One Bottleneck at a Time

Teachers can easily identify what subjects their students have trouble with, whether it is transcription and translation, glycolysis and fermentation, balancing chemical equations, or vector analysis of forces acting on an object. Yet, no matter how teachers try to make these complex issues more accessible to students, or how new editions of textbooks provide improved graphics and more lucid descriptions, students still find these topics troublesome. This article describes a method by which teachers can analyze and find solutions for these kinds of "student-learning bottlenecks," and at the same time incorporate more inquiry into the classroom. The method is based on a summer professional development workshop called the Summer Research Institute (SRI) at Indiana University (IU) in which teachers collaborate with their colleagues to remedy learning bottlenecks that they have identified in their courses. (Contains 1 figure.)