Teaching is a science

There is an eternal debate about the nature of teaching, is it an art or a science? As a scientist and a teacher, I can offer a unique perspective on this debate. It is clear, teaching is a science. Since you now know where I stand, let me show you how I reached this conclusion.

You can probably guess that I teach science. I have been teaching science for many years, but only a few years ago, I realized that my background was different than most of my peers. I had actually started out as a research scientist. I had no intention of going into education as a teacher. How I got here is a story for a different time. Suffice it to say that I was a poorly prepared teacher when I first entered a high school classroom. It should have been obvious to me that teaching is a science very early on, but I'm not that smart. So here are some ways in which teaching is a science:

• Scientists need subjects for every study. The more subjects, the better the statistical analysis. 
• Teachers have subjects from small groups in Special Education classes to teachers with class loads of 150 freshman literature students. 
• Scientists gather data, the more data they gather, the more likely they are to be able to make decisions about the strength of their hypothesis. 
• Teachers are constantly gathering data. Some data is quantitative (like a test) and other data is qualitative (gauging interest in a topic). 
• Scientists use tools to gather data.The better the tool, the better the data. When a new tool is developed, it allows scientists to test hypotheses and theories that they couldn't test before. 
• Teachers use tools to gather data. One issue that we constantly face is that we are unsure about the quality of the tools we are using. Multiple choice questions are a popular tool, but are not good at identifying whether or not students can understand complex processes like photosynthesis. 
• Some scientists run controlled experiments. In these experiments, there is a control group that doesn't receive a treatment and an experimental group that does receive the treatment. Differences between the groups are analyzed to see if there is an effect of treatment. 
• Teachers don't consistently run controlled experiments, but sometimes a teacher uses one treatment with one class, but not with another. 
• There are many teachers that teach the same subject and each may use a different technique or some may choose not to teach some part of the curriculum. In that sense, teachers do have some controlled experiments. 
• Scientists analyze their results using statistical techniques. These techniques allow them to determine whether the treatment had an effect and if so, the degree of the effect. 
• Teachers should do this, but due to a lack of understanding of statistics or of their power, they almost always skip this part. 
• Teachers who teach the same content over several years could use statistics to see how a change in the way that they taught had an effect on performance if they used the same or similar assessment. 
• As a result, teachers are only vaguely aware of the effect of their teaching on the learning of the students. 
• Scientists know that science is an iterative process. Each time they carry out an investigation, they are informed by the investigations they have done in the past and those conducted by others in their field. 
• Teachers know that teaching is an iterative process. Each year, they look at what they did in the past and work on ways to refine the learning process to become more effective. 
• Teachers do not look at work conducted by others in their field. This is a huge problem. Teachers are very often so busy that they do not have any time available to research current best practices in the field or publish their own work. There are a very small percentage of teachers who attend local, regional and national conferences on their subject matter regularly. School districts have limited budgets for travel and professional development. It is a vicious cycle. There is research out there, but very few teacher ever read it. 
• Scientists know that effect sizes can be small. That is, the treatment employed in the experiment is not likely to have a major impact on the subject. Given the constraints of the study, however, even small effect sizes can be important. 
• Teachers are always dealing with small effect sizes. Utilizing a pre-post assessment, many teachers may only find a small improvement in the performance of the students. Most teachers are disappointed by those kind of results, but it is important to remember the context. Learning is hard and even if you do a good job, it might not work well for everyone. Hence, the small effect on the group. 
• However, if the teacher can improve on that performance each year, it can add up to huge effects over time. That is where the iterative process comes into play. You should always look critically at your teaching. What worked? What didn't work? Consult with others, read some research and try again. 

I could go on with examples, but I think you get the idea. Regardless of the setting, being a teacher is very similar to being a scientist. I have already pointed out some ways in which teachers could do a better job of being more like a scientists, but there are more as well. I'd like to spend the rest of this essay talking about a few of them. 

There are many teaching practices that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny if they were assessed (or have been assessed) using a scientific process. Some of these practices persist despite evidence that they are quite ineffective. 

Worksheets 

Students are supposed to take information from a text and fill in answers. It is supposed to be a way to make sure the kids read the text and take something from it. However, students view it as an assignment to be completed and don't read the text in context, they skip around looking for the relevant answers, fill in the blanks and check off that they got the work done. 

Worksheets have virtually no effect on learning (2). They are employed generally to take up time in the classroom for when teachers may be differentiating or absent or have run out of ideas about how to fill the time in class. 

Long lectures

Back in the days of Aristotle and Plato and even before when most learning was the result of oral recitation, lectures were the primary way in which teaching occurred. Even today, the standard teaching technique in high school and college classrooms is the long lecture. Teachers, supported by a slide show, talk to students and students are expected to take in information, process it and connect it to prior knowledge. Multiple concepts are covered and through listening and writing down information teachers think that they are covering the material and that students are learning it. 

Evidence is weak (1) to support this technique as an effective form of learning. However, many teachers have been so indoctrinated in this technique that they find it difficult to change how they teach their courses. 

Learning Styles
We know that everyone is a little different and that some people can effectively teach themselves while others need structures in place to aid in the learning process. An idea that gained great traction was that teaching students using a preferred learning style (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) would be more effective than having students learn using only one style or a non-preferred learning style.

There is no support for this idea (3), other than using different kinds of stimuli is good for all students. A teacher who only relies on visual forms of stimulation will be less effective than a teacher who uses multiple forms of stimulation, but catering to each student's preferred form of stimulation turns out to be not effective at all.

Left Brain/Right Brain
Along with the discredited idea that you only use 10% of your brain (an excellent description of how this idea evolved can be found here), there is no support to the idea that there are people who are left brain dominant or right brain dominant. All brain functions are integrated and even though a specific location for a brain function can be identified, its activity is regulated by other areas and it in turn regulates other areas. So spending time to find out what kind of brain map a student has is a waste of time for both the teacher and the student.

To summarize, which is an effective, but under utilized, teaching technique (4):

• Being a teacher is very similar to the job of research scientist.
• There are techniques (such as data analysis and communication between scientists) that would help teachers become more effective. 
• There are several teaching strategies that have not held up to the scrutiny of research, but that are widespread in classrooms. 
• Teachers would be well-served by using a research approach to improve their teaching practice. 

References: 

1. Freeman, et al., Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics PNAS 2014 111 (23) 8410-8415; published ahead of print May 12, 2014, doi:10.1073/pnas.1319030111

2. Choo, S. S. Y., Rotgans, J. I., Yew, E. H. J., & Schmidt, H. G. (2011). Effect of worksheet scaffolds on student learning in problem-based learning. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 16(4), 517–528. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-011-9288-1
3. Guterl, S. (2013, September 20). Is teaching to a student's learning style a bogus idea? . Scientific American, pp. 21-22.
4. King, A. (1992) “Comparison of Self-Questioning, Summarizing, and Notetaking-Review as Strategies for Learning From Lectures” American Educational Research Journal, P 303-323 Volume 29 #2 doi:10.3102/00028312029002303