- Brainstorming on waves I think is effective--keep this exercise next time.
- I use the wave table a lot--to demonstrate speed, frequency, energy transfer, etc. I think any of those uses are very effective, judged by the focus of the students on the demo. I tried a new question this year, I said, "so what do I have to do to make the wave travel faster? Shake faster or slower?" Most students shouted "faster" and I didn't hear anyone say "it doesn't matter," so I think this was a good learning experience. The wave table is also good when I can shake the first rod, and get a wave to travel down and make the last rod hit the table with a "ding." I then ask the students to describe what happened. It's fun to have them realize / describe how the energy flowed from one wave into a sound wave into their ear, etc. I have no data, but I feel like the mesmerizing effect of the wave table puts people in a good frame of mind for learning about waves.
- I'm pretty sure they really liked the ripple tank applet. I'd really like to know if any students with computers in class were using the applet at the same time I was. If you've never seen this applet before, you should check it out.
- The note about earthquake seismic wave speeds from the TA, Zhang Jiang, really needed a youtube video or an applet. My verbal explanation just wasn't very interesting, I don't think.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
4th Lecture, Oscillations and Intro to Waves
Last Thursday was the 4th lecture of the semester, where we went over oscillations and introductory waves (slides are embedded below from slideshare). The demos I used were the wave table (I love it), mass on a spring, anchored slinky, and rubber tube stretched across room (also great). The killer applet is the ripple tank applet from falstad. I felt like students were bored already with Brownian motion--not sure whether any liked going over those quiz questions. I also felt a bit boring going over the details of oscillation and wave terminology, but it's sort of necessary. I used to "debrief" from my lectures on my private wiki, and I think I've now transitioned to using this blog. I'll give my commentary in general order of slides:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
3rd Lecture, Brownian motion, energy, conservation of energy
OK, now some comments on today's lecture. First, I'll say that I spent a bunch of time learning names before today's lecture. I think I know about 50 out of 150 students, and within a few lectures, I think I can learn most of them (say 120). The first student who asked a question today, I knew his name, and he said, "wow, that's impressive," and I though to myself, "yes...yes it is." Yes I am tooting my own horn. Not because I'm good at learning names (I stink, actually), but because I think it's a really good thing to do in terms of building a classroom community and I'm achieving it. I think it improves the learning atmosphere and students like it. I think also it vastly increases my enjoyment of teaching. One of my talents is to get real happiness out of students' successes. Knowing their names, and even better, knowing a little about them magnifies this effect greatly.
I have no idea at this point whether students liked today's lecture or any part of the course so far. I had assigned them to read Feynman's lecture about conservation of energy, which I love. I asked them via show of hands who found the reading (like 4 pages) illuminating, and NONE of the >120 people raised their hand! Ouch! That's really good to know, of course. I made the common mistake of putting the students way out of their context of understanding. I love the Feynman piece, but I've been through graduate school in physics. This is many of these students' first science course in college. The irony is that during my first lecture, I led them through that fantastic exercise (Wason selection task), which demonstrates how important context is. Whoops & sorry! I'm not too worried, though, as I am pretty confident that the upcoming topics are going to be pretty interesting and illuminating.
The big demo today was the nose basher. This is the one where there is a bowling ball hung from a hinge on the 20 foot ceiling. The unlucky person (me in this case) holds the bowling ball up against his face, let's it swing down and away, and back again. Of course, it does not bash his face (but please supply youtube videos if you know of other results). But the ball moves remarkably fast when it is mere feet from the face. It's alarming. And quite crowd-pleasing. The demo actually doesn't prove anything per se. But it's so entertaining that I think it's a great backdrop for talking about conservation of energy and energy flow. A student, Brandy, even pointed out that the ball was like an inch from my face, not exactly touching it on the return. This was a great way to point out transfer of energy to the air.
The other demo is the "rattleback," the asymmetric wooden thingy that only likes to spin in one direction. We have a big one that's easy to see. It's a great toy, just fun to observe. And like Nose Basher, it's a good backdrop for discussing energy flow...as well as the fact that conservation of energy doesn't let you predict everything about energy flow. I first saw this demo when a famous physicist gave a keynote lecture at Cornell in 1997 or so. He named the rattleback as one of his 7 wonders of the world. Another of his was the "green flash." I don't remember the other five, but they too have probably been solved in the post-wikipedia age :) I remember liking the rattleback, because I had previously noticed it with many telephone handsets (they exhibit the spin / rocking reversal). I tell my physics 102 students what telephone handsets are and explain to them the concept of the "home phone."
Next up on Thursday, we start talking about waves. Two key demos. First is the "wave table." This is such a beautiful demo device. It makes wonderful waves. If I had one of these in my house or office, I would probably spend 5 hours a day waving it. The second is the Ripple Tank applet from Paul Falstad. It's a fantastic applet for demonstrating countless wave phenomena.
Monday, January 26, 2009
2nd lecture in conceptual physics course, atoms and Brownian motion
Last Thursday was my second lecture in the conceptual physics course, and the first "real" lecture in terms of physics concepts I'd want the students to remember. I liked how Feynman started out with atoms in his lecture series, so when I started this course, I figured I couldn't do any better than he did. (Although I was recently told by a leader of physics education at U. Minnesota that Feynman's lectures were not effective at all in terms of the learning of the Cal tech students...whoops!) I had assigned the students some reading from Feynman's lecture and also from our textbook about the structure of matter.
I've posted the lecture slides on Slideshare. Before getting into Brownian motion, we did a brainstorming exercise where students suggested things that are in the room, and I tried to classify them in real-time using powerpoint on the overhead projector. By the time we'd finished, the students had come up with many of the things which we'll study this semester and I had tried to classify them in terms of concrete versus abstract and complex versus fundamental. I didn't tell the students the classification system, and they were able to guess what it was after watching me file things away. I don't know if this exercise accomplishes much, but the students seemed engaged. At the end, I pointed out concepts on the page and how they were interconnected and there is no obvious order in which to approach the concepts. I then used this an explanation for the order in which we're approaching things: matter, waves, light, sound, etc.
In terms of Brownian motion, I like the "molecular motion" overhead demonstration. This is a device that sits on top of a regular overhead projector and has a corral that can shake ball bearings. Unfortunately, I didn't get to practice with the demo, and the ball bearings I chose were not well shaken at all. I'd wanted to demonstrate Brownian motion by putting a big ball bearing in with a bunch of small ones, but I pretty much crashed and burned. Hopefully the Brownian motion applets we'll see tomorrow will make up for this. I definitely got lots of laughter, and being laughed at is better than being slept at, in my opinion.
The laser speckle demonstration worked very well in my opinion. I described this a bit in my previous post. As far as I could tell from a show of hands, everyone in the entire room could easily see the shimmering laser speckle pattern on the wet paint. We'll revisit this again later in the semester when talking about interference. Thank you to Dan Ralph @ Cornell Physics for showing us this demo back when I was in grad school!
I'm not sure whether students enjoy the discussion of scanning tunneling microscopy or not. The reason I include it is because I think it's yet another great demonstration of the existence of atoms -- you can practically see them.
Tomorrow's lecture will be about Brownian motion (discussion of homework question, applets) and introduction to energy and conservation of energy. The in-class demos will be the "rattleback" and the nose basher.
I've posted the lecture slides on Slideshare. Before getting into Brownian motion, we did a brainstorming exercise where students suggested things that are in the room, and I tried to classify them in real-time using powerpoint on the overhead projector. By the time we'd finished, the students had come up with many of the things which we'll study this semester and I had tried to classify them in terms of concrete versus abstract and complex versus fundamental. I didn't tell the students the classification system, and they were able to guess what it was after watching me file things away. I don't know if this exercise accomplishes much, but the students seemed engaged. At the end, I pointed out concepts on the page and how they were interconnected and there is no obvious order in which to approach the concepts. I then used this an explanation for the order in which we're approaching things: matter, waves, light, sound, etc.
