HPCwire: TeraGrid ’11 Keynote Speaker Nora Sabelli Calls for New Ways to Teach Science

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August 03, 2011

TeraGrid ’11 Keynote Speaker Nora Sabelli Calls for New Ways to Teach Science

August 3 -- The scientific community, along with the National Science Foundation leadership, must rethink how the sciences are taught at all levels by focusing not only on computational thinking but also on modeling, said Nora Sabelli, a former program director for NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources.

Speaking at the TeraGrid ‘11 conference held July 18-21 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Sabelli, now a senior science advisor with the independent, nonprofit research institute SRI International, urged attendees to reframe their thinking about how science is taught, not only from grade school through the graduate level, but outside the formal education system and throughout what she called our “life-long” and “life-wide” learning experiences.

First coined in 1996, the term “computational thinking” gets its name because it borrows many of the same techniques used in computer science.

In her keynote, “Data and Computer-Driven Modern Science – How Do We Prepare the Future for it?,” Sabelli said we lack what she called a “commulativity” of scientific knowledge in education, i.e. using more effective learning techniques and processes that leverage new technologies for teaching science to a new generation of students and researchers.

“The way we teach has not kept pace with the way we do science,” said Sabelli, who prior to joining SRI in late 2001 worked on several NSF-wide and cross-agency initiatives related to education, technology and science, such as the Interagency Education Research Initiative . “We need to teach science in a new way, not just talk among ourselves,” she told more than 450 TeraGrid ’11 attendees. “And we need to stress its importance to society.”

Sabelli said that while computational thinking lacks the decades of theoretical and empirical work that is found in fields such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, this approach is based on the use of models that is vital to developing and expanding new learning opportunities as science makes more technical advances now than it has ever done in the past. “Nobody has picked up computational thinking and extended it as a way of using models in science,” she said, telling attendees that “you as a group have the tools to do this.”

One of the keys to help students better understand science is to use models, which Sabelli said differs from using simulations, the latter of which seek to reproduce an experience, while the former focuses on concepts and understanding the problem.

“The use of models helps people to abstract things,” said Sabelli, who cited how we tell time, or how we associate the color black with death in our society, as examples of models we use without thinking, many of which were learned at a very early age through repeated exposure. “Everything we do is interpreted through models. We use mental models and don’t even know it.”

Sabelli also said NSF’s leadership needs to embrace a systematic study that includes a comprehensive instrumentation of cyberlearning software for enabling better assessment of conceptual learning. “We need scientific literacy for the next generation,” she said, noting that the public at large “doesn’t see the full complexity of science and the importance of using data to validate models and simulations.”

The NSF-funded TeraGrid, the nation’s largest open-access scientific discovery infrastructure, is being succeeded this summer by a new project called XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment). XSEDE is a five-year, $121 million 17-institution partnership led by the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications and will provide the most advanced and powerful collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.

Initially, XSEDE will support 16 supercomputers across the country. It also includes other specialized digital resources and services to complement these computers. These resources will be expanded throughout the lifetime of the project.

The XSEDE partnership includes: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University /University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, University of Tennessee Knoxville, University of Virginia, Shodor Education Foundation, Southeastern Universities Research Association, University of Chicago, University of California San Diego, Indiana University, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Purdue University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, University of California Berkeley, Rice University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It is led by the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Written by Jan Zverina, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

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