 it's 12 o'clock block, isn't it? Make that the one o'clock block on a given Monday. Welcome to Research in Manila. That's one o'clock. I'm your host, Jay Fidel. Our show today is called Education Initiatives. Educational Initiatives. We're going to talk about sharing science with Hawaii and the community, science outreach program in Hawaii. If you want to ask a question to participate in discussion, you can tweet us at ThinkTechHI, or call us at 415-871-2474. Our guest for the show is Barbara Bruno, and she's an education director at HIGP, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in Southwest. That's right. Yeah, and she's got a special grant that she's using. She's the educational director of that program, and this is all about fostering science teaching, education and science to not only undergraduates, but all the levels of learning that you can have in HIGP and so on, and Seymour, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, all that. So it's a fairly big universe of science within UH Manila, and you're there to enhance the educational experience for the students, and I suppose the graduate students too. Yeah, I mean, my research, all my training is in geology and geophysics, and about 10 years ago, I started realizing that there was a disconnect between the way I did my science and the way I taught. So rather than just going into a classroom and lecturing, I started actually searching the literature and finding out what really worked, and one of the things I learned is that lecturing doesn't really work, and I started getting more interested in learning about research-based teaching methods, and then recently, I'm on now a couple of grants where we're able to support many faculty, about 30 faculty members in SOEST to help them think a little bit more critically about how they teach and why they teach, and have them assess whether or not what they're doing is working. Yeah, this is very interesting, because in fact, SOEST and HIGP and Seymour are world-class, and they bring research grants from all over the place, and they're known all over the place, all around the world, for the research they do on environmental issues here in Hawaii. Yeah, I mean, SOEST is ranked currently 12th in the world for Ocean and Earth Science, the 12th University in the world, so they're definitely top researchers, and HIGP is one of the leading units within SOEST. So you wouldn't make it better yet? Yeah, because what you're talking about is research reputation. What I'm talking about is the teaching, which should be fully integrated with the research, but isn't always. Yeah, I imagine that, because people who are out there doing the research, they care about the research, and they don't necessarily address bringing people up to their level, because they're at such a high level. Right, and most professors never got any training in teaching. I mean, all of the training is in geology and geophysics. It's not in how they teach that, right? So why is a lecture a bad idea? Because lectures can be, I mean, granted, some lectures can be really, really, really boring, but other lectures can be just great, and it depends on the lecturer and the way it's organized. It depends on the interest and the identity of the students too, doesn't it? It does. I mean, lecturing works great for expert audiences, for introductory audiences like undergraduates, then having part of a class period dedicated to lecture can be quite effective. But if you spend the majority of the class period on lecture, students are not going to be listening, they'll be playing on their iPhones, they'll be texting each other, they'll be surfing the internet doing Amazon shopping. They will not be listening to you. So you might feel you're doing a great job in covering the material, and maybe you are, but they're not learning the material, and a lot of research has been done on this. What about smackin' them on the side of the head? That is one method you could try. Again, I don't know if there's a research basis, though, that that's effective. It may not be legal, anyway. They get in big trouble doing that. So one of the alternatives to lecturing, I mean, I'm remembering now a visit I had to Mid-Pak Institute, which is a high school, and what was interesting was that somebody had some very generous benefactor had given every kid in the school an iPad, and then they put them in teams, and it's very advanced, educationally advanced modular science room, and they all worked in teams of three or four with their iPads, and that's the way they learned science. It was not actually by lecture. It was with real problems. It was case studies and like that. Yeah, and that's very effective. There are times when you will need to share material with the students, but if you just lectured them, they're not coming in motivated to learn that material. Instead, if you give them a problem to solve and they grapple with it, maybe first on their own and then in these small groups, then they're going to get frustrated. They don't know the answer. Then, if you lecture, it will be like a gift. They'll be spending a few minutes directly giving them information to a problem that's relevant to the task they have at hand. So in that situation, lecture can be quite effective. Yeah, but yes, right after the fact, after they have acclimated themselves to the issues, but I just wonder also how much the social aspect this plays into it, because in the mid-pack, I shouldn't say experiment. It was actually ongoing. It was an experiment for the teachers. It was the fact for the students. The students were learning at a rapid rate, and they were teaching the teachers, which is a good thing. But what struck me was that there was a social group. There was a competition. It was a social peer group thing where if you did something, contributed something to the process, you got social points. And if you did that, that motivated you to keep on pushing. Yeah, because life isn't about working individually and doing things ourselves. Whether at work or whether in our social groups, we're constantly interacting with people. And students are much better at teaching