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Newsletter Volume 1 |
Fall 1996 |
Innovations in Fundamentals of Physical Science
Susan WyckoffDepartment of Physics & Astronomy
Arizona State University
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Newsletter Volume 1 |
Fall 1996 |
During the spring of 1996, ASU and community college instructors of the PHS 110 course, Fundamentals of Physical Science, met informally to discuss various approaches being taken to improve the pedagogy and content of this course. PHS 110 is one of the physical science courses taken by K-8 preservice teachers. Several of the instructors have already implemented innovations, and improvements are under consideration and development by other faculty. During the past several months I had the opportunity to participate in three separate workshops sponsored by: (1) American Association of Physics Teachers ("Powerful Ideas in Physical Science"), (2) The Physics Education Group, led by Lillian McDermott, University of Washington, and (3) the ACEPT Summer Workshop. All of these experiences proved very useful in making the transition from the traditional to the reformed version of PHS 110.
Traditionally PHS 110 has been taught at ASU as a large-enrollment lecture course with an associated laboratory. The 50-minute lecture sections meet three times a week and the labs meet once a week, each section for two hours. PHS 110 is a one semester 4 credit hour general studies lab science course open to all ASU students. In recent years the enrollment has totalled 100 students each semester. Changes which were in corporated into the ASU version of PHS 110 during the fall 1996 semester are summarized below.
REU student Jorge Garcia, Molly McCartney, Center for Solid State Science, ASU, and Betty Mayer, Office of Youth Preparation, ASU, discover what causes objects to float or sink.
Take-home and more formal labs became the center of the course. The formal two-hour labs (20-24 students each) meet on Tuesday and Wednesday before the general class meeting on Wednesday. Thus all students have encountered a phenomenon in an inquiry-based lab prior to its discussion in class on Wednesday. The labs are designed to be inquiry-based and student centered, and avoid cookbook style lab procedures. Calculator Based Laboratories (CBL's), TI-83 graphing calculators and desktop computers were introduced to free students from the tedium of data recording and hand plotting of graphs. The students learned to use the technology easily, and did effectively use the time freed for discussion of the phenomena being studied. Generally the course instructor and an extra TA are present in the Lab, and circulate among the students to guide the interactions and engage student in socratic dialogue discussions about the phenomena under study.
The entire PHS 110 class meets three times a week (MWF) in a large lecture hall equipped with the instructional electronic network system, Classtalk. Lectures rarely exceed ten minutes because the large class meetings are structured around group learning and problem-solving session in peer groups. The students check their knowledge in peer group discussions using ConceptTest questions developed by Eric Mazur, Department of Physics, Harvard University. Generally three to six Classtalk problems are discussed during class each period. Students discuss with other members in their group the solutions to the Classtalk problem posed, and then key their individual answers into the TI-85 calculators. The instructor's computer collects the answers and performs a statistical analysis of the class results. A histogram showing class performance is immediately displayed giving both the instructor and the students immediate feedback on students' understanding of the concept. Since the student's individual ID numbers are keyed into the calculator and collected by the computer, Classtalk can also be used as an electronic assessment tool. More importantly the instructor can gauge from the Classtalk results immediately whether to dwell on a concept or proceed to the next. Coverage of material is abbreviated compared to traditional courses, because emphasis is placed on depth of understanding key concepts in physics. Students necessarily take on more responsibility for learning directly from the text (P. Hewitt's Conceptual Physics) than in traditional lecture courses in science.
Jim Mayer, Center for Solid State Science, ASU, demonstrates to Steve Semken, Navajo CC, Tony Lawson, Steve Reynolds, and Sue Wyckoff, ASU, that faculty never stop learning.
To give students more hands-on opportunities to explore phenomena, and to promote awareness of how physical laws apply in different real-life situations, take-home experiments, called Personal Labs have been developed. The idea of take-home labs is modeled after the efforts of Jerry Pine at Cal Tech and John King at MIT who have developed take-home labs for the freshmen physics courses. For the ASU PHS 110 course, twenty-two Personal Labs have been collected into a manual called Doing Science which is being used in draft form during the fall 1996. The students purchase a science kit containing inexpensive materials, costing approximately $30, and perform experiments at home. The content of the formal Tues/Wed labs and the Personal Labs are coordinated so that a phenomenon is encountered by the students before it is discussed in class each week. The Personal Labs afford students the opportunities to perform more than two times as many experiments as in the traditional PHS 110 course. Thus there is considerably more hands-on experience in this course. The effectiveness of the innovations in PHS 110 is being tested by two evaluation instruments (Force Concept Inventory and Views About Sciences Survey) developed by Ibrahim Halloun in collaboration with David Hestenes, both of the ASU Department of Physics and Astronomy.
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