Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better.
Last month, the faculty in charge of the course wrote the following public letter:
The United States is in the midst of a debate over the value of a traditional college education. Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything from Massive Open Online Courses? In more parochial terms, what is the value added by approaches such as Columbia’s Core Curriculum? Recently students in our Core Course, Frontiers of Science (FoS), provided a partial answer. The FoS faculty designed a survey to gauge the scientific skills and knowledge of the Class of 2016 both before and after taking FoS. In an assembly held during orientation week last August, 966 first-year Columbia College students answered questions covering basic skills such as statistics, probability, and the reading and analysis of graphs, as well as content to be taught during the fall session of FoS. For the 519 College students taking FoS in the fall semester, the same survey was administered again as part of the final exam. The mean score for the initial orientation survey was less than 28%. The mean score for the same questions at the end of the semester was 76%! (The margin of error in both cases was ±1.0%.) To control for gains independent of FoS, 167 first-year College students, who did not take FoS in the fall, answered the same survey questions again at the start of the spring semester. The mean score of those students was 31%, not substantially greater than they and their classmates had scored on the survey during orientation. This type of research always has its limitations. However, the results with and without FoS are so different that the conclusion is inescapable. The scientific habits and knowledge that FoS imparts are new to, and effectively learned by, first-year students after one semester of intense study . . .
This sounds pretty good, especially the part about “basic skills such as statistics, probability, and the reading and analysis of graphs.” My first thought is that, if these skills are so important, maybe all the students at Columbia should be taking a course in probability and statistics! But then I remembered that our intro stat course isn’t so great (I know, I’ve taught it several times), so maybe it’s just as well if some biologists, physicists, etc., create a new statistics module from scratch. Seriously, I have lots of ideas of how we could teach intro prob/stat better, but when I actually try to do it, I get all tangled in the details. So I can’t very well object to outsiders taking a shot at it. As users of statistics, they might have a better idea than I do of how to teach the subject.
Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the engineers could teach a better intro physics class than the physicists could. And it could well make sense to have biologists teach first-year chemistry, and psychologists teach first-year biology.
What, then, would the statistician teach? First year math, of course. It would make the mathematicians cringe, but it might be closer to the students’ own level. Statisticians are users of math, and we could teach the subject from a user’s perspective. Just as, arguably, the collection of scientists who run Frontiers of Science might be teaching probability and statistics in a way more useful to freshman than whatever my colleagues and I in the stat department could come up with.
OK, now that I’ve established my complete acceptance of the idea that this team can, and perhaps should, be teaching probability and statistics to Columbia’s freshmen, let me say that there are a bunch of things about the above-quoted letter that bother me.
First, the economic basis for their argument: “Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything from Massive Open Online Courses?”
It’s not new that you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000! Until relatively recently, in-state tuition at state schools was cheap, pretty much everywhere. At Columbia you get the top professors teaching what they know best. But that argument doesn’t work for Frontiers of Science, which features non-statisticians teaching statistics, and a particle physicist who strips off his clothes to get students to recognize that nuclear weapons proliferation is scary.
As for online education, it’s great, but if you can “learn everything” from a mook, you can learn everything by buying a stack of textbooks. Or maybe not. I just don’t see that the results from this study have anything to do with mooks, one way or another.
Second, the pre-test and post-test. This actually does seem like a good idea, and I remain embarrassed that my statistics colleagues and I don’t do this in our own classes. That said, “The margin of error in both cases was ±1.0%.” Are they kidding? And “the conclusion is inescapable”?? We’d need to know more about the post-test conditions of those 167 freshmen who were not in the course. One student writes that the students in Frontiers of Science were given “premade cheat sheets during the final” with formulas. Maybe the 167 controls were given the cheat sheets too, but such sheets might not mean much without some prior coaching.
What was on the quiz? Nicholas Christie-Blick, one of the authors of the letter quoted above, writes, “The questions and answers will be released. . . . Nor does it matter much what the questions are. What matters is that they are representative of the range of skills in scientific thinking that we call Scientific Habits.”
I’d say something snarky here, but then again I remember that my own intro stat course hasn’t always gone so well, nor is it clear how much my students ever learned.