each other at least some of the time than faculty are, because we might be up here, so we might not always understand what it is that a student doesn't understand. But one of their peers, maybe they didn't understand it last week. They know what the problem is, so they're very effective translators of the information we provide. Yeah, and he teaches me. He feels good, and I feel good. We have a positive exchange, or she. And likewise, I ask him questions or I teach him. We have a very positive exchange. And the result is that I develop a level of confidence. This is my interpretation of a sort of a science fair. Develop a level of confidence, because I'm able to articulate my thoughts about this. All of a sudden, I come to believe that, yes, I can do it. I can understand it. I'm not just some wallflower sitting in the back of a lecture hall. Right, and you're actually paying attention and you're engaged. I mean, you don't have any time to play on your iPhone or surf the Internet if you're working with a group, and you have a short amount of time to solve a problem. Right, right. Okay, so you come up with this idea that lecturing is not, you know, the panacea here, that we have to have other tools. And this is very instructive for me. And so you say, I am going to follow my intuition on this. I am going to do something good here for education as a part of the mission of HIGP and so on. How do you proceed now? You've got to get money for that. Doesn't come easy. That's true. And a lot of funding is from federal sources, as well as state sources or private, but the funding that I have is federal. And one grant is from the National Science Foundation. It's through the Geosciences Directorate, and it's dedicated specifically for undergraduates' STEM education. It's called I Use Geopaths, Improving Undergraduate STEM Education in Geopaths. And the idea is we want to create pathways for undergraduate students to become geologists. Sure. That's especially important in Hawaii. Sure. Well, you have to have that for sustainability of the whole enterprise, because the old guys are all going to retire. And girls, they're all going to retire. And then if there's nobody left to take the mantle, then that great reputation, that research reputation, goes around the world, all of a sudden starts to decline. You cannot afford not to teach. Yeah. And in Hawaii, especially, a lot of our top science students don't consider geoscience as a major. They go into medicine. They study biology or chemistry to become a doctor, or they major in engineering. But the idea that physics and math and engineering, chemistry, everything is needed for the geosciences is something that isn't obvious to most undergraduate students. So it's really important that we do a good job teaching them in this undergraduate classes, their first introductory class, that most students have to take anyway. And then we can hook them into how they can apply all of their science skills to preserve and understand the world around them. Yeah, that's so important. I mean, it's really, and you're bringing them into the fold. You're showing them what it is and that they can have a career in this. And they can be part of this great scientific tradition at UH. They wouldn't otherwise know. So if you make it a stiff lecture series in a lecture hall, they're not going to find out about that. So you've got to touch them somehow. Okay. So anyway, you write this up and writing grants is an art form all in itself. It's more an art than a science, I would have to say. I'd say it's marketing. Marketing, okay. How do you send in your grant application? Lo and behold, somebody, it was a National Science Foundation network. Yeah. The first grant was the IU's grant, which allowed us to develop all of these ideas. And more recently, we got a large $20 million EBSCOR grant to basically work on understanding the hydrology of Hawaii. And through that grant, we were able to leverage a lot of the IU's components. Kevin Kelly, he does EBSCOR. Yeah, he's our managing director. Yeah. So that's a lot of bread, actually. Well, the $20 million is over five years and the $4 million per year is over multiple institutions. It includes overhead and a very small fraction of that is for education. But we are very grateful for it. So how do you spend that kind of money? I mean, this is different now. This is education as opposed to taking the aloha ship out to sea and finding microbiology under the surface where you have all kinds of equipment and expenses and student expenses. This is different because now you're talking about education, which is, how do you spend the money like that on education? Education is thousands of dollars. The millions of dollars is for the research. Yeah, it's thousands of dollars. A lot of that goes to salary for a team to help support the faculty. What we do really is one of the first things we do is we after doing like an introductory workshop to introduce faculty to these ideas, what we really have to try to encourage them to do is take a step back. Rather than thinking about how do they want to teach, we ask them what do they want the students to learn. And once they have an idea of what their learning goals are, then they have to think, well, how can I assess whether or not students achieve that? Sure. So if your goal is to help students understand something or have a greater appreciation for something, you're not going to be able to assess that. That's not measurable. But if you want students to be able to defend a certain argument or graph a certain relationship, then you design your assessment to measure that. And once you know how you're going to assess, then you develop, use teaching methods that are going to help the students be able to do that. Okay, so what I get is if you want to do this, if you want to make it a better experience for the students and acclimate them into geology and science in SOS and HIGP and Seymour, then you have to touch the faculty. You have to talk to the faculty and you have to get them off the old paradigm and onto a new one. And how do you do that? Because that's not easy because they are researchers