PROVO — There are no long lectures in John Bell's freshman biology class at Brigham Young University.

Ditto for more than 200 students taking the course from William Bradshaw.

That's because both have spent more than 10 years breaking the mold of traditional teaching by interjecting student participation, group work and challenging problem-solving exercises into their classroom instruction.

The result? Students who not only know about biology — but think like biologists.

"We assumed people don't learn anything from sitting through an hourlong lecture, copying slides, memorizing long lists and then cramming before the tests," Bell said. "We've all experienced that in our educations and know it doesn't work."

The U.S. Department of Education agreed and took interest in the pair's research five years ago, giving them a grant to determine if their teaching methods enhanced student performance.

BYU statistician Richard Sudweeks analyzed data from the classes they taught and discovered students' critical reasoning skills increased using Bell and Bradshaw's method.

Now, the national department is giving the pair $480,000 to implement their teaching techniques at six schools — the University of Washington, Youngstown State University, University of Utah, Texas Tech University, California State-Fullerton and University of California-Riverside.

"We are delighted to see this important national support coming to BYU," said Kent Crookston, dean of BYU's biology department. "The results of their work will not only bless this college, but teachers of all disciplines, anywhere."

To help students think for themselves, Bradshaw and Bell recommend instructors push students to draw their own conclusions from such experimental data as photographs, tables and graphs, rather than feeding them a lot of facts.

They also encourage student participation by calling on students or having classes break into smaller groups to work on problems — even if the class has 500 students.

"We weren't challenging the students, we weren't making them think," Bradshaw said. "So what we've tried to do instead is to turn the classroom into a problem-solving workshop. The teacher isn't so much an instructor but is more like a coach, helping his students reach a specific goal."

David Morton, assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah's School of Medicine, uses a similar teaching approach with his medical students.

"A university is an institution of higher learning and should challenge students to not just memorize facts but to logically think through problems," Morton said. "The new methods will help encourage medical students to incorporate the basic sciences into more clinical problem-solving scenarios."

Bell and Bradshaw are confident their teaching methods will better prepare students for postgraduate careers.

"It doesn't matter if they're studying science, business, law, the humanities or the arts," Bell said. "It's essential that students learn to use their minds."

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E-mail: lwarner@desnews.com