So, in quick summary, I’m suspicious of the claims of efficacy of the Frontiers of Science course. But I’m sympathetic with their efforts to measure anything at all. Measurement in education is tough.
Umm…it’s kind of amazing to me that postsecondary educators get away with this kind of thing. The whole point of having standardized tests is that *anybody* can write a test that students do really poorly on before taking a class and really well after taking the class. It doesn’t mean it actually measures anything, let alone that the class was particularly efficacious at teaching things we care about.
For example,
Pre-test:
1) What was the name of Professor Bighead’s childhood friend, the hamster?
Class: Consists of a series of anecdotes in which Professor Bighead describes the love of the scientific method his childhood friend, Archimedes the Hamster taught him, through hilarious example.
Post-test:
1) What was the name of Professor Bighead’s childhood friend, the hamster?
Is this a defense against that: The Prof. teaching “Frontiers of Science” asks someone else, say, five good Professors at another University to make a set of questions they think are relevant for a freshman to know. Then he uses a random sub-set of those as pre-class test and the rest as post-class test. Hopefully we can also trust him to not read any questions on that set.
Rahul:
I agree. Having an outside evaluator would make a lot of sense.
> also trust him to not read any questions on that set
Given their career may depend importantly on the result…
I once taught one section in two sections of intro stats where the undergrad director set the questions, originally agreed to be a random subset, that neither instructor would see until just before the exam.
Its not nice (ethical) to put people in the position were it is not in their interest to act properly. For instance allowing faculty to evaluate the value of their own course (i.e. themselves).
The setting and marking of exams by someone other than the course instructor is standard at Oxford and Cambridge, but probably too expensive for most universities?
And the instructor whose students do better can, except for selection bias, take that as “evidence” they did something less wrong than other instructor.
Would it really be that much more expensive? I agree it would be a bit more work and the faculty might whine about the additional work at first etc. But I don’t see any big duplication or huge extra workloads. It’s more swapping around responsibilities.
About your other point: I did not see how you could act improperly to further your interests even if you wanted to? So long as the director won’t cheat and show you the question-set all you can do is try and do your best teaching. Where’s the possibility of gaming?
“It’s not new that you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000! Until relatively recently, in-state tuition at state schools was cheap, pretty much everywhere. At Columbia you get the top professors teaching what they know best”
A key difference is MOOC’s are often taught by the best too. That’s what has changed.
Phoenix Univ. or some random community college cannot even remotely boast of the caliber of Profs. some of these MOOCs have. (whether Sebastian Thurn is as effective face to face as in a MOOC is another matter all-together….)
PS. I still would choose Columbia over a MOOC. But Andrew’s reasoning was missing a key point.
>I would still would choose Columbia over a MOOC.
And hopefully over a mook as well;-)
It’s entirely reasonable to me that a general course on scientific concepts could be FAR better for some general audiences than a standard series of intro courses for science majors. Statisticians will want to teach statistics, physicists will want to teach physics, chemists chemistry… etc But if you’re a film student or a history major or a social sciences major or whatever, you’d probably be much better off starting with a course that combines concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, statistics, etc and then taking a few more advanced relevant courses (let’s say you need more stats, or you need more math or whatever).
One thing that undergraduate education *should* do is give you perspective on enough areas of study that you can tie together basic ideas and their relevance for your particular area of interest.
I totally agree with Rahul about the importance of external review of the topics. It DOES matter whether the students learned fundamental concepts (say newton’s laws, thermodynamics, optics, REDOX reactions, cellular structure, methods of graphical data display, comparisons, variation) or just the latest stylized trendy facts (say the greenhouse effect, how a few people have tried to reconstruct the climate, theories of bee colony collapse disorder, renewable energy concepts, and whether beautiful people have more female children or not)
But you have the whole four (four+ ?) years of an undergrad curriculum to teach them the fundamental concepts!
It may not be entirely useless for a “Frontiers of Science” course to dabble in stylized trendy facts. Part of its job (IMHO) it to make them feel the breadth and excitement of science.
I was under the assumption that the people taking this kind of course rarely go on to take more than say one more science course, so no, you’re really not going to have the rest of the 4 years for those students. They’ll be off learning about literature, history of the cuban missile crisis, game theory, or cinematography techniques or something like that.
