STEM – can you think of a more enticing name for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics? Well, it used to be called SMET, so I guess not. It is the future of all knowledge-based economies and part of the Australian Government’s plan to get students to take STEM subjects in higher education.
Courtesy of Samsung Australia, I was a guest at the Spatial Environment Research Centre (SERC) Spatial Reasoning Seminar in Canberra.
Spatial reasoning is the capacity to think about objects in three or even four dimensions (length, breadth, width, and time) and draw conclusions – hopefully the right ones – from the information provided. Part of the SERC focus - a group of very dedicated people – is to deeply consider the impact of spatial reasoning on education and how that will impact tomorrow’s world.
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Let me get to the crux of the issue as I understand it. In the good old days’ students learned by repetition creating a generation of children that could add up, subtract, multiply, divide in their heads and importantly spell words ingrained by many spelling bees. For want of a better word let’s call these learned skills analytical.
As time progressed, teaching methods – pedagogy - turned to things like Cuisenaire rods for mathematics, phonetic spelling and an ever-increasing use TV, images, graphics, and diagrams. This produced another generation of, for want of a better word, visualisers who solved problems visually. For example, to multiply three by three, they could imagine three rows of three dots and count them all to equal nine.
I won’t go into the relative merits of each system. But as we enter a new pedagogy, one driven using computers, tablets, virtual and mixed/augmented reality, old methods simply won’t produce the best and brightest, especially where STEM is concerned.
My host for the day was Tess Ariotti, Corporate Social Responsibility Manager for Samsung Australia. Samsung had given a considerable grant to the University of Canberra (UC) and SERC including enough Android tablets, S7 Edge smartphones, and Gear VR headsets to outfit two classes. These are being used for “interventions” – more on that later.
I also met and spent quality time with Professor Tom Lowrie, a Centenary Professor at UC who has an international research profile in the discipline area of mathematics education. Tom was not dry like my maths teachers – he was animated, passionate and driven to discover the correlation between the use of graphical languages in mathematics, and its success in helping to learn, especially when applied to disadvantaged children.
His research shows that many students find STEM boring and difficult, hence, even in developed countries there is a decreasing student interest in participation in STEM. There are also gender and cultural disparities and imbalances related to STEM participation. In other words, no matter how much you encourage STEM education it is not enough to enable and support innovation that Australia desperately needs in the future.
There must be a better way. Lowrie says it is via learning using graphical languages (Jock Mackinlay’s framework) which includes Axis, Applied position, Retinal-list, Maps, Connection, and Miscellaneous. I won’t go into this further – you can read a little more here (Table 1 – page 2). Using ten-week “intervention programs” in Indonesia and Australia he has shown significant improvement in student’s ability to visualise and understand maths. With the help of Samsung SERC is moving the program to “digital” to take it further afield, especially to remote and disadvantaged communities.
I cannot do justice to Lowrie’s work in a few words, except to say that it appears he is onto something – the use of spatial recognition programs will increase the participation of all students in STEM and improve digital literacy.
The remainder of the seminar focused on the use of new teaching methods in VR (Samsung Gear VR headsets), AR (Samsung tablets), and Mixed Reality (Microsoft HoloLens).
Lowrie (paraphrased) Nate Turley saying, “There are no rules, there are no best practices, in this environment. It requires a massive shift in thinking. We will make a lot of the rules as we go so cross-disciplinary, radically collaborative, and iterative approaches are going to win out.
He finished his presentation with a quote from a 2014 study titled Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. “Students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students using active learning methods. It is almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” Eric Mazure, Physicist Harvard University.