at the core of it. They're researchers not actually lecturers. They're researchers trying to write papers for important journals and make discoveries that will disrupt the scientific world and all that. How do you make them focus and do you teach them? Do you call them into a lecture hall and say, you sit down, I want to tell you how to do this? How do you do that? We do have workshops where we don't lecture them, but we engage them in their own learning. But we really appeal to the research scientists within them. We ask them, what teaching methods do they use and where do they get them from and how they evaluate if they're effective. And we are trying to get the professors to take the same approach they would in their research laboratory or in their field work to their classroom. I got it. It's very interesting. So you know they're familiar with the scientific process. Now you're trying to adapt the scientific process for them or have them adapt the scientific process to the teaching process. Yeah, like for example, recently there was in a very well regarded journal called PNAS. There was a peer reviewed article that was a meta analysis. So it reviewed 158 studies on comparing active learning first lecturing and undergraduate science classes. And the take home message was, if you want students to fail, switch from active learning to pure lecturing and your failure rate will increase 55%. Just in case you're wondering about that. And when we come back from this break, Barbara Bruno, I'm going to ask you exactly what active learning is because I think we all need to know what that is and maybe even engage in it. Students and faculty and everybody in the world will be right back after this short break. Sounds like scuba divers are the poor man's astronaut. At DiveHeart, we believe that to be true. We say forget the moon. DiveHeart can help children, adults and veterans of all abilities escape gravity right here on earth. Search DiveHeart.org and imagine the possibilities in your life. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii which streams live on ThinkTechHawaii.com, uploads to YouTube.com and broadcasts on cable OC16 and Ollello 54. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Okay, I'm here with Barbara Bruno. She is a faculty research person at HIGP, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. I can say it five times fast. And so it's the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology. And they are also sort of affiliated with CMOR, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. And there's a lot of people there. A lot of people who do research and actually teach. There's a certain amount of undergraduate students come in for required courses. It's like the one geology 101 sort of course. And that's the target. That's what you want to nail. So you got to find a way to do active teaching and active learning, get feedback, pushback, whatever, engagement. It's all about engagement. The old model doesn't work anymore. We want them to pass. We want them to learn. We want them to be stimulated. We want them to become scientists. And they got to really learn science for that. So you said you wrote a paper about this right now. What's happening? Yeah, so basically what we did is we encouraged faculty to try using peer collaboration as one of their active learning strategies. So when I say active learning, I mean anything other than traditional lecturing, there are many things you can do in a classroom. And one thing you can do is have students solve problems together and working in groups. And we wanted to try this during examinations. So the idea is you whatever teaching methods you use, you cover your original, the first third of the class, and then you give a midterm exam. So what we asked faculty to do is give every student their own exam and have each student complete the exam individually and turn in the paper. And then, rather than sending them home, have them retake the exam. Retake the exam. Again, the same exam. Same example in groups this time. They would work with three or four other students. Each group would be given a single exam paper, same questions as before, but they could only turn in one answer for each question. So they had to negotiate. So you collaborate. Right. And it's up to the instructor to wait the two stages of the exam however they want. Most instructors found that they wanted to wait the original exam, the initial stage, high enough to motivate students to study. So maybe 80 or 85 percent of the grade. But you wanted the group exam to count enough, maybe 15 or 20 percent of the grade. So they'd be really engaged in the process and not just checking out. Wow, that's a great idea. Yeah, I didn't come up with the idea. I was just researching the literature and then, within the literature, finding the techniques that seem to be really effective. Well, that just strikes me as just a terrific thing because you're fresh off the exam. You've thought it through. You have a certain amount of concern, lack of confidence about exactly how you answered. And now you talk to your buddies and you collaborate and you get another grade to collaborate for yourself. And not all those groups are going to have the same results either. Right. And I think students find that there's a high stakes. This is an exam. This is an important part of their course grade, which is an important part of their GPA. And it has repercussions, whether it's for employment or for graduate school. So they want to do really well. And there's a lot of passion in the argument. There's also listening. And I've observed a lot of these classes. And it's really interesting to see when the light bulb goes off. When you realize students were able to figure something out. And what I think is especially interesting is in some cases, none of the students got an exam question right on during the individual stage. Individually. Together as a group. They got it right. I was able to tell you why your answer was wrong. You were able to tell me why my answer was wrong. And then by process of elimination, we were able to deduce the correct answer. Spectacular. It