Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford University, excelled in the lab, where he created the Bose-Einstein condensate(玻色-爱因斯坦凝聚态). However, his mastery in the lab did not extend to the classroom. For years, he wrestled with what seemed to be a straightforward task: making undergraduates comprehend physics as he did. Laying it out for them — explaining, even demonstrating the core concepts of the discipline — was not working. Despite his clear explanations, his students' capacity to solve the problems he posed to them remained inadequate.
It was in an unexpected place that he found the key to the problem: not in his classrooms but among the graduate students who came to work in his lab. When his PH. D. candidates entered the lab, Wieman noticed, their habits of thought were no less narrow and rigid than the undergraduates. Within a year or two, however, these same graduate students transformed into the flexible thinkers he was trying so earnestly, and unsuccessfully, to cultivate. "Some kind of intellectual process must have been missing from the traditional education," Wieman recounts.
A major factor in the graduate students' transformation, Wieman concluded, was their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge — the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another. In 2019, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences backed this idea. Tracking the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses(假设), designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students' engagement with their peers in the lab, rather than the guidance they received from their faculty mentors(导师).
Wieman is one of a growing number of Stanford professors who are bringing this "active learning" approach to their courses. His ambition is to move science education away from the lecture format, toward a model that is more active and more engaged.