In terms of Brownian motion, I like the "molecular motion" overhead demonstration. This is a device that sits on top of a regular overhead projector and has a corral that can shake ball bearings. Unfortunately, I didn't get to practice with the demo, and the ball bearings I chose were not well shaken at all. I'd wanted to demonstrate Brownian motion by putting a big ball bearing in with a bunch of small ones, but I pretty much crashed and burned. Hopefully the Brownian motion applets we'll see tomorrow will make up for this. I definitely got lots of laughter, and being laughed at is better than being slept at, in my opinion.
The laser speckle demonstration worked very well in my opinion. I described this a bit in my previous post. As far as I could tell from a show of hands, everyone in the entire room could easily see the shimmering laser speckle pattern on the wet paint. We'll revisit this again later in the semester when talking about interference. Thank you to Dan Ralph @ Cornell Physics for showing us this demo back when I was in grad school!
I'm not sure whether students enjoy the discussion of scanning tunneling microscopy or not. The reason I include it is because I think it's yet another great demonstration of the existence of atoms -- you can practically see them.
Tomorrow's lecture will be about Brownian motion (discussion of homework question, applets) and introduction to energy and conservation of energy. The in-class demos will be the "rattleback" and the nose basher.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
First lecture in conceptual physics course, Wason selection task was effective
Yesterday I presented my first lecture of the semester in Physics 102, "Introduction to Physics." The alternate course title I like best would be "Conceptual Physics," and others are "Physics without Math," "Physics for Poets," "Why the Sky is Blue," etc. You can find my syllabus on Scribd. Here are the goals stated in the syllabus:
I like these goals, but they are not measurable, really. I did not take the time this semester to implement pre-testing and post-testing assessment as I had hoped. Perhaps partially the reason I didn't is I'm still quite annoyed that this is the last time I'm going to teach this class for a number of years. Our department has a custom of switching courses every 3 years, and also I was told that I need to show diversity in teaching in order to get tenure. I strongly disagree with both of these notions, but well, you know...
In any case, the goals are to have fun learning some physics concepts and to come away from the course with a positive impression of physics and science and an ability to enjoy learning about them. I don't have rigorous data, just informal student feedback (thank you emails, which I absolutely love to receive) and the scantron feedback forms. But this anectdotal evidence indicates that our goals were achieved the first two years. Plus, I have really enjoyed it and felt good that many students learned a lot and enjoyed the course. The only negative is that it takes a lot of time, especially the first semester I taught the course, where I developed about 28 powrepoint lectures from scratch, 75 minutes each--that utterly kicked my ass. I would like to put all of my powerpoint lectures on Scribd, in case they could ever be useful to someone else. The only thing keeping me from doing this is that I know I've missed attribution of some of the pictures I've "borrowed" for my lectures. Plus, I definitely don't have copyright on many of the non-CC licensed images I've used. Any comments on how to deal with this? I have in mind that I could try to correct this as I present the lectures this term, but realistically, that's not going to happen.
I did post my yesterday's introduction slides on Slideshare. I think the only stuff I use is from wikipedia and I attribute it. Overall, the lecture went well and I had a great time. Once again, the students are fantastic and I am sure I will enjoy getting to know them and seeing them succeed. I have some comments on a couple specific things from yesterday.
Wason Selection Task
One thing I do during my first lecture is take pictures of all of the students while they are doing group discussion. This accomplishes a number of things. First, it gets them acquainted to talking with their neighbors, which we do several times / lecture. Second, it allows me to practice learning names over the next couple weeks. I have each group write down their names along with physical description and then I go around the room taking photos of the group and telling them their group number. It will take me a couple hours to put the names with the faces in powerpoint, and then a couple more hours of studying. Combined with interacting with the students, I've been able to learn quite a few of their names. I did pretty well with 120 students last year, but this semester I have 154 students registered, so I'm nervous whether I'll be able to do this or not. I think it's important, though, and the ability to talk to people by name adds a lot of value for students. Incidentally, I'm helped by the fact that students tend to sit in the same areas every day, so I'm basically making a seating chart without imposing one. This is a technique I learned from TA training, and it works really well. Thank you to whoever did TA training at Cornell Physics in 1996!
OK, so in order to carry out this exercise on the first day, I need an entertaining puzzle for the students to debate with each other. The first two years, I tried using the Monty Hall paradox. That worked pretty well, but this year I switched to the Wason selection task. I was REALLY happy with the way this turned out. First, I had them use their iClickers with the number / color version of the selection task. Since most of them did not yet have iClickers, I also had them shout out their answers (surprisingly, it's pretty easy to poll 150 students this way, and the shouts matched the iClicker graphs). Most people got the puzzle wrong (which is what always happens), and after debating, a consensus developed on the "wrong" answer (to flip over all the cards). The reason I liked this puzzle so much is because when I showed the same logic puzzle with the beer / under 21 version, then entire class immediately picked the correct answer. I could then show the two questions next to each other and blab some stuff about how learning is contextual. I think it does demonstrate that, but the important thing is that they probably had fun while I took photos and probably remembered the exercise in a positive light and some probably even tried it out on their friends after class. I'll definitely use this for my next large class.
Wireless in the classroom
Someone on friendfeed recently posted an article talking about either the perils or opportunities of wireless in the classroom. It turns out my classroom has wireless for the first time, so I brought this issue up with the students. I basically told them I was worried about the possible distraction, but that the worry was far outweighed by the possible benefits it could have. I was telling them I didn't really know how we'd leverage it, but that I encouraged people to use it. While saying this, I saw a Mac laptop in front of someone, so I said, "Like you, Mac Guy (I don't know their names yet)...you're probably already checking out our facebook page, aren't you?" He said, "Yeah! actually I am...I'm looking at photos of you." (At this point I realized that there must be a bunch of embarrassing photos of me on facebook.) I said, "like what?" and he said, "Some marching band photos..." I made a perfect dramatic pause and then addressed the class, "Well...you already knew I was a dork." This drew much laughter, which made me happy. OK, that little anecdote was unnecessary, but it was funny if you were there. This wireless experiment will be interesting throughout the semester. The one thing I have in mind is that we look at a lot of applets during lecture, and I'm hoping the students will be trying them out themselves while I'm showing it on the projector. I can see that this could turn into mayhem, but I also feel that the level of learning will be much higher if they can play with the applet themselves. We'll see!
Tomorrow we'll do the first real physics lecture, where we'll talk about the structure of matter, focused around Brownian motion. The two demos will be a demo that shakes ball bearings on an overhead projector (to give an idea of molecules in a gas) and a demo where we look at laser speckle off wet and dry paint. This latter demo is really cool and easy to do, and I find it a fascinating demonstration of Brownian motion without need for a microscope. I learned it from Dan Ralph during his graduate solid state physics course at Cornell back in 1997-ish. You'll need to see it with your own eyes (maybe I can take a video of it?), but the laser speckle pattern on dry paint does not change if you keep your head still. On wet paint, the pattern shimmers, due to the microscopic latex particles undergoing Brownian motion. So, basically you can see evidence of Brownian motion with a cheap laser and paint. Laser speckle is a great demo, because you can see it from any distance away, and it's fun to look at whether or not it's shimmering.
The primary goal of the course is to help students develop a better understanding of a variety of physics concepts that they experience or hear about in their every day lives. We will strive for true understanding of the concept versus tiresome memorization of facts and trivia. This may lead to a heightened enjoyment of everyday physics wonders (such as rainbows, sunsets, waves, phases of the moon), improved ability to understand technological issues (such as energy shortages and sources, nuclear power and radiation, cell phone communication), and a deeper understanding of future scientific material including biology, chemistry, geology, medicine, and possibly a subsequent more advanced physics course!
I like these goals, but they are not measurable, really. I did not take the time this semester to implement pre-testing and post-testing assessment as I had hoped. Perhaps partially the reason I didn't is I'm still quite annoyed that this is the last time I'm going to teach this class for a number of years. Our department has a custom of switching courses every 3 years, and also I was told that I need to show diversity in teaching in order to get tenure. I strongly disagree with both of these notions, but well, you know...