teaches you all kinds of things. Not only science, but social science, psychology, all that stuff. So, gee whiz, if you were waiting these two, the individual test and the group test, what weight would you give ideally? If it's a secret and you can't tell me, just say that. Oh, no, I can tell you. I like the 80-20 or something around it. 80 for the individual and 20 for the group. Yeah, I'd be concerned if I made it 50-50 that some students might say, oh, I don't really need to study. You know, I can, you know, 50%, well, yeah, I'll study a little bit. But if it's 80%, you know you have to come in there. You have to work. Doing your homework. Yeah, I think that's a good number. You have to study. Yeah. And on the other hand, if it was 95-5, then there might be little motivation for students to engage in the collaborative process during the second stage. Yeah. Would you go for 60-40? Or 70-30? I think anything would be helpful. Yeah. I don't think there's a magic number in there. I haven't, yeah. But I do think that it's going to be really exciting when this paper gets published this month. It's in a peer-reviewed journal called Oceanography, because it's introductory into oceanography and geology classes that we're working on. And this will then be, this journal is the official journal of the leading society for oceanography in the country. So this will become mailed to many oceanography professors. So I'm hoping this will get many people outside of the university and serve as a national model. Make it a real contribution to the field that way. Yeah. So, okay. So you find out about this 80-20 or whatever ratio it is. It seems to me, seems to me clear that a student will, A, have a better experience if he has the dual tests, and B, he'll do better. He'll do better because, well, it's a sociology, but he'll do better. But the question is, what else? There must be other tools in your toolkit that you are going to tell the faculty about then, you know, the senior researchers and professors about, so that they can have the benefit of teaching this way. Yeah. It's not so much that I tell them how to teach as much as they give you a menu of choices, and it's up to them to figure out which ones they want to try and test, see if they work in their classroom. So this idea of peer collaboration, that's something that it's not just for exams, it's for learning the material. So for example, rather than lecturing at students, you can instead ask them a question for them to think about, first on their own, so they can get their own thoughts together, then work in a group and see if they can puzzle it out. When I say a question, it could be a problem. You could show them a graph and ask them to interpret it. And then after you have them work in groups, then you can present the same graph as you would as if you were doing a lecture. You can explain it, give them some time to ask questions, and then you can have them answer a worksheet of questions. That's one common active learning strategy. Yeah, there's so many possibilities, but it does remind me of my law school experience, because you remember that in law school, they have the Socratic method, even still today in most classes. And so the professor will ask you a question, and you will answer the question. And I had professors who would ask me a question, and I would answer the question, then he would ask the next guy, go down the row like this, chipping away at the class, and ask the next guy whether he agreed with my answer. And ask the guy after that whether he agreed with the number three answer. And by the time he got to eight, he was asking about all the other seven, and trying to get a real conversation going. But in doing that, you had to listen. If you didn't listen, you would be out of the mix on this. And so it was very valuable. There's so many ways to engage and interact and force people to interact. Yeah. And the Socratic method is definitely one example of active learning. I think here in Hawaii's classrooms, having students who work in small groups first sometimes can be really helpful. It doesn't put them on the spot as much, and they can develop some confidence. And then if you want to use the Socratic method, when you ask a student for their answer, rather than putting them on the spot and asking what they think, you can ask them to represent what their group thinks. And that's a way of taking off the pressure and the individualism. Yeah. You don't want to make anybody uncomfortable, because then that confidence is gone. Yeah. There's a right degree of uncomfortable where you put somebody slightly out of their comfort zone, but at the same time, maintaining their confidence. Yeah. Oh, so, okay. So you're building a toolkit like this with different techniques. And you're going to impart these techniques to the existing faculty in lectures or maybe in other, maybe in Socratic method as well to try to have them build that into the way they teach students. Yeah. My colleague Jenny Engels and myself, we run workshops for faculty. We also connect them with other resources such as websites that have a lot of great information out there. We do one-on-one consultations. We recently brought out Carl Wyman's research group, who's a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He decided to apply his Nobel Prize-winning physics brain to science education. Wow. And he's developed a research center now at the University of British Columbia. So we brought out our colleagues, some Sarah Harris and Sarah Bean Sherman, from there. And they held some workshops and, as well as doing teaching demonstrations, because we've had some instructors say, oh, I'm in a lecture classroom. I can't move the furniture. Everybody's facing front. How can I do active learning? So rather than telling them, they showed them. They took over a lecture and they showed how you can teach in that circumstance. Theater in the round. Is that part of it? Sure. I'm not quite sure what you mean, but sure. No, it's around. The presser's in the middle, maybe. And the students are around here. What I'm saying is this professor was basically saying, because we have