Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics and former White House adviser on education policy, is joining Stanford University’s faculty in a merger of expertise on improving the undergraduate teaching of science.
In choosing to move to Stanford, Mr. Wieman has found a home where researchers are already deeply engaged in studying social and psychological strategies for more effective science education. And in Mr. Wieman, Stanford has obtained a high-profile crusader with expertise in the discipline-specific differences between various scientific fields.
“Stanford is just a really ripe environment for him, almost a perfect environment, and he’s perfect for us,” Claude M. Steele, Stanford’s dean of education, said of Mr. Wieman’s hiring, which takes effect on Sunday.
Mr. Wieman left the White House last summer, after receiving a diagnosis of multiple myeloma and after spending two years searching for ways to force universities to adopt teaching methods shown through scientific analysis to be more effective than traditional approaches.
His health has improved, Mr. Wieman said in an interview last week. But rather than try again through the political process to prod universities to accept what research tells them would be better ways of teaching and retaining students in the sciences, he now hopes at Stanford to work on making those methods even better.
In that regard, he said he sees multiple advantages in choosing Stanford. One is the lab of Daniel L. Schwartz, a professor of education who uses games and puzzles in his studies of how spatial cognition affects student learning. Another, he said, is a team led by Mr. Steele, an expert in how social-psychological factors such as self-adopted stereotypes among black students can hinder educational-success rates.
Both Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Steele acknowledged that a key missing element in their work to date has been the ability to account for discipline-specific variations. Mr. Wieman, with his understanding of how teaching physics is different from teaching chemistry and biology, and how academic cultures differ across those fields, should enhance Stanford’s work in those areas, they said.
The interaction should be groundbreaking, said Mr. Schwartz, director of the AAA Lab, where Mr. Wieman’s graduate and postdoctoral students are expected to be based. “He’s done a tremendous amount to learn all this literature” on student cognition, Mr. Schwartz said, “but he hasn’t sort of been surrounded by it.”
White House Years
Mr. Wieman gained fame at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the leverage to pursue his longstanding interest in improving undergraduate teaching, in 2001, when he and two other researchers won a Nobel Prize for producing Bose-Einstein condensate—matter supercooled to the point at which it demonstrates the quantum behavior predicted by Einstein.
The University of British Columbia later lured him with a six-year, $10-million commitment to test his ideas about teaching. The Obama administration hired him in 2010, though in two years at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, he could not put into effect his suggestion that the government require faculty members to answer an annual questionnaire describing their teaching approach. His goal was to lead professors to recognize there were more scientifically proven methods of teaching sciences, such as emphasizing discussions over lectures and stressing practical applications rather than formulas.
But now, Mr. Wieman said, it will remain up to others to push for wider adoption of such techniques. “I’ve sort of scaled back on worrying about getting everybody paying attention to this,” he said.
Deep Skepticism on MOOCs
That’s not to say his arrival at Stanford won’t be entirely without political intrigue. That’s because the university and its president, John L. Hennessy, are leaders in the development of large-scale online courses. By contrast, Mr. Wieman, a crusader for hands-on teaching styles, regards MOOCs with deep skepticism, if not hostility.
“It’s based on a flawed concept of learning,” he said of MOOCs, “and once people start looking harder at what the success rates are, and what the students really learn from them, it will kind of drift off into something else.” Those at universities pushing MOOCs are usually administrators, not the people directly engaged in learning, Mr. Wieman said.
There’s room at Stanford for such opinions, Mr. Steele said, even as many on the campus—not just the administrators but also researchers in the schools of education and of engineering—continue to take “a good hard empirical look” at them.
Part of that willingness is due to the university’s proximity to Silicon Valley, Mr. Steele said. “We’re up close to the band, we can hear all the notes,” he said, “and we’ll see how Carl feels about it as time goes on.”
Mr. Schwartz agrees. “I don’t think there’s a way he’ll be able to stay out of it,” he said, “and my hope is I can draw him in, to show him that actually there are ways to use these technologies.”
And either way, when it comes to MOOCs or Mr. Wieman’s innovations, Stanford has one powerful advantage for spreading ideas about college teaching: Many of its graduates end up as university faculty members elsewhere in the country.