In any case, the goals are to have fun learning some physics concepts and to come away from the course with a positive impression of physics and science and an ability to enjoy learning about them. I don't have rigorous data, just informal student feedback (thank you emails, which I absolutely love to receive) and the scantron feedback forms. But this anectdotal evidence indicates that our goals were achieved the first two years. Plus, I have really enjoyed it and felt good that many students learned a lot and enjoyed the course. The only negative is that it takes a lot of time, especially the first semester I taught the course, where I developed about 28 powrepoint lectures from scratch, 75 minutes each--that utterly kicked my ass. I would like to put all of my powerpoint lectures on Scribd, in case they could ever be useful to someone else. The only thing keeping me from doing this is that I know I've missed attribution of some of the pictures I've "borrowed" for my lectures. Plus, I definitely don't have copyright on many of the non-CC licensed images I've used. Any comments on how to deal with this? I have in mind that I could try to correct this as I present the lectures this term, but realistically, that's not going to happen.
I did post my yesterday's introduction slides on Slideshare. I think the only stuff I use is from wikipedia and I attribute it. Overall, the lecture went well and I had a great time. Once again, the students are fantastic and I am sure I will enjoy getting to know them and seeing them succeed. I have some comments on a couple specific things from yesterday.
Wason Selection Task
One thing I do during my first lecture is take pictures of all of the students while they are doing group discussion. This accomplishes a number of things. First, it gets them acquainted to talking with their neighbors, which we do several times / lecture. Second, it allows me to practice learning names over the next couple weeks. I have each group write down their names along with physical description and then I go around the room taking photos of the group and telling them their group number. It will take me a couple hours to put the names with the faces in powerpoint, and then a couple more hours of studying. Combined with interacting with the students, I've been able to learn quite a few of their names. I did pretty well with 120 students last year, but this semester I have 154 students registered, so I'm nervous whether I'll be able to do this or not. I think it's important, though, and the ability to talk to people by name adds a lot of value for students. Incidentally, I'm helped by the fact that students tend to sit in the same areas every day, so I'm basically making a seating chart without imposing one. This is a technique I learned from TA training, and it works really well. Thank you to whoever did TA training at Cornell Physics in 1996!
OK, so in order to carry out this exercise on the first day, I need an entertaining puzzle for the students to debate with each other. The first two years, I tried using the Monty Hall paradox. That worked pretty well, but this year I switched to the Wason selection task. I was REALLY happy with the way this turned out. First, I had them use their iClickers with the number / color version of the selection task. Since most of them did not yet have iClickers, I also had them shout out their answers (surprisingly, it's pretty easy to poll 150 students this way, and the shouts matched the iClicker graphs). Most people got the puzzle wrong (which is what always happens), and after debating, a consensus developed on the "wrong" answer (to flip over all the cards). The reason I liked this puzzle so much is because when I showed the same logic puzzle with the beer / under 21 version, then entire class immediately picked the correct answer. I could then show the two questions next to each other and blab some stuff about how learning is contextual. I think it does demonstrate that, but the important thing is that they probably had fun while I took photos and probably remembered the exercise in a positive light and some probably even tried it out on their friends after class. I'll definitely use this for my next large class.
Wireless in the classroom
Someone on friendfeed recently posted an article talking about either the perils or opportunities of wireless in the classroom. It turns out my classroom has wireless for the first time, so I brought this issue up with the students. I basically told them I was worried about the possible distraction, but that the worry was far outweighed by the possible benefits it could have. I was telling them I didn't really know how we'd leverage it, but that I encouraged people to use it. While saying this, I saw a Mac laptop in front of someone, so I said, "Like you, Mac Guy (I don't know their names yet)...you're probably already checking out our facebook page, aren't you?" He said, "Yeah! actually I am...I'm looking at photos of you." (At this point I realized that there must be a bunch of embarrassing photos of me on facebook.) I said, "like what?" and he said, "Some marching band photos..." I made a perfect dramatic pause and then addressed the class, "Well...you already knew I was a dork." This drew much laughter, which made me happy. OK, that little anecdote was unnecessary, but it was funny if you were there. This wireless experiment will be interesting throughout the semester. The one thing I have in mind is that we look at a lot of applets during lecture, and I'm hoping the students will be trying them out themselves while I'm showing it on the projector. I can see that this could turn into mayhem, but I also feel that the level of learning will be much higher if they can play with the applet themselves. We'll see!
Tomorrow we'll do the first real physics lecture, where we'll talk about the structure of matter, focused around Brownian motion. The two demos will be a demo that shakes ball bearings on an overhead projector (to give an idea of molecules in a gas) and a demo where we look at laser speckle off wet and dry paint. This latter demo is really cool and easy to do, and I find it a fascinating demonstration of Brownian motion without need for a microscope. I learned it from Dan Ralph during his graduate solid state physics course at Cornell back in 1997-ish. You'll need to see it with your own eyes (maybe I can take a video of it?), but the laser speckle pattern on dry paint does not change if you keep your head still. On wet paint, the pattern shimmers, due to the microscopic latex particles undergoing Brownian motion. So, basically you can see evidence of Brownian motion with a cheap laser and paint. Laser speckle is a great demo, because you can see it from any distance away, and it's fun to look at whether or not it's shimmering.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Panic! Classes start Tuesday. Course goals for conceptual physics course.
I apologize for the long delay between blog entries. Well, I suppose that will continue now that the fantasy time of Winter Break has ended. I finished up teaching Junior Lab in mid-December (my previous blog described the open science fun we have in that course). On Tuesday is my first lecture in Physics 102. I think the official title is Introduction to Physics, or possibly Introductory Physics. But the unofficial titles are more descriptive: Conceptual Physics, Physics without Math, Why the Sky is Blue, Physics for Poets, etc. This was the first course I taught at U. New Mexico, back in August 2006, and I love teaching it just as much as Junior Lab, though it is very different.
One of the senior professors here, Carl Caves, gave me some advice about Physics 102 that I liked. He said that he views the audience not as students that need to "think like physicists," but rather as our future voters, senators, and representatives who will have to make decisions about the worthiness of funding science. Of course, I received this advice a couple weeks after I was already completely overwhelmed with the course--but fortunately, his advice fit well with decisions I'd already made, so I was comforted. The fact that these students will impact my research funding is actually not a motivator for me, though that is true. (I'm actually still undecided on the merit of always arguing for increased federal spending on university research no matter what--and you can berate me about this in the comments if you'd like.) But it is very important to recognize that these students are different than the students in Junior Lab who have chosen to major in physics. They are not going to be practicing scientists (most of them) and thus, the goals are very different. Here are the goals I came up with and put on the syllabus I handed out to the students in 2006:
"The primary goal of the course is to help students develop a better understanding of a variety of physics concepts that they experience or hear about in their every day lives. We will strive for true understanding of the concept versus tiresome memorization of facts and trivia. This may lead to a heightened enjoyment of everyday physics wonders (such as rainbows, sunsets, waves, phases of the moon), and improved ability to understand technological issues (such as energy shortages and sources, automobile safety, nuclear power and radiation, cell phone communication) and a deeper understanding of future scientific material including biology, chemistry, geology, medicine, and possibly a more advanced physics course!"
I don't think that is so bad, especially considering I had about 2 weeks to prepare, never having taught a course before (aside from TA-ing), and receiving little guidance beyond the course number I was to teach, the classroom times, and the course description. Actually, that's not true, I did manage to meet with one of our star instructors, Kathryn Dimiduk (now at Cornell), and she gave me all kinds of very good advice. Nevertheless, I don't think those goals are so bad, considering how unprepared I was. The funny thing, though, is that those goals will pretty much be the same goals I profess on Tuesday, unless I find some time in the next five days to revise them. This is going to be very difficult, given that I have a mini-grant due Friday. Consider this your glimpse at my standard state of affairs. I have no talent for managing multi-tasking better than this. Could I have spent time over the break preparing for teaching and grant writing, instead of learning how to blog, signing up for FriendFeed, and meeting many new people around the world? Yes, I could have. Would it have been better? I don't know, I am a very good rationalizer.
