UNITED KINGDOM:
'Much of What We Were Doing Didn't Work'

Currying curiosity. Derek Raine says students "are hooked into working hard" by courses they find interesting. CREDIT: COURTESY OF DEREK RAINE

Physics and chemistry are caught in a vicious circle. High demand for graduates from high-tech industry and the financial sector has meant fewer students going into teaching. That depleted teaching corps--some 25% of U.K. high schools, for example, now have no specialist physics teacher--could mean fewer inspiring teachers, says Raine, which leads to fewer students selecting physics or chemistry at university. (At age 16, U.K. pupils choose just three or four subjects to continue through to graduation at age 18, and they study their major almost exclusively for 3 years at university.)

This dire situation has developed despite a 42% growth in the U.K.'s undergraduate population between 1995 and 2005 and a government campaign to get at least one-half of all young people to attend university. But some subjects have lost ground: The total share studying physical sciences has dropped by nearly one percentage point since 1998, to 3.7%.

Hence Raine's struggle to boost Leicester's undergraduate physics program. He himself trained at Cambridge University and did postdoctoral work at Oxford in quantum field theory and astrophysics that branched into biophysics. His experience teaching at the University of Leicester made him "see how much of what we were doing didn't work," he says, especially for the average or struggling student. His search for a better answer led him to problem-based learning (PBL), an approach often used in medical schools and pioneered at Canada's McMaster University in the 1970s.

Working in teams, students are given a real-world problem to research, solve, and then explicate to the class. One exercise casts students as the crew of a cargo plane that has crashed on a desert island and asks them to construct some sort of beacon to communicate their position. Such problem solving "is what we do every day as researchers," says Sarah Symons, head of a project to develop PBL at Leicester. "I can't see why it's not obvious to everyone."

Today, after 7 years of work, about 25% of Leicester's physics courses are taught using PBL, and three-quarters of staff members are involved in some way. Leicester's chemistry department is developing a PBL course, and a few other U.K. universities are altering their curricula. Although studies of the effectiveness of PBL have produced contradictory results, some suggest that students retain their knowledge longer and are better at applying it to real-world situations.

The U.K. government is also belatedly tackling the problem. The lack of action on physics education is a "big failure" of Tony Blair's government, charges Peter Cotgreave of the Campaign for Science and Engineering in London. But after some high-profile department closures (Science, 4 February 2005, p. 668, and 1 December 2006, p. 1363), the government last year put up $150 million over 3 years to help finance expensive lab-based courses and gave grants to physics, chemistry, engineering, and mathematics societies to stimulate demand for and improve curricula. Raine is involved in one such project being run by the Institute of Physics (IOP) in London to create a multidisciplinary degree with a healthy dose of physics. "Derek's always up for something new," says IOP's Philip Diamond.

Raine actually began developing such a degree 5 years ago in an attempt to expand science enrollment at Leicester. His Integrated Sciences course has been running for 3 years now, using PBL extensively. The curriculum asks students how they might have built the pyramids of Egypt and used them for astronomy, and then moves on to space science, nanotechnology, biomechanics, and quantum teleportation, among other subjects. All of these topics are presented in PBL scenarios such as mock court cases, film productions, and preparations for the 2012 London Olympics. "You can ask any question, no matter how stupid," says second-year undergraduate Ben Watson.

Undergraduates aren't yet flocking to pursue the Integrated Sciences degree, however. This year's first graduating class numbers only six students, and in a typical year, fewer than 10 enter the program. "Students are wary of something new," says course administrator Alex Mack, and sometimes unsure of what it prepares them to do. Raine thinks it's ideal training for interdisciplinary research, science-based industry, or teaching. Raine is hoping that IOP's decision to sponsor similar degrees at three other universities--Surrey, University of East Anglia, and London South Bank--will create a "brand" that will boost enrollment.

"Our vision is that all science students should initially come in studying Integrated Sciences," Raine says. "Not everyone is going to be a string theorist."