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118 Teaching and Learning in General Educationscientific approach to science teaching works, but how do we make this thenorm for every teacher in every classroom, rather than just a set of experimentalprojects? This has been my primary focus for the past several years.A necessary condition for changing college education is changing theteaching of science at the major research universities, because they set thenorms that pervade the education system regarding how science is taughtand what it means to “learn” science. These departments produce most of thecollege teachers who then go on to teach science to the majority of collegestudents, including future school teachers. So we must start by changing thepractices of those departments.There are several major challenges to modifying how they educate theirstudents. First, in universities there is generally no connection between theincentives in the system and student learning. A lot of people would saythat this is because research universities and their faculty do not care aboutteaching or student learning. I do not think that is true—many instructors carea great deal. The real problem is that we have almost no authentic assessmentsof what students actually learn, so it is impossible to broadly measure thatlearning and hence impossible to connect it to resources and incentives. Wedo have student evaluations of instructors, but these are primarily popularitycontests and not measures of learning.The second challenge is that while we know how to develop the necessarytools for assessing student learning in a practical, widespread way at theuniversity level, carrying this out would require a significant investment.Introducing effective research-based teaching in all college science courses—by, for instance, developing and testing pedagogically effective materials,supporting technology, and providing for faculty development—would