An A.D. White Professors-at-Large keynote public event

Nobel prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman (Stanford University; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell) will present the public lecture, “Teaching & Learning Science in the 21st Century,” on Tuesday, Sept. 26, at 4pm, 201 Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall.

This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of Physics. Wieman visits the Cornell campus in Ithaca as an ADW-PAL September 25-29. He was elected as an ADW-PAL in 2019. His appointment runs through 2025.

Abstract: Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science and engineering have advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Education in these subjects, however, guided primarily by tradition and dogma, has remained largely medieval. Recent research on how people learn, combined with careful experiments in university classrooms, is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than is currently used in most classes. I will discuss these results, what they tell us about principles of learning, and their effective implementation in science courses. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. It also shows better ways to evaluate teaching quality, and it reveals that traditional attitudes about learning and the introductory science curriculum can be inadvertently sustaining systemic discrimination.

Biography: Carl Wieman is a Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University. Wieman has conducted extensive experimental research in atomic physics (Nobel Prize in physics, 2001) and university science and engineering education (Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year, 2004). He founded PhET, which provides online interactive simulations that are used 100 million times/year to learn science, and published a book, Improving How Universities Teach Science: Lessons from the Science Education Initiative (2017). He is currently studying expertise and problem-solving in science and engineering disciplines, and how this can be better measured and taught. Most recently, he was awarded the 2020 Yidan International Prize for Education Research.