Physics Education - Steven Pollock + Qudsia Quraish) CU Boulder, Aug 2003 a workshop for physics TA's.

Good Teachers are born, not made. True or False:

Learning Goals: Teaching as a scholarly activity Applications for your own classes: formative assessments collaborative learning context-rich problems supportive classroom environment Inspiration : learn more about teaching, try something research based! Understand "interactive engagement" and "student preconceptions”

Physics Education Research In recent years, physics education research has emerged as a topic of research within physics departments.... The APS applauds and supports the acceptance in physics departments of research in physics education. -The American Physical Society Statement 99.2 Research in Physics Education (May 1999)

Conventional model of teaching: “transmitting knowledge” => lecture/demo

Richard Feynman: “I don't think you can teach physics very well anyway to people in that manner, by giving lectures on a big scale. I think it's hopeless.”

Constructivist view: Students... are active in their educational process. construct understanding based on prior knowledge.

Assessing Conceptual Mastery *Hestenes, Wells, Swackhamer, Physics Teacher, 20, 1992, p. 141 Force Concept Inventory (FCI) * 30 multiple-choice question survey Covers the most basic concepts in Newtonian mechanics. Designed to evaluate effectiveness of instruction Based on research & interviews Explicit distractors.

6000+ students: Traditional vs. Interactive Engagement %gain vs %pretest > = post-pre 100-pre

red = traditional green = interactive engagement > = post-pre 100-pre

Fewer than 5% of our physics 1110 students are likely to become physics majors. Our students are not all like us...

Find the current through the 2 ohm resistor and the potential difference betwen points a and b. Assessment of learning (75% vs 40%) E. Mazur (Harvard)

"Context Rich Problem” You're reading an article in the local paper about lightning deaths in Colorado, when you run across an impressive "factoid": the earth's surface has an average electric potential of a million volts. You're suddenly struck by a mental image of the earth as a gigantic spherical capacitor! You start thinking about this and wonder - could we make use of the resulting stored electrostatic energy as a significant long term "energy supply" for our electric needs?

Concept Test (skiier) A skier on frictionless snow (so common in Colorado) is cruising gently along the flats, when she spots a symmetrical dip. She can go down and back up the dip, or ski horizontally across a bridge. Which path will get her to the far side faster? PINK: Bridge is faster BLUE: Dip is faster GREEN: Same PURPLE: