Reflection On Stanford Prison Experiment

Every Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go to a Stanford classroom inside the Jordan Hall, the same hall where the classic Stanford Prison Experiment took place more than four decades ago. However, it’s not a psychology class that I am taking — it is a class on learning and teaching science, taught by Carl Wieman, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics. Carl is now more active in research and works aiming to improve science education, and was recognized as one of the recipients of the 2017 World Innovation Summit for Education Award for his efforts to tackle global education challenges. It has been a privilege to be able to take a class on science teaching with a pioneer himself on the subject.

This class has two main learning goals: recognizing existing challenges in science teaching and thinking of the best possible ways to address those challenges. For that, we take a course that was taught to us in the past as an example course, and critique on things the teacher of that course did not do right. We also get chances to slowly develop activities, syllabus, assignments that could resolve those problems and facilitate better learning in the same example course. The class is quite informal, mostly involving discussions among peers, and Carl is there mostly acting as a moderator. Every class day, he comes with the same curiosity and enthusiasm to hear

Some of the biggest challenges in the Nepalese education system relate to these same requirements. Our failure to gauge the prior knowledge of our students, our inefficacy to keep all students motivated to learn, the lack of enough practice opportunities, and our inadequacy of timely and relevant feedback. These challenges are not just faced by low budget schools; they are also faced by many of the big name