a very traditional lecture classroom where people are just facing the classroom, they thought the furniture was a liability. While the facilitators were saying, well, take yourself out of the equation. It's not about you. It's about them. And they're all around each other. So they can be working together in groups and turning around. How far into this IU grant? We are one year into a three-year grant with the IU grant and with the hydrology EBSCOR grant that is just finished the first year out of five years. So we have several years on our existing funding, but then we're planning on really institutionalizing this. Once faculty learn the methods, they'll be doing it forever. I haven't had a single faculty member who's taught a two-stage exam who's going to go back to the individual method. So is it full-time for you? I'm a full-time faculty member at HIGP. No, this program. And the EBSCOR program funds the majority of my salary. Not quite full-time, but. That means you put your most of your time into this kind. And so the result is, have you had results? Have you had faculty that have actually changed the way they teach? Have you had faculty that came back to you and said, you know, that was pretty good. And I'm getting better grades from my students and so forth. Yeah, that's what this paper, the one that's just coming out this month in oceanography is about. It's about the results, the peer-reviewed results of our faculty of thumbs in seven classes. It's a total of 14 exams trying this two-stage method and then doing statistical analyses showing that the learning gains are real. So taking it larger, I mean, it sounds like with this collaboration and inviting people in to talk to you from other places, come from other schools and all, we're involved in a movement here. There's a movement in science education, am I right? Yeah, it's actually quite a few movements. There's the movement about getting engaging students in their learning and switching faculty's perspective from how much material are they going to cover to what students are going to learn. So the active learning is one piece of that. Getting undergraduates involved in geology and geophysics research, that's another separate part of the grant. Having them learn by being scientists and doing research rather than being in the classroom. And then we have professional development training that we offer our undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs, so they can graduate being ready for jobs. And then there's the recruiting aspect, which we do in partnership with Kapilani Community College. We have lots of different aspects to this. So this is a whole refresh on how you teach science. How you teach science and who does science. Really? Yeah. So you're making judgments about people? I think a lot of judgments have been made in the past about who can do science. And we take the approach that we think everybody can do science. So we want to be much more welcoming and inclusive. And we just finished a summer bridge week, where we spent a week with especially a week of field trips with Kapilani Community College students. About half of them were Hawaiian Studies majors and about half of them were science majors. And we wanted them to see their environment from a very different perspective and start thinking about how they might be able to contribute to protecting Hawaii's environment. Yeah. So yeah, it all comes together. It's an intersection. And it reminds me, and I'm still working on trying to fully understand this, but I had lunch with a group of people, including the Vice Mayor of Beijing a few years ago. He was here. And I said to him, you know, I had seen something in the paper. And I said to him, I said, Mr. Vice Mayor, it's wonderful that 29% of the college graduates in China are engineering students. Everybody studies engineering. Because in the 21st century, that's got to be very important for education in general. And he said, yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you for saying that. But it isn't 29%. It's 59%. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with studying science and social science at the same time. There's nothing wrong with making yourself a Renaissance person. There's nothing wrong with having it all together because we do live in the 21st century. And so these kids that are coming up, not only in geology, but in many, many things, will benefit by a refresh on the system. Right. We're not trying to change everybody into a science major. There are some people who are very interested in art or history or other things. But we do think everybody should have a basic understanding of science so they can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting booth, or whether it's understanding the geology around them when they're driving down Klana Neole Highway. It is important to understand the earth around them and the changing climate. And when you have to make decisions about resources, trying to have that basic scientific knowledge, to be able to evaluate arguments fairly. And you're talking about many disciplines, not just, you know, specifically geology or climate or anything. It could be any kind of science that intersects with the things in Southwest and HIG. Sure. I mean, just the idea that we don't just say things. We don't have an opinion just because we believe something or we think something might be right. But the idea that a lot of things can be tested. And you don't have to be an official professional scientist to test them. But we in our everyday lives have access to resources where we can evaluate arguments. And you're reaching beyond just the faculty or the research students at HIGP and SOAS and CMOR for that matter. You're reaching out to Coppulani Community College. You're reaching out to faculty wherever you can find them in order to have the benefit to go to students wherever you can find them. So this is very important to improve the quality of science education and understanding in Hawaii. You are on a mission, aren't you? Yes. Yes, I am on a mission. Well, thank you, Barbara. Barbara Bruno of HIGP and SOAS at UH Manoa. Thank you. Aloha.