With that in mind, "couldn't I be actually preparing for teaching right now instead of composing this interminable blog about panicking about teaching on Tuesday?" Yes, but in writing this blog, I am consciously and subconsciously thinking about complex teaching issues that will arise next week, and thus I am spending my time even more effectively than if I were to simply focus on the task.
OK, so what is wrong with my course goals? My problem is that they are not measurable by either me or the students. Or maybe they are, but I don't measure them very well. I came away from the "New Faculty Workshop" last November with the highest priority goal of implementing assessment in the courses I teach. A key element of assessment is to have a pre-test at the beginning of a course so you can assess the actual learning that has been achieved. The only assessment I have used are exams and the end-of-course instructor assessments. Neither of these have a pre-test, and thus they don't provide any information about learning. I now view the need for pre-tests as obvious from a scientific point of view, but I, along with many other scientists who are teachers, have not really approached education scientifically in the past.
There exist some research-based pre- and post-tests for physics, such as the somewhat-famous "Force Concept Inventory." But I am not aware of any tests which are well aligned with my "non-math" conceptual physics course. We do not use anything beyond arithmetic, really--just proportionalities or "if this increases, does that decrease or increase" kind of questions. (BTW: I was delighted to discover that there are many important physics concepts that can be learned without algebra...I feel like I could easily teach two semesters without mathematics!) Furthermore, if I were to write out goals that were measurable, some important goals would not involve physics concepts. Some may be more general science concepts. And I certainly would like to measure enjoyment and desire for learning about physics and science.
So, this is where I stand now. If you do know of any battle-tested assessment tools for this kind of course, I would very much like to hear about them. Or, even if you have any suggestions for questions I could pose that could be used as pre- and post-test questions, I would love to hear them!
One of the senior professors here, Carl Caves, gave me some advice about Physics 102 that I liked. He said that he views the audience not as students that need to "think like physicists," but rather as our future voters, senators, and representatives who will have to make decisions about the worthiness of funding science. Of course, I received this advice a couple weeks after I was already completely overwhelmed with the course--but fortunately, his advice fit well with decisions I'd already made, so I was comforted. The fact that these students will impact my research funding is actually not a motivator for me, though that is true. (I'm actually still undecided on the merit of always arguing for increased federal spending on university research no matter what--and you can berate me about this in the comments if you'd like.) But it is very important to recognize that these students are different than the students in Junior Lab who have chosen to major in physics. They are not going to be practicing scientists (most of them) and thus, the goals are very different. Here are the goals I came up with and put on the syllabus I handed out to the students in 2006:
"The primary goal of the course is to help students develop a better understanding of a variety of physics concepts that they experience or hear about in their every day lives. We will strive for true understanding of the concept versus tiresome memorization of facts and trivia. This may lead to a heightened enjoyment of everyday physics wonders (such as rainbows, sunsets, waves, phases of the moon), and improved ability to understand technological issues (such as energy shortages and sources, automobile safety, nuclear power and radiation, cell phone communication) and a deeper understanding of future scientific material including biology, chemistry, geology, medicine, and possibly a more advanced physics course!"
I don't think that is so bad, especially considering I had about 2 weeks to prepare, never having taught a course before (aside from TA-ing), and receiving little guidance beyond the course number I was to teach, the classroom times, and the course description. Actually, that's not true, I did manage to meet with one of our star instructors, Kathryn Dimiduk (now at Cornell), and she gave me all kinds of very good advice. Nevertheless, I don't think those goals are so bad, considering how unprepared I was. The funny thing, though, is that those goals will pretty much be the same goals I profess on Tuesday, unless I find some time in the next five days to revise them. This is going to be very difficult, given that I have a mini-grant due Friday. Consider this your glimpse at my standard state of affairs. I have no talent for managing multi-tasking better than this. Could I have spent time over the break preparing for teaching and grant writing, instead of learning how to blog, signing up for FriendFeed, and meeting many new people around the world? Yes, I could have. Would it have been better? I don't know, I am a very good rationalizer.
With that in mind, "couldn't I be actually preparing for teaching right now instead of composing this interminable blog about panicking about teaching on Tuesday?" Yes, but in writing this blog, I am consciously and subconsciously thinking about complex teaching issues that will arise next week, and thus I am spending my time even more effectively than if I were to simply focus on the task.
OK, so what is wrong with my course goals? My problem is that they are not measurable by either me or the students. Or maybe they are, but I don't measure them very well. I came away from the "New Faculty Workshop" last November with the highest priority goal of implementing assessment in the courses I teach. A key element of assessment is to have a pre-test at the beginning of a course so you can assess the actual learning that has been achieved. The only assessment I have used are exams and the end-of-course instructor assessments. Neither of these have a pre-test, and thus they don't provide any information about learning. I now view the need for pre-tests as obvious from a scientific point of view, but I, along with many other scientists who are teachers, have not really approached education scientifically in the past.
There exist some research-based pre- and post-tests for physics, such as the somewhat-famous "Force Concept Inventory." But I am not aware of any tests which are well aligned with my "non-math" conceptual physics course. We do not use anything beyond arithmetic, really--just proportionalities or "if this increases, does that decrease or increase" kind of questions. (BTW: I was delighted to discover that there are many important physics concepts that can be learned without algebra...I feel like I could easily teach two semesters without mathematics!) Furthermore, if I were to write out goals that were measurable, some important goals would not involve physics concepts. Some may be more general science concepts. And I certainly would like to measure enjoyment and desire for learning about physics and science.
So, this is where I stand now. If you do know of any battle-tested assessment tools for this kind of course, I would very much like to hear about them. Or, even if you have any suggestions for questions I could pose that could be used as pre- and post-test questions, I would love to hear them!
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Get 'em while they're young: Open Science for Junior Physics Lab
I've been wanting to write about an open science teaching experiment I've been doing at U. New Mexico that I think has been really successful. I've been thinking about presenting at a local teaching conference on campus (and I should still do that), and other venues, but I think blogging about it here will be an effective way of letting others know about it.
What it is in a nutshell
The course is Junior Lab (modern physics lab course) at the U. New Mexico. We run the course as close to "open science" as we can, with a course wiki on OpenWetWare as the foundation. The students post everything on the wiki: their primary lab notebooks on the wiki, analysis notes, Matlab code and Excel sheets, formal report rough drafts, and final drafts. Further, all of my instructor feedback is also posted on their work, in the margins. The only written things we don't put on the wiki are letter grades and a few confidential emails. (We also have no mechanism for putting video or audio conversations on the wiki...though that's an interesting and scary idea that just occurred to me.)
Does it work?
I say emphatically: YES! I have just finished teaching the course for the second time and I have been very pleased both times. I've also only received positive feedback about the open science style of the course--including many unsolicited emails from students saying the wiki was very helpful for them. Unfortunately, I only have anectdotal evidence...next fall I want to implement some kind of pre- and post-testing for assessment, as I talked about in yesterday's blog.
What have been some good outcomes?
Good science. When I decided to teach this course on OWW (OpenWetWare), I purposefully didn't put much planning into it (my style of time management). I also decided to just give it a whirl and "be bold" figuring the worst that could happen would probably not be much worse than an average lab course. Thus, I didn't really imagine all of the wonderful things that would happen as we got started. I think the thing that I have enjoyed the best is seeing the students reading the lab notebook of other students to get hints for how to set it up, how to do the analysis, etc...and then citing and linking the help they got!. I was seeing this happen and just so delighted to see them practicing science the way it should be practiced. For some of them, this was natural, for others, I could tell they felt like they were cheating or something, because it seemed too easy. I just constantly reminded them that this was science and too keep looking at previous work and to keep citing.
Open science training. I don't have evidence for this, but I feel like these students will be much more likely to practice open science later in their careers. I suspect they'll be required by at least one future instructor or advisor to go back to paper and pen and "science 1.0" ... and having been through this course, I also suspect they will rebel and lead changes wherever they are.
