Blogs on Education Reform

It's five minutes before the bell. My psychology students are reaching for their smartphones after our mini-field trip to the main campus library for an introduction to online reference materials.

"Wait," I say. "Before you go, I have a short question to leave you with."

The students sigh but smile, setting down their phones.

"What's left?" I ask, pausing for effect. "What is left?" They wait for me to continue. "Online, you've now got instant access to what everyone everywhere knows and thinks. In the past, to know anything you would have had to spend hours finding and memorizing it. Now it's right there on your smartphones. So what's left? If everyone has access to all this information, what is school for, and how could it possibly give you any kind of edge? What's the future of education?"

We hear so many negative things about public education in America -- most notably, that our schools are failing. And the reasons often cited involve educator shortcomings, for example, that colleges of education are doing a terrible job of preparing new teachers, or that the students in those colleges are not the high quality individuals we want teaching our children. We also hear that teachers unions care only about adult interests and that as a general rule the professional development teachers receive is a waste of resources.

This blog post is an excerpt from Save Our Science: How To Inspire a New Generation of Scientists by Ainissa Ramirez (TED Books).

The 21st century requires a new kind of learner -- not someone who can simply churn out answers by rote, but a student who can think expansively and solve problems resourcefully. As a scientist and inventor, a longtime professor at Yale University, and a woman who has always been passionate about getting kids excited about science, I believe that the key to this goal is to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. These disciplines are rooted in the kind of thinking that is now critical. One of the most important aspects of this shift is to fix the false presumption that girls are not as good as boys in science and math.

The multiple-choice problem is becoming a bit of an issue.

While it has been derided by educators for decades as incapable of truly measuring understanding, and while performance on such exams can be noticeably improved simply by learning a few tricks, the multiple choice question may have a larger, less obvious flaw that disrupts the tone of learning itself. This is a tone that is becoming increasingly important in the 21st century as access to information increases, as the updating of information happens more naturally, and as blended and mobile learning environments become more common.