The aim:

1. explore some physics concepts
2. demonstrate some teaching strategies as alternatives to teacher talk, class unison responses or individual responses
3. have some fun

This was the lesson trajectory:  Icebreakers (Role Play) > Brainstorm > Pair work on Problems, Drawing diagrams, Processes > Discrepant Event fun > Collaborative small group problem > done

1. ICEBREAKER/ROLE PLAY

As an icebreaker, a role play. Get into pairs (this was a hard concept) and one person is an eight year old and you are the teacher. Talk about the concept “What is energy?”

Then, reverse roles and talk about the concept “What is a force?” Success in some ways was noise and interaction.

2. BRAINSTORM (Pairs > Whole class)

Establish some parameters for the session.
The topic: forces. “In your pairs, list all the types of forces you can think of”
I had a set of pages with Chinese translations on them. Demonstrations, a bit of fun. We compiled our list, with as many real items as possible: falling apple (after climbing up a ladder), magnet, friction (a sliding block), push, pull.

Some formal"chalk and talk" - "consolidation"

3. MINI WORKSHEETS 1-4

1. SPEED OF A TOY CAR.
Aim: diagram drawing.  I had a toy car, and we went out into the corridor to measure it’s speed. Passed out two stopwatches.

2. ENERGY GAIN OF THE TOY CAR GOING UP A SLOPE.
Aim: diagram drawing again, and more of a full process of problem solving.

3. FOUR FREE BODY DIAGRAMS.
FREE BODY DIAGRAMS. I made an assumption that they had covered the concept of Free Body Diagrams. Started with the definition of a free body diagram (in Chinese)

Aim: FBD for Apple on a plate, Apple on a spring, Falling apple, Thrown apple

4. FREE BODY DIAGRAM OF A CONICAL PENDULUM.
Putting it together.

4. DISCREPANT EVENTS

We had a little break.

“Can you balance a coke can on it’s edge?”

The answer of course is yes, when you put a little water into it.

The question then is “Why does it do this?”

5. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SHEET

“If I climb up to the fifth step of the ladder and then jump, at what speed will I hit the floor?”

Students had to work in pairs, submitting one answer with full diagram, working, units . .

Working together got much much better.

The end.  Group photo and we finished.

So what?

More on this later.

The good old “I’m a filter, not a pump” keeping the not so good students down where they belong approach.  “I’ll just cater for the good students”.

A rather cynical comment from Bernard Pliers, actually on Maths education:

Evaluating the trial in the Weiman study had three dimensions

• Student engagement
• Post-test
• Attendance.

ENGAGEMENT

This fascinated me. So I reproduce in full from the supporting notes:

The engagement measurement is as follows. Sitting in pairs in the front and back sections of the lecture theatre, the trained observers would randomly select groups of 10-15 students that could be suitably observed. At five minute intervals, the observers would classify each student’s behavior according to a list of engaged or disengaged behaviors (e.g. gesturing related to material, nodding in response to comment by instructor, text messaging, surfing web, reading unrelated book). If a student’s behavior did not match one of the criteria, they were not counted, but this was a small fraction of the time. Measurements were not taken when students were voting on clicker questions because for some students this engagement could be too superficial to be meaningful as they were simply voting to get credit for responding to the question. Measurements were taken while students worked on the clicker questions when voting wasn’t underway. This protocol has been shown by E. Lane and co-workers to have a high degree of inter-rater reliability after the brief training session of the observers

E. Lane is referred to, but not referenced but is sure to be Erin Lane.

There is a diagram from one of her studies which is looking an Earth and Ocean Science class.  Physics is not the only discipline seeking approaches to improve engagement:

From: www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/files/Geo_Ocean/Lane_QuantifyingStudentBehavioralEngagement_poster.pdf

From the report:

In the experimental section, student engagement nearly doubled

THE TEST

The test questions for this topic were agreed after the week of teaching, both instructors agreeing it was a good test of the objectives. (Whew!!) From the paper:

The average scores were 41 (+/- 1%) in the control section and 74 (+/- 1%) in the experimental section. Random guessing would produce a score of 23%, so the students in the experimental section did more than twice as well on this test as those in the control section

ASIDE: all the questions are included in the online report. They are HARD questions.

ATTENDANCE

During the week of the experiment, engagement and attendance remained unchanged in the control section. In the experimental section, student engagement nearly doubled and attendance increased by 20% (Table 1). The reason for the attendance increase is not known

What is significant

It seems obvious: pay more attention and come to class more and you learn better.  Maybe.  There is a complex relationship between interest, motivation, effort, time on task, the right kind of task (etc)

In summary: two teachers taught a well defined subject to two groups to all intents and purposes the same.  Different approaches.  They both tried hard.  One group’s results were far superior to the other.

What does this mean? you may ask.

The lecturers: Instructor (A), a successful lecturer (who had won a teacher of the year award, and had good student evaluations) and a post-doc tutored by Weiman.
Both teachers gave it their best shot

Instructor A and L.D. had agreed to make this a learning competition

ASIDE: this in itself is an astounding opportunity: an instructor (A) with a history of good evaluations etc etc agreeing to this. I reckon his/her name and identity will emerge in due course hopefully NOT on a sleazy talk show, and we’ll learn some more about this project.

The course: traditionally, a physics course is divided into topics, with some building on each other.  The first part of the course was taught traditionally.  In the study the final topic (and the subject of the study) is a complete unit, Electro-magnetism.