Much better instructor / student communication. One of the principles from "The One Minute Manger" (a cheesy little book that is very much worth reading) is to give feedback as close to instantaneously as possible. After reading that book, I think it's pretty obvious that early feedback is much more valuable than delayed. But in traditionally run lab courses, where labs are handed in on paper, the feedback is necessarily delayed quite a bit. Having the course in public on the wiki allows me to leave feedback and "grade" any time I have internet access. My goal is to give the feedback very quickly, but to be honest, I didn't do so hot this semester. Maybe for the first half of the course, I was able to provide written feedback within one week, but attending the New Faculty Workshop in November completely derailed me and I wasn't happy with being two to four weeks behind sometimes. Fortunately, I think the feedback is much more important early on in the course. Even with my failures, I still think this was a very positive aspect of the course compared to the paper alternatives.
What have been some of the challenges?
It takes a lot of time. Having 14 students in the lab, I'd say I spent at least 10 hours / week (a lot more at certain times) providing written feedback (aka "grading"), plus the 6 hours in lab, and about 3 hours / week preparing low-quality lectures. (We have one hour of lecture on statistical data analysis and other science topics, see agenda here.) Adding up those numbers doesn't seem like a lot, so I maybe am estimating incorrectly. In any case, it feels like a lot of time, and for sure the way I teach it is not at all scalable to more students. I feel like the one-on-one interactions (both real and virtual) are a critical aspect of the course--the students are apprentices. This is in contrast to the other course I teach (Conceptual Physics for >100 non-scientists), where I also value the personal interactions with the students, but not as essentially as in this course.
Technical difficulties. OpenWetWare is a fantastic resource, and I am enormously grateful for everything the OWW founders and Bill Flanagan have provided to help with this course. It is a very solid foundation and pretty much has everything we need for this course to work very well and to be far superior to the traditional version of a lab course. That said, there are very many technical improvements that could add a lot of value. Some of these were brought up at the Lab Notebook brainstorming session we had in October 2007. For example, integrated spreadsheeting would be great (but time-intensive to implement). Also, some kind of "auto-save" is necessary...a few students throughout the semester lost data due to either glitches or being logged out, or even their own mistakes. As we all know, losing data is a crushing blow, so it needs to be kept very much to a minimum. Two good students lost this battle and resorted to paper and pencil followed by uploading later, which of course is not a desirable outcome. (One idea I have to solve this with MediaWiki is to just install a "Save and Keep Editing" button, which would essentially be a "preview" button that actually saves the entry in the data base in addition to keeping the editing window open.) There are all kinds of other things, but I think I'm getting into a broader discussion of electronic lab notebooks in general.
What do I want to do differently next year?
I'm very happy with the way the course has worked so far. Most of the ideas I have for changing things next year are not related to the open science aspects of the course (for example, improving or adding new experiments). I would love to hear about any ideas you have, so please post them on the comments here! Also, if you would like to emulate open science aspects of this course at your institution, I would be really happy to help you get started.
What it is in a nutshell
The course is Junior Lab (modern physics lab course) at the U. New Mexico. We run the course as close to "open science" as we can, with a course wiki on OpenWetWare as the foundation. The students post everything on the wiki: their primary lab notebooks on the wiki, analysis notes, Matlab code and Excel sheets, formal report rough drafts, and final drafts. Further, all of my instructor feedback is also posted on their work, in the margins. The only written things we don't put on the wiki are letter grades and a few confidential emails. (We also have no mechanism for putting video or audio conversations on the wiki...though that's an interesting and scary idea that just occurred to me.)
Does it work?
I say emphatically: YES! I have just finished teaching the course for the second time and I have been very pleased both times. I've also only received positive feedback about the open science style of the course--including many unsolicited emails from students saying the wiki was very helpful for them. Unfortunately, I only have anectdotal evidence...next fall I want to implement some kind of pre- and post-testing for assessment, as I talked about in yesterday's blog.
What have been some good outcomes?
Good science. When I decided to teach this course on OWW (OpenWetWare), I purposefully didn't put much planning into it (my style of time management). I also decided to just give it a whirl and "be bold" figuring the worst that could happen would probably not be much worse than an average lab course. Thus, I didn't really imagine all of the wonderful things that would happen as we got started. I think the thing that I have enjoyed the best is seeing the students reading the lab notebook of other students to get hints for how to set it up, how to do the analysis, etc...and then citing and linking the help they got!. I was seeing this happen and just so delighted to see them practicing science the way it should be practiced. For some of them, this was natural, for others, I could tell they felt like they were cheating or something, because it seemed too easy. I just constantly reminded them that this was science and too keep looking at previous work and to keep citing.
Open science training. I don't have evidence for this, but I feel like these students will be much more likely to practice open science later in their careers. I suspect they'll be required by at least one future instructor or advisor to go back to paper and pen and "science 1.0" ... and having been through this course, I also suspect they will rebel and lead changes wherever they are.
Much better instructor / student communication. One of the principles from "The One Minute Manger" (a cheesy little book that is very much worth reading) is to give feedback as close to instantaneously as possible. After reading that book, I think it's pretty obvious that early feedback is much more valuable than delayed. But in traditionally run lab courses, where labs are handed in on paper, the feedback is necessarily delayed quite a bit. Having the course in public on the wiki allows me to leave feedback and "grade" any time I have internet access. My goal is to give the feedback very quickly, but to be honest, I didn't do so hot this semester. Maybe for the first half of the course, I was able to provide written feedback within one week, but attending the New Faculty Workshop in November completely derailed me and I wasn't happy with being two to four weeks behind sometimes. Fortunately, I think the feedback is much more important early on in the course. Even with my failures, I still think this was a very positive aspect of the course compared to the paper alternatives.
What have been some of the challenges?
It takes a lot of time. Having 14 students in the lab, I'd say I spent at least 10 hours / week (a lot more at certain times) providing written feedback (aka "grading"), plus the 6 hours in lab, and about 3 hours / week preparing low-quality lectures. (We have one hour of lecture on statistical data analysis and other science topics, see agenda here.) Adding up those numbers doesn't seem like a lot, so I maybe am estimating incorrectly. In any case, it feels like a lot of time, and for sure the way I teach it is not at all scalable to more students. I feel like the one-on-one interactions (both real and virtual) are a critical aspect of the course--the students are apprentices. This is in contrast to the other course I teach (Conceptual Physics for >100 non-scientists), where I also value the personal interactions with the students, but not as essentially as in this course.
Technical difficulties. OpenWetWare is a fantastic resource, and I am enormously grateful for everything the OWW founders and Bill Flanagan have provided to help with this course. It is a very solid foundation and pretty much has everything we need for this course to work very well and to be far superior to the traditional version of a lab course. That said, there are very many technical improvements that could add a lot of value. Some of these were brought up at the Lab Notebook brainstorming session we had in October 2007. For example, integrated spreadsheeting would be great (but time-intensive to implement). Also, some kind of "auto-save" is necessary...a few students throughout the semester lost data due to either glitches or being logged out, or even their own mistakes. As we all know, losing data is a crushing blow, so it needs to be kept very much to a minimum. Two good students lost this battle and resorted to paper and pencil followed by uploading later, which of course is not a desirable outcome. (One idea I have to solve this with MediaWiki is to just install a "Save and Keep Editing" button, which would essentially be a "preview" button that actually saves the entry in the data base in addition to keeping the editing window open.) There are all kinds of other things, but I think I'm getting into a broader discussion of electronic lab notebooks in general.
What do I want to do differently next year?
I'm very happy with the way the course has worked so far. Most of the ideas I have for changing things next year are not related to the open science aspects of the course (for example, improving or adding new experiments). I would love to hear about any ideas you have, so please post them on the comments here! Also, if you would like to emulate open science aspects of this course at your institution, I would be really happy to help you get started.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Learning versus teaching
I sort of introduced this teaching blog with my first post on my science blog. As I said, I've been inspired by Rosie Redfield's research and teaching blogs and thus I've set mine up so I have separate teaching, research, and "other science thoughts" blogs. I'm still not sure whether that's a good idea, after reading this "how to blog" article from Slate that I saw on A Blog around the Clock. Well in anycase, it probably doesn't matter too much, and I'm wasting too much time thinking about it.
