On Teaching to the Masses and the Masters: Competing Requirements for Undergraduate Education

Generational changes in the preparation of students for entering university have been substantial. The 21 century high-school experience is very different from that of the prior generation. In particular, the social and academic skills developed seem to be those of reaction to external stimuli and peer-group conformance rather than individuality, personal responsibility, and problem-solving. Responsibility and activity tend to be concentrated in severely restricted environments, where the skills of creative problem-solving are not sufficiently emphasized and/or developed. The “Nintendo generation” of students tend to be visual learners [10] and they expect significant external motivation. However, introductory university courses in the sciences assume that independent curiosity motivates the expected problem-solving approach, a significant contradiction between expected and actual personality traits. The greater mass of the student body is ill-served by traditional pedagogy geared to those who readily master the materials. In this paper, we present a strategy for introducing and reinforcing structured problem-solving strategies that are relevant to both the sciences and to the larger audience of the general student population. We include the motivation, teaching methods, and course topics. We stress active learning within a meaningful context that enables students to take the lessons from this course into the remainder of their undergraduate degrees and the rest of their lives.