Many college-level science courses begin with what, for the students, should be a brief review of the basics of the scientific method. After all, without any hint of the method behind the science in a course, a science course becomes a jumble of facts to memorize and regurgitate on command.
Sometimes, though, these beginning exercises in the methods of science can turn into frustration for instructors, who have to wrestle with the deficiencies of students in other areas. In particular, many students aren’t able to separate needed information from unneeded information.
Here’s an example.
The assignment:
You wake up one morning to find the power is off in your home. There can be a number of reasons for no power…I’ll let your imagination run wild as to the other observations that you might make to help you figure out the cause. Formulate 1) a hypothesis and 2) a prediction based on your observations; post them as a reply to this message.
As you can see, this isn’t exactly a foreign situation to anyone who lives in a modern home with lights and electricity.
Here’s one of the responses:
I woke up late for work one morning because the alarm clock didn’t go off. When I looked at my cell phone to see the time, I immediatly jumped out of bed and threw the light switch up, no light. I went in the bathroom and threw that switch up, no light there either. The power was out. I do remember hearing thunder last night and I know that there were severe thunderstorm warnings and watches all around until late into the night. The storm must have caused there to be a power outage and the power company had not yet been notified. I quickly got dressed and flew out the house. On the way to work I called the power company to report the outage. Thank goodness for cell phones.
So what’s wrong with the response? Well, other than the fact that the imagery associated with the phrase “I went in the bathroom and threw that switch up” reminds me of the ipecac scene in an old episode of Family Guy, I don’t think the point of the assignment was to write a short essay in praise of the cellular phone. You could actually make a few hypotheses and predictions from what this student has written, but the student doesn’t actually point any of them out.
While this particular example isn’t from any of my classes, I do run into a lot of the same kinds of answers. Students have an inability to extract relevant information. It’s no wonder that these students have trouble with the sciences, where stripping away unimportant detail is fundamental to explaining why things work.
But why do students have these problems? Is it a lack of training in early years? (Is the problem-solving that students do in high school so contrived that students never have to actually think about details and whether they are important?) Is the “info dump” style of answering questions (as demonstrated above) rewarded somewhere along the line? (I’m thinking that partial credit might play a role here.)
Any ideas?