Recommended Reading

Welcome  to CTSI’s feature on recommended reading. Once a month, a U of T faculty or staff member will suggest books or articles on teaching, learning and higher education.

Our inaugural recommendation comes courtesy of John Percy, Professor Emeritus, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and Teaching Academy member:

Tobias, Sheila (1990), “They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different”, Research Corporation, Tucson AZ, pp. 94, paperback, ($3.99 on Amazon)

Sheila Tobias is a social scientist who has made deep and constructive studies of the teaching and learning of science and mathematics, and written many books and articles on these topics.  Research Corporation is a non-profit foundation which, through its support of this work, made it available at a very low cost. This book is “a study of why students abandon science for other disciplines”. The core message is the following: especially in introductory courses, the students are not “like us”; they are unlikely to do graduate work and eventually become a professor in our discipline. They don’t necessarily want the course content to be dumbed-down, but they do want to see its connections and applications to society and to other disciplines.  This is a special problem in physics, which is too often taught in a narrow, analytical way.  No wonder physics enrolments are going down across the continent!