In the first four chapters, Handelsman, Miller, and Pfund provide an overview of the landscape of scientific teaching and its three facets: active learning, assessment, and diversity.
Each chapter includes specific examples for classroom teaching, in addition to research findings.
Chapter 5 puts scientific teaching to work by helping the reader build a framework for instructional materials that focus on what students will learn.
The last chapter offers strategies to enlist collegial support and integrate scientific teaching into faculty culture.
HHMI Professor Jo Handelsman and her colleagues at the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching (WPST) have distilled key findings from education, learning, and cognitive psychology and translated them into six chapters of digestible research points and practical classroom examples.
The recommendations have been tried and tested in the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology and through the WPST.
Scientific Teaching encourages the reader to approach teaching in a way that captures the spirit and rigor of scientific research and to contribute to transforming how students learn science.