I don’t mind using stylized trendy facts as motivation, so long as it’s not just the stylized facts that they’re learning, they should get the principles that lead us to understand something about the stylized facts.
I’ve always preferred depth to breadth in courses. Michigan State was great when I was an undergrad in letting me skip the intro survey classes and jump right into classes like psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind, and micro-economics. As a result, I’m pretty shaky on psychology outside of cognitive psych, philosophy unrelated to semantics or carried out before the late 19th century, or anything in econ other than optimization and axiomatic game theory.
Why I like the deeper classes is that you get to think about real problems. In all of the courses I mentioned above, you run into real unsolved problems right away. You may do that in a survey class, but in deeper classes you actually get a flavor for the tools researchers are using to try to solve the problems.
This is related to Andrew’s application of the aphorism “God is in every leaf of every tree.”
I must be missing something.
The actual design is
O1 … FOS … O2 versus
O1 ……….. O2
but the setup in the first sentence seems to imply
O1 … FOS … O2 versus
O1 ….MOOC… O2
It’s also hard to be impressed with any inference of permanent learning based on scores on a final exam, which is the time when students are most focused on remembering a specific set of facts likely to be tested. If we march two years, four years, ten years farther out, what sort of permanent knowledge gain do we see?
I was curious enough to check out their website since I want to know what “Frontiers of Science” actually means. I have an issue with using the word “Frontiers” in a course supposed to teach fundamentals/ general knowledge. The site unfortunately tells me very little about the course! It lists a bunch of seminars but I couldn’t find a syllabus. None of the seminars would seem to be ideal for teaching basic statistics or probability.
zbicyclist: They need to disclose what are the reasons why students chose NOT to take the course, and what would they take instead. Is there a science requirement at Columbia? If so, are they telling us that the other science courses are ineffective at teaching the basics, or ineffective at teaching the materials of FoS? Do students get to place out of the requirement?
Kaiser:
The most famous part of the Frontiers of Science curriculum is when a physics professor took off his clothes in class to demonstrate the importance of nuclear proliferation.
I assume he was making them afraid that they might “see his nuclear missile?”
Doesn’t sound like a way to reduce controversy.
Maybe it was part of his Shock and Awe campaign.
I’m reminded of this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1503#comic
Columbia is obviously preferable to a cheaper state university because it’s a much, much stronger signal of competence than a state school diploma or a cert. of completion in an online education course. The real question is why anyone would pay private tuition rates to attend a middling private school like Hofstra when preferable in-state options exist.
Disregard that — I didn’t realize this was examining Columbia College.
Or is it? Not sure why uni and college are both used.
Just to clarify, the above Andrew is not me!
Apologies!
And this Andrew isn’t me either!
I hereby request that all Andrews who aren’t me, identify themselves using more information.
I like your (implied?) comment that MOOCs are not really different in character from books. They are just a different (shallower) medium, and maybe more entertaining, but they contain great content delivered by the best. Indeed, MOOCs are books in some sense (old, non-interactive, pre-recorded content). I think that also relates to Rahul’s comment: The best books are by the best people, so you get much more than you pay for.
(Oh, and that Andrew wasn’t me either)
David:
It’s been pointed out to me that mooks are more than videotaped books because mooks are set up so that students can have online group discussions.
“premade cheat sheets during the final” with formulas — I think the student means that they could make these for themselves, not that they were provided by the teachers
Morgan:
I heard that students got a premade cheat sheet, and they were also allowed to add their own notes.
As a student in a frontiers course last semester, I’d submit that my physics teacher had no business teaching anything outside of his department. He was a smart fellow, but his voice audibly trembled when answering questions outside of his expertise.
Although the biology curriculum of the course may have been written by other physicists like my professor, I am uncertain my physics faculty had the breadth to write a biology curriculum himself. Normally, it is fine when a course divorces the writing of its curriculum from its teacher, because the teacher is assured to know the discipline well. But in the case of the frontiers curriculum, the teacher is not always an expert in the material he is teaching, so there is not always a bridge to teach the curriculum when the lecture notes are ambiguous or questions arise.