students. Some were able to pick up new material quickly, while others took longer for the lesson to sink in -- but by the end of the course, all of them had reached the same level of understanding. The problem, according to Wender, is that by placing too much emphasis on midterm exams, the grading system ends up favoring fast learners over slower ones.

To overcome the problem, Wender allows his students to arbitrarily drop one of their three midterms: "We don't care when they drop it. They could have a legitimate or non-legitimate excuse -- we could care less."

The student is then given two options: Plan A, in which the remaining two midterms count for 55 percent of the grade and the final 35 percent; or Plan B, in which the two midterms are worth 35 percent of the grade and the final 55 percent.

"It's a forgiving system," Wender explained. "It's equivalent to the cat. If they don't do well on the first exam, I tell them, 'Don't worry about it. Throw that exam away. Do better on the next exam.' If they don't do well on the second exam, are they in trouble? No, the second exam only counts for 18 percent of their total grade. It really works. The students love it, I love it, because I can get away from these anxiety problems -- and we focus, focus, focus more on education rather than on grades."

The bottom line, he said, is that the students eventually will learn the material: "We don't care when they get it, just as long as they get it. The real question is not what's going to be on the exam, but what's going to be on in life. We're here for an education, not a grade."

William Tell Overture

To make seemingly obscure subjects relevant, Wender recommends bringing real-life examples into the classroom. For example, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy seems like an esoteric technique -- until Wender shows the class an image of a living brain produced with NMR technology.

"Make it easy on the students," he urged, even if that means tying pink and white balloons together to demonstrate the ideal shape of a methane molecule, or using a silly musical sound track to help students remember a complex, multi-step chemical reaction, or watching beakers filled with a clear, colorless liquid sequentially change colors to the strains of the William Tell Overture.

"I see some of my students here," Wender noted. "I really want them to succeed. I really care about them. It's not just because they're in the room, but I'm selfish. When they're successful, I'm going to feel good."

And, by the way, the answer to the question posed to the Harvard graduates: It is the tilting of the Earth on its axis that determines seasonal temperatures.