I'm pretty excited about having a blog about teaching (my field is physics) and connecting with others out there to exchange ideas with. So far I've taught two courses at U. New Mexico: Physics 102 (conceptual physics, aka physics without math, aka physics for non-scientists, aka why the sky is blue) and Physics 307L (Junior Lab, aka modern physics lab). These courses are quite different in terms of the student population, what we do in class, and how I spend my time. I have really loved teaching both courses, much more than I think I would have predicted before I started as an assistant prof. in 2006. I'm looking forward to sharing (hopefully over the next few weeks) many of the things I have tried out that I think have been successful. For example, I've been really happy with the "open science" aspect of Junior Lab (see the course site on OpenWetWare). Another thing I'm looking forward to talking about is a really successful experience collaborating with the course TA via private wiki for the conceptual physics course.
So far, all of my "evidence" for success in teaching is anectdotal or non-scientific, which leads me to what I thought would be most appropriate to talk about in my first teaching blog. A couple months ago, I was really fortunate to attend the "New Faculty Workshop" for physics and astronomy faculty. I cannot recommend this workshop strongly enough: if you're an assistant professor of physics or astronomy in your first couple years, you absolutely should have your chair nominate you for this workshop. Ironincally, in my case, I had to miss a class and got way behind in grading due to the workshop...but it was very much worth it. (By the way: Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to leading this workshop! I won't try to list all the names for fear of leaving someone out.)
One of the main things I learned at this workshop is that anectdotal evidence for good teaching techniques isn't a good measure of student learning. For example, I sort of took seriously the end-of-semester student evaluations without ever stopping to think about them scientifically: what do they tell me about student learning or any other goals I have set for the course (besides student happiness)? Furthermore, even the exams aren't really assessing student learning since I don't have a baseline pre-test. A pre-test is pretty common sense as far as scientific thinking goes...but it never really occurred to me before this workshop, I don't think. The pre-test is one of the main things I want to implement this coming semester (conceptual physics)...choosing the pretest will be the subject of future blogs, hopefully.
In addition to learning about assessment in physics, I learned a bunch of other stuff. I actually took a lot of notes on my private wiki (back in November), and below I'm going to transfer over a lot of those thoughts. Yeah, I am breaking some rule about long blogging, but I'll throw some headings in there to increase the chance of anyone reading parts of this post. I'll also edit it slightly.
Older Notes from New Faculty Workshop
Assessment
The number one thing I want to implement is real assessment: Pre and Post-testing so I can assess the effectiveness of my teaching. There are all sorts of existing standardized tests, one of the more popular being the FCI (force concept inventory), although that may not be relevant for my version of 102. Probably for Junior Lab, I will have to use my own free-response questions, since the goals are not easily tested by multiple choice, and there are few enough students to assess what they say and try to measure learning. If you care about learning, then assessment really should be a precursor to any kind of new educational thing you're going to try. Many of the results are counter-intuitive. For example, strategies that have a major, significant affect on learning seem to decrease student's end-of-semester attitudes towards physics. That is to say: the student feedback scores (while important for tenure) are actually not a good indicator of learning. Now, attitudes is of course an important outcome sometimes, and long-term attitudes have less data. But the point is you can't rely on student's opinions. A corollary of this is that there is no correlation at all of learning outcomes with lecturing "ability." Basically all lecturing is ineffective, whether it's from award-winning lecturers or really crappy lectures. The thing to google here is the "hake plot" and Eric Mazur at Harvard. Above and to the right is a schematic of the "hake plot." It takes a minute to understand it, so I recommend going to Redish's site about the research. What the plot shows is that no matter the student background, or lecturer ability, only about 25% of the possible learning occurs with plain-old lecture. There were a number of stunning things to me from Eric Mazur's talk (which in addition to being very informative was very entertaining as well). I was really surprised when I saw this plot, for two reasons. First, I was embarrassed to realize that there is a lot of good research (with real data) out there about how to effectively teach. Second, I was surprised that the data very strongly indicated that any kind of passive lecture is really not very effective. This was fun to see, because I intuitively had already been thinking this.
Some active learning tidbits
It turns out a lot of the things I was already doing in P102 are similar to some effective strategies, although perhaps not implemented correctly. For example, JiTT (Just in Time Teaching), peer-instruction, think-pair-share (I don't remember the definitions of all of these), interactive lecture demos. I should read more about these, and decide whether to implement them "correctly" based on the existing research, and also to choose assessment that will really measure the learning.
Setting effective course goals
I don't remember who, but someone asserted that 3 goals is pretty much the maximum number of goals a course should have. Actually I'm not really sure if someone said this directly, but it sticks in my mind. I realized, that my list of goals for Junior Lab is way too long--and thus none of the students could possibly remember it while actually working in lab. So, I need to reduce these to 3 or 4 clear and measureable goals. Plus, of course, I need to work these into a pre- and post-test for assessment.
Ideas about a Biophysics 101 or "Conceptual Biophysics" course
I am continually asked by faculty here what I think the biophysics curriculum should be here at UNM. I have consistently resisted implementing courses willy-nilly, thinking we don't yet have critical mass here, and it's not clear what is an effective course to implement. My own bias is our graduate students definitely do not need another required course. But I now finally I have an idea for what "biophysics" course should be taught, or at least one that I would like to develop. It fits in with what I've been realizing that it's really not any more strange having "biophysics" in the department than it is having "astronomy" (aka astrophysics). Many departments (such as ours) are "Physics and Astronomy", and there's usually (as far as I can tell) not any discussion over whether astronomy is really physics etc. In contrast, there is frequent discussion and / or discomfort over how biophysics fits in our department. But when I step back and think about it, Astronomy is really just physics applied to many non-physics things. Consider optical biophysics versus observational astronomy: both are physicists who have to know a lot about light, spectroscopy (atomic physics), optics, etc. in order to get the information they want. Anyway, I think this is maybe a valuable parallel so that other faculty in the department don't get so confused about biophysics. One of the best sessions was taught by Ed Prather from Arizona (I think), who teaches Astronomy 101. He pointed out how they really teach the students physics, and the students love it -- they just don't tell them that they're teaching them physics. The physics is so they can understand the astronomy--so they learn physics because they like astronomy. I think there could be a perfect parallel by teaching a "biophysics" course that was all about biology, but really required learning a bunch of physics to understand the biology. I am thinking first at the conceptual level, but it could possibly extend to algebra or even calculus physics I suppose, but the audience would start with non-physics majors. I already do a little of this in 102. For example, talking about the applications of fluorescence in biology, which fits in with the atomic physics, light, etc. topics. Brownian motion is also dominant, and of course, all kinds of forces inside cells. When talking about this with people at dinner, it occurred to me that it would be funny learning about forces first in cell biology world, because instead of having to imagine friction-less surfaces, you instead have to get used to "massless" systems w/ tons of friction. Why would that be any worse than assuming no friction? In fact, one misconception students usually have is Newton's first law, because we all grow up in a world where things stop pretty quickly when the external force apparently goes away. Anyway, this is the idea, and it seems completely achievable to me, perhaps even without too much more effort as an evolution of P102. However, I would be very smart to wait until post-tenure to try this.
Resources I don't want to forget about
I saw an example of Oregon State physics education system, which was really impressive (by Kenneth Krane). Their classrooms had computers for groups of students, and personal whiteboards (you can get this at Home Depot for like $12, but I forget the name of it...not called whiteboard, though...and then cut it into little pieces). They ask the students something like "write down a feature of vector dot products", for example, and then walk around and collect whiteboards and then bring them to the front. (This would seem to parallel our P102 "brainstorming" sessions.) (Paradigms in Physics wiki at OSU.)