L.D. and instructor A agreed beforehand what topics and learning objectives would be covered

The teaching: no formal lecturing at all in the experimental section. Instead:

The instructional approach used in the experimental section included elements promoted by CWSEI and its partner initiative at the University of Colorado: preclass reading assignments, preclass reading quizzes, in-class clicker questions with student-student discussion (CQ), small-group active learning tasks (GT), and targeted in-class instructor feedback (IF). Before each of the three 50-min classes, students were assigned a three- or four-page reading, and they completed a short true false online quiz on the reading

No new gadgets were used. Clickers has been used the whole course.
Pre-reading: the only change in the control section was the requirement to read the text in advance.

The populations (267, 271): using various statistical measures these were essentially identical eg same mean (+/- 1%) in mid term exam.

What is significant here

The value of pre-reading.  Other studies show this has an effect on learning.  We could say “this is obvious” but traditionally it has been hard to convince students of the value of actually doing it – and now we have ways to encourage this to be more of a regular habit.  The online testing with self marking helps.

The aim:

• exposure to a few strategies to support active learning
• practice in English
• have fun

All these students will be teachers sometime.  The hope: just to see a small demonstration in a class with interaction could trigger an interest in teaching a little differently.

And my own emergent summary: http://akowiki.canterbury.ac.nz/index.php/Physics_Education_research

Still deciding where to exist online. Probably eventually Wikieducator.com

Reflections on the last 20 years in Physics Education

There have been some quite remarkable educational discoveries (if that is the right way to phrase it) in Physics Education. The ‘Golden Age” was the 1990′s. Now (in my opinion) it is the Grunt stage: putting it into practice.

One little snippet from William J. Leonard, William J. Gerace, and Robert J. Dufresne, Department of Physics & Astronomy and Scientific Reasoning Research Institute University of Massachusetts. Not available on the net anywhere (that I can find). But there is an article at http://umperg.physics.umass.edu/library/Gerace_1999cbp/download

This may seem boring, but believe me, for a physics class, it can be transfomational. Everything except mere telling.

Eleven instructional modes, with short statements of purpose for each mode.

1. Use multiple representations
to enrich students understanding of concepts, and to provide alternative ways to solve problems.

2. Make forward and backward references
to help students to interconnect their knowledge store.

3. Explore extended contexts
to avoid oversimplified generalizations, and to help students abstract concepts

4. Compare and contrast
to sensitise students to those categories and features useful for analysis.

5. Classify and categorize
to make students aware of useful categories, and to increase the sophistication of ideas used to classify.

6. Predict & show (inadequacy of old model)
to help students become self-aware and self-invested, to give them practice in applying their models to new situations, and to confront other peoples’ models.

7. Explain (summarize, describe, discuss, define, etc)
to become aware of features used for analysis and problem solving and to practice using and modifying one’s model.

8. Generate multiple solutions
to encourage students to develop Strategic Knowledge elements, and to help them prioritize knowledge elements and organisational schemes.

9. Plan, justify and strategize
to develop a deeper understanding of physics concepts and their role in
problem solving, and to develop Strategic Knowledge.

10. Reflect (evaluate, integrate, extend, generalize etc)
to solidify the results of other activities and increase the likelihood that long-term change has occurred, and to help students make the knowledge they acquire useful and accessible to them at a later time.

11. Meta-communicate
to motivate students, to help students become self-invested, to address learning issues, and to improve communication.

I intend to touch on each of these in the Chuxiong Workshop. Have some fun. Stimulate some brain cells. I still remember with a little bit of horror the Workshop in 1999 where we were discussing misconceptions. There in front of everyone a some of us showed our own misconceptions . . .

Novice vs Expert

Also from Gerace et al:

I have not worked with these ideas for a while. Some literature searching shows some new applications of these ideas. But it really all comes back to Donald Simanek’s quote:

Nothing works unless the students work.

The new ITAG (IT advisory group) meets once a month for lunch and an informal catch up on various matters at 0ur institution.  They invited me in to speak about web 2.0 and benefits (And a guy from the web team to talk for 10 minutes about the other side)

On the TALO list from Kylie:

It looks like a bit too much to cover in ten mins (8 topics, 1minute and a bit for each??).

One of the issues with presenting stuff about flexible/online learning, is newbies get overwhelmed, and their heads spin. that can turn some folks off.  <snip>

Also, provide a list of links covered in your talk. Almost every time I present these intro style sessions for staff, they want all your links.
Better still, just link them to a delicious page with all your links – leading by best practice.

Kylie was right of course.  There was a question “Could I provide links”.  I will of course.  I thought I had headed off this query with a brief description of Delicious.
It was a good session, (9.45 min), and yes, Kylie was right about ‘too much’ – but that’s life.  I know what I’d like to do with Blogs (WP MU or roll your own) plus nice simple aggregators.  But I still don’t know what to do about wikis.

I feel like the geeks have let me down a bit.  Here’s a story:

In 1998 I was conducting some research on lectures.  Videoing lectures, principally in Physics (but also maths) doing their thing explaining stuff.  Often they would miss out on a vital step – or gloss over it so quickly we would miss it.

Previous research has demonstrated that physics experts categorize physics problems by the principles used to solve them; whereas, many physics novices tend to categorize physics problems by surface-feature similarity. This current study sought to find differences between physics experts and novices on a memory test of physics pictures.