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This is a talk by Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton University, given at Harvard on 11/13/2012 with a subtitle of “Inverting the Pyramid”. Here is a short summary of what she is advocating:

She started with a litany of the well known and depressing statistics concerning science education and student performance in the US. Her explanation and remedy are – 1. Science education starts with teaching very basic scientific fact such as Newton’s law and the Darwin theory of evolution. 2. We gradually pile on more specialized fact year after year through high school and undergraduate years and do not begin research until a couple of years into graduate school. By that time, many students have lost interest and dropped out due to years learning “facts”. The joy of research comes too late except of a small percentage few.

Tilghman’s thesis is that we should invert this pyramid of fact learning with research at the top. We should introduce student to research early in middle and high school. She cites her own experience with discovering the joy of research in chemistry early in her teens which led to a rewarding life in biochemistry. It does not matter what subject one use to start the research experience and how small or insignificant the research project is. The important thing is to imbue the learner with this joy of discovery. To critics who doubt that a young teenager can know enough Facts to begin research, her argument is that you can learn things as you go along; and many basic facts has little to do with the research project you happen to be working on. This is entirely consistent with my own experience as to how I became and engineer  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu-Chi_Ho  and my often stated assertion that you can learn enough in six month time to begin doing useful research in any field  http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-2224.html , http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&quickforward=1&id=2265 .

Tilghman cites various examples of success at Princeton and other places using this form of innovative teaching of science (asking questions and doing research first while learning about the needed sciences to answer the questions simultaneously). She also admits one drawback of this approach, namely, it is labor intensive on the part of the teacher. Unlike the old fashioned lecture method where one teacher can address hundreds of students. Individual guidance on the part of the teacher to every student cannot be done easily on a large scale. However, she suggests that “on line teaching” may be a way to compliment and solve this “scale up” problem. She cite the examples of “Coursera”, “Edx”, “Udacity” etc as intriguing and encouraging experiments (Google the names for details).

Certainly the educational establishment has not changed its lecture method of instruction for hundreds of years. It is high time we think seriously about a change in this new high tech century. I salute President Tilghman’s call for action.

Note added 11/16/2012. Here is more reporting of the Tilghman talk in the Harvard Gazette http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/tipping-science-on-its-head/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11.16.12%2520%281%29 For those of you with sharp eye, can you spot me in the audience photo taken there?