A book I want to read
Somebody recommended a book, "How People Learn," (Actually checking Amazon, it's probably How the Brain Learns, judging by popularity.) which is somewhat popular I guess (or it might be "How People Learn (2000)" by the NRC, N. Acad. Press)...I think this book maybe had the recommendation to tell students to pause and write down something that they just learned. I should use something like this in P102 (and maybe even Junior Lab)...all students are going to want to take notes. In this case, I'll tell them to spend time thinking about what they learned, and there (supposedly?) is data that this has an effect on retention.
Interactive lecture demos
I think it was during the interactive lecture demo talk (which was run by two physics profs from different universities) that they said, "The physical world is the authority" (that is: the instructor is not the authority, but the actual way the physical world operates is). I like this, and it's the point of doing interactive lecture demos. I think in my first day of P102 I use a quote from Feynman saying that theory without experiment is useless, which is similar.
We learned a lot about this method throughout the workshop, but my notes are too scattered to copy over for the most part. Peer instruction techniques were at the heart of the Hake plot above (first presented by Mazur to us), with research showing this simple technique significantly improved student learning. Both Mazur and Prather were adamant that you need good peer instruction questions (such that half the students know the answer to begin with), but I am not convinced. I still believe a question in which 0% of the students know the correct answer can result in improved long-term learning via the peer instruction method. I don't feel like I was shown data showing that long-term learning was only improved by these "50%" questions. While thinking of this, I was also reminded of very cool education research I saw in Science Magazine earlier this year (The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning).
Kinesthetic Learning
During both the Oregon State session and the Prather astronomy session, I was very impressed by the power of kinesthetic learning. Unlike some of the other things, this is something in which I haven't dabbled, but which I think I really want to try to implement. Here's a brief wikipedia article about kinesthetic learning. The idea is to thave the students act out physics concepts that are otherwise challenging to visualize. In Prather's session, he showed how to use several student actors to demonstrate light traveling 50 million light years (or whatever) from a supernova, and when events happen relative to observation due to the finite speed of light. In the OSU session, we tried acting out unit vectors in spherical coordinates with our arm, and I easily saw the benefit of a group of students doing this together. Two ideas that occurred to me for Physics 102: having students act out the photoelectric effect (perhaps even picking the people with blue versus red shirts) and also having students jump between seats in different rows to model electrons in energy shells.
Context is important to learning
Chandralekha Singh gave a talk about improving teaching of quantum mechanics. Thankfully I haven't had to teach this course yet. I mean thankfully from both my and the students' perspectives! She had some good general points, though. One was an example I was reminded of that I want to use in my P102 course. I think it's called the Wason selection test, and it's a really great way of demonstrating how important the context of a problem is to the way students will view it. You can read the link...I think the version she used was F, K, 3, 7 (instead of colored cards) and Coke, Beer, 25 years, 16 years. I could use this exercise in my first day of P102, combined with also the "Traxoline" lecture that Ed Prather gave.
Modeling, Coaching, Practicing
Kenneth Heller gave a good lecture (the irony of this workshop is that half of it was lectures convincing us that lectures are not an effective learning technique...but only a pseudo-irony if that's even a word) about viewing learning physics from the perspective of modeling, coaching, and practicing. (This page maybe describes what he said, I'm not sure, I didn't read it.) It was a good analogy between teaching someone to play golf and to do physics problems. If we were to teach someone to play golf the same way we often teach physics, it'd be something like this: Tiger Woods hits a 6 iron 220 yards straight and high in front of his students. He then says, "OK, that's how you do it. Your homework is to do it. Also, your homework is to also figure out how to hit 2 through 9 irons. On the exam, we'll surprise you with a 3-wood." But the way you would actually teach golf, of course, is to show them how it looks when done well, and then have them try it out while coaching them on, and then iterating the process. I liked this way of thinking about learning problem solving.
I'm pretty excited about having a blog about teaching (my field is physics) and connecting with others out there to exchange ideas with. So far I've taught two courses at U. New Mexico: Physics 102 (conceptual physics, aka physics without math, aka physics for non-scientists, aka why the sky is blue) and Physics 307L (Junior Lab, aka modern physics lab). These courses are quite different in terms of the student population, what we do in class, and how I spend my time. I have really loved teaching both courses, much more than I think I would have predicted before I started as an assistant prof. in 2006. I'm looking forward to sharing (hopefully over the next few weeks) many of the things I have tried out that I think have been successful. For example, I've been really happy with the "open science" aspect of Junior Lab (see the course site on OpenWetWare). Another thing I'm looking forward to talking about is a really successful experience collaborating with the course TA via private wiki for the conceptual physics course.
So far, all of my "evidence" for success in teaching is anectdotal or non-scientific, which leads me to what I thought would be most appropriate to talk about in my first teaching blog. A couple months ago, I was really fortunate to attend the "New Faculty Workshop" for physics and astronomy faculty. I cannot recommend this workshop strongly enough: if you're an assistant professor of physics or astronomy in your first couple years, you absolutely should have your chair nominate you for this workshop. Ironincally, in my case, I had to miss a class and got way behind in grading due to the workshop...but it was very much worth it. (By the way: Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to leading this workshop! I won't try to list all the names for fear of leaving someone out.)
One of the main things I learned at this workshop is that anectdotal evidence for good teaching techniques isn't a good measure of student learning. For example, I sort of took seriously the end-of-semester student evaluations without ever stopping to think about them scientifically: what do they tell me about student learning or any other goals I have set for the course (besides student happiness)? Furthermore, even the exams aren't really assessing student learning since I don't have a baseline pre-test. A pre-test is pretty common sense as far as scientific thinking goes...but it never really occurred to me before this workshop, I don't think. The pre-test is one of the main things I want to implement this coming semester (conceptual physics)...choosing the pretest will be the subject of future blogs, hopefully.
In addition to learning about assessment in physics, I learned a bunch of other stuff. I actually took a lot of notes on my private wiki (back in November), and below I'm going to transfer over a lot of those thoughts. Yeah, I am breaking some rule about long blogging, but I'll throw some headings in there to increase the chance of anyone reading parts of this post. I'll also edit it slightly.
Older Notes from New Faculty Workshop
AssessmentThe number one thing I want to implement is real assessment: Pre and Post-testing so I can assess the effectiveness of my teaching. There are all sorts of existing standardized tests, one of the more popular being the FCI (force concept inventory), although that may not be relevant for my version of 102. Probably for Junior Lab, I will have to use my own free-response questions, since the goals are not easily tested by multiple choice, and there are few enough students to assess what they say and try to measure learning. If you care about learning, then assessment really should be a precursor to any kind of new educational thing you're going to try. Many of the results are counter-intuitive. For example, strategies that have a major, significant affect on learning seem to decrease student's end-of-semester attitudes towards physics. That is to say: the student feedback scores (while important for tenure) are actually not a good indicator of learning. Now, attitudes is of course an important outcome sometimes, and long-term attitudes have less data. But the point is you can't rely on student's opinions. A corollary of this is that there is no correlation at all of learning outcomes with lecturing "ability." Basically all lecturing is ineffective, whether it's from award-winning lecturers or really crappy lectures. The thing to google here is the "hake plot" and Eric Mazur at Harvard. Above and to the right is a schematic of the "hake plot." It takes a minute to understand it, so I recommend going to Redish's site about the research. What the plot shows is that no matter the student background, or lecturer ability, only about 25% of the possible learning occurs with plain-old lecture. There were a number of stunning things to me from Eric Mazur's talk (which in addition to being very informative was very entertaining as well). I was really surprised when I saw this plot, for two reasons. First, I was embarrassed to realize that there is a lot of good research (with real data) out there about how to effectively teach. Second, I was surprised that the data very strongly indicated that any kind of passive lecture is really not very effective. This was fun to see, because I intuitively had already been thinking this.
Some active learning tidbits
It turns out a lot of the things I was already doing in P102 are similar to some effective strategies, although perhaps not implemented correctly. For example, JiTT (Just in Time Teaching), peer-instruction, think-pair-share (I don't remember the definitions of all of these), interactive lecture demos. I should read more about these, and decide whether to implement them "correctly" based on the existing research, and also to choose assessment that will really measure the learning.
