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Penn State Part of Research Team to Broaden Mission of American Faculty
by Jeff Deitrich

University Park, Pa.—When it comes to churning out crack scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, no one does it better than the American research university. Now, Penn State will be collaborating with other universities on a five-year $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) on developing a working laboratory to help graduate students and faculty develop teaching skills that match their skills in the lab.

For the past 50 years, the 100 or so research universities in the United States have produced the bulk of Ph.D.-level scientists in U.S. colleges and universities. And while these scientists are at the top of their game in the laboratory, less is done to prepare them to address the other vital part of their jobs: to teach science effectively.

The mission of the new center, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is to develop “a national science, engineering and mathematics faculty with teaching skills that will enable all college students to be scientifically literate, and which will promote a public better prepared to live in a high-tech world,” said Robert Mathieu, a professor of astronomy at Wisconsin and the principal investigator of the new initiative known as the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL).

The team at Penn State includes Richard Cyr, professor of biology, Peter Jurs, professor of chemistry, and Akhlesh Lakhtakia, professor of engineering science and mechanics, who will implement the programs, and Carol Colbeck, director of Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and professor of higher education, who will be responsible for assisting with the implementation and will evaluate the programs’ success.

“Penn State faculty will reinforce already-existing university-wide efforts to improve teaching and learning, including the Teaching and Learning Consortium, the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning, and the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching,” said Colbeck. “The CIRTL will foster the development of engaged faculty and faculty-in-training on Penn State’s campus and at other universities in the CIRTL network.”

While Penn State’s team already involves faculty in science, engineering and education, it plans to expand to include faculty from agriculture, earth and mineral sciences and the new School of Information Sciences and Technology.

According to Colbeck, CIRTL will employ several key strategies. The first strategy will be to treat the improvement of teaching as a research problem. As Mathieu noted, “We hope to develop science faculties that continuously inquire into their students’ learning. We would like to produce faculty who hypothesize, experiment, observe, analyze and improve student learning throughout their careers.”

A second CIRTL strategy will be to create faculty and graduate student learning communities that support the development of teaching skills through collaboration and shared learning. The goal will be to create a network of such communities nationwide.

A third key strategy is to help ensure that math and science are taught well not only to the select few undergraduates who go on to advanced degrees and careers in the sciences, but also to those students who will encounter only a minimum of science and math coursework. CIRTL will research and implement ways to modify teaching approaches to serve a variety of learning styles, thereby enhancing success in science courses for diverse audiences.

The CIRTL is also concerned with the ever-expanding audiences that science teachers must teach to. According to Mathieu, students taking science, math and engineering at the undergraduate level have become much more diverse. And college professors are also reaching new constituencies as they spend more time reaching out to the public, working with distance learners and preparing future K-12 teachers.

“There is little in present graduate training that prepares future faculty for this broad set of challenges,” Mathieu said. “We have come to recognize the importance of all these teaching opportunities and our center will give present and future faculty the skills to help all students learn science.”

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