Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman will present a free public lecture on Thursday, January 30 at 3 p.m. in the University Club, Ballroom B. The lecture, titled, "Taking a Scientific Approach to Science Education," is the inaugural event of the University of Pittsburgh Discipline Based Science Education Research Center (dB-SERC).
Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science education meanwhile has remained largely medieval. Research on how people learn is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than what is in use in the traditional science class.
The combination of this research with information technology is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching and learning that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century.
Professor Carl Wieman currently holds a joint appointment at Stanford University as Professor of Physics and the Graduate School of Education. Wieman received the Nobel Prize for achieving a Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and early fundamental studies of the properties of these condensates. Since then he has focused on experimental approaches to the improvement of student understanding of physics at the undergraduate level. He has won many prestigious prizes in this area including the American Association of Physics Teachers Oersted Medal in 2007, and the Presidential Citation for Lifetime Achievement from the National Science Teachers Association in 2012.