Setting effective course goals
I don't remember who, but someone asserted that 3 goals is pretty much the maximum number of goals a course should have. Actually I'm not really sure if someone said this directly, but it sticks in my mind. I realized, that my list of goals for Junior Lab is way too long--and thus none of the students could possibly remember it while actually working in lab. So, I need to reduce these to 3 or 4 clear and measureable goals. Plus, of course, I need to work these into a pre- and post-test for assessment.
Ideas about a Biophysics 101 or "Conceptual Biophysics" course
I am continually asked by faculty here what I think the biophysics curriculum should be here at UNM. I have consistently resisted implementing courses willy-nilly, thinking we don't yet have critical mass here, and it's not clear what is an effective course to implement. My own bias is our graduate students definitely do not need another required course. But I now finally I have an idea for what "biophysics" course should be taught, or at least one that I would like to develop. It fits in with what I've been realizing that it's really not any more strange having "biophysics" in the department than it is having "astronomy" (aka astrophysics). Many departments (such as ours) are "Physics and Astronomy", and there's usually (as far as I can tell) not any discussion over whether astronomy is really physics etc. In contrast, there is frequent discussion and / or discomfort over how biophysics fits in our department. But when I step back and think about it, Astronomy is really just physics applied to many non-physics things. Consider optical biophysics versus observational astronomy: both are physicists who have to know a lot about light, spectroscopy (atomic physics), optics, etc. in order to get the information they want. Anyway, I think this is maybe a valuable parallel so that other faculty in the department don't get so confused about biophysics. One of the best sessions was taught by Ed Prather from Arizona (I think), who teaches Astronomy 101. He pointed out how they really teach the students physics, and the students love it -- they just don't tell them that they're teaching them physics. The physics is so they can understand the astronomy--so they learn physics because they like astronomy. I think there could be a perfect parallel by teaching a "biophysics" course that was all about biology, but really required learning a bunch of physics to understand the biology. I am thinking first at the conceptual level, but it could possibly extend to algebra or even calculus physics I suppose, but the audience would start with non-physics majors. I already do a little of this in 102. For example, talking about the applications of fluorescence in biology, which fits in with the atomic physics, light, etc. topics. Brownian motion is also dominant, and of course, all kinds of forces inside cells. When talking about this with people at dinner, it occurred to me that it would be funny learning about forces first in cell biology world, because instead of having to imagine friction-less surfaces, you instead have to get used to "massless" systems w/ tons of friction. Why would that be any worse than assuming no friction? In fact, one misconception students usually have is Newton's first law, because we all grow up in a world where things stop pretty quickly when the external force apparently goes away. Anyway, this is the idea, and it seems completely achievable to me, perhaps even without too much more effort as an evolution of P102. However, I would be very smart to wait until post-tenure to try this.
Resources I don't want to forget about
- Resource that look very promising
- COMPADRE -- the leader of this is also very receptive to ideas for improvement
- PHET (very nice applets)
- Physlets (and related) -- this would be for more advanced students, as it allows changing the code at various levels (I'm not sure if this is the correct link: http://webphysics.davidson.edu/applets/DownLoad_Files/default.html)
- I really should have a simulation component as much as possible in Junior Lab
I saw an example of Oregon State physics education system, which was really impressive (by Kenneth Krane). Their classrooms had computers for groups of students, and personal whiteboards (you can get this at Home Depot for like $12, but I forget the name of it...not called whiteboard, though...and then cut it into little pieces). They ask the students something like "write down a feature of vector dot products", for example, and then walk around and collect whiteboards and then bring them to the front. (This would seem to parallel our P102 "brainstorming" sessions.) (Paradigms in Physics wiki at OSU.)
A book I want to read
Somebody recommended a book, "How People Learn," (Actually checking Amazon, it's probably How the Brain Learns, judging by popularity.) which is somewhat popular I guess (or it might be "How People Learn (2000)" by the NRC, N. Acad. Press)...I think this book maybe had the recommendation to tell students to pause and write down something that they just learned. I should use something like this in P102 (and maybe even Junior Lab)...all students are going to want to take notes. In this case, I'll tell them to spend time thinking about what they learned, and there (supposedly?) is data that this has an effect on retention.
Interactive lecture demos
I think it was during the interactive lecture demo talk (which was run by two physics profs from different universities) that they said, "The physical world is the authority" (that is: the instructor is not the authority, but the actual way the physical world operates is). I like this, and it's the point of doing interactive lecture demos. I think in my first day of P102 I use a quote from Feynman saying that theory without experiment is useless, which is similar.
- Also, I thought at this point (and other times during the workshop) how it would probably be quite effective if I could figure out a way of having the students "bet" or "invest" in the clicker questions. This is biased by my own love of gambling and investing, of course. But I feel like it could be quite effective...it seems to me that people really change their perspective when they have money riding on it. This relates to a quote Eric Mazur had when he first gave his Harvard students the FCI exam (which they did not so hot on, after scoring very well on his exams)...a frustrated "A" student asked, "Professor Mazur...are we supposed to answer the way you taught us, or the way we really think about the problem???"
We learned a lot about this method throughout the workshop, but my notes are too scattered to copy over for the most part. Peer instruction techniques were at the heart of the Hake plot above (first presented by Mazur to us), with research showing this simple technique significantly improved student learning. Both Mazur and Prather were adamant that you need good peer instruction questions (such that half the students know the answer to begin with), but I am not convinced. I still believe a question in which 0% of the students know the correct answer can result in improved long-term learning via the peer instruction method. I don't feel like I was shown data showing that long-term learning was only improved by these "50%" questions. While thinking of this, I was also reminded of very cool education research I saw in Science Magazine earlier this year (The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning).
Kinesthetic Learning
During both the Oregon State session and the Prather astronomy session, I was very impressed by the power of kinesthetic learning. Unlike some of the other things, this is something in which I haven't dabbled, but which I think I really want to try to implement. Here's a brief wikipedia article about kinesthetic learning. The idea is to thave the students act out physics concepts that are otherwise challenging to visualize. In Prather's session, he showed how to use several student actors to demonstrate light traveling 50 million light years (or whatever) from a supernova, and when events happen relative to observation due to the finite speed of light. In the OSU session, we tried acting out unit vectors in spherical coordinates with our arm, and I easily saw the benefit of a group of students doing this together. Two ideas that occurred to me for Physics 102: having students act out the photoelectric effect (perhaps even picking the people with blue versus red shirts) and also having students jump between seats in different rows to model electrons in energy shells.
Context is important to learning
Chandralekha Singh gave a talk about improving teaching of quantum mechanics. Thankfully I haven't had to teach this course yet. I mean thankfully from both my and the students' perspectives! She had some good general points, though. One was an example I was reminded of that I want to use in my P102 course. I think it's called the Wason selection test, and it's a really great way of demonstrating how important the context of a problem is to the way students will view it. You can read the link...I think the version she used was F, K, 3, 7 (instead of colored cards) and Coke, Beer, 25 years, 16 years. I could use this exercise in my first day of P102, combined with also the "Traxoline" lecture that Ed Prather gave.
Modeling, Coaching, Practicing
Kenneth Heller gave a good lecture (the irony of this workshop is that half of it was lectures convincing us that lectures are not an effective learning technique...but only a pseudo-irony if that's even a word) about viewing learning physics from the perspective of modeling, coaching, and practicing. (This page maybe describes what he said, I'm not sure, I didn't read it.) It was a good analogy between teaching someone to play golf and to do physics problems. If we were to teach someone to play golf the same way we often teach physics, it'd be something like this: Tiger Woods hits a 6 iron 220 yards straight and high in front of his students. He then says, "OK, that's how you do it. Your homework is to do it. Also, your homework is to also figure out how to hit 2 through 9 irons. On the exam, we'll surprise you with a 3-wood." But the way you would actually teach golf, of course, is to show them how it looks when done well, and then have them try it out while coaching them on, and then iterating the process. I liked this way of thinking about learning problem solving.
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