Where did it go wrong with our university system? One possible reason is the increasing importance of "grades" in the mind of a student, instructor, granting agency, employer, for the easy quantification it provides of a student's learning. This is problematic on so many different levels. Maybe the most important level is that education/teaching/learning is not about "to distinguish the wheat from the chaff", but actually about learning. At Guelph, our guiding principle for teaching and learning is "
Tom Nudds and I co-taught community ecology for the first time together last semester (and Amanda was one of our wonderful TAs). Despite our differences ;-), we share a very similar teaching philosophy. And as a result of some crazy ideas, we decided to completely remodel community ecology. Tom’s rallying cry:
Out with rote learningTo implement this, we cut out all “normal” aspects of grading in our course, and instead we implemented 3 research projects in a problem-based learning framework.
We discussed these two articles mentioned in a previous post in our Community Ecology class, and this is the summary of the very interesting discussion between the students, the TAs, and Tom and I:
It is not one or the other (which is actually acknowledges by using the “first” in the title)The scientific method is cyclical and depends on data, hypotheses, predictions, increased information, or is cyclical as is illustrated by TomBut I added (which was not supported by the majority of the students, or Tom ;-) that the start of the scientific method is data, or the description of a natural phenomenonI also tried to argue that the “hypotheses first” in its extreme is related to religion, since religion is essentially a hypothesis (causal mechanism) without data to support it, but at this point I was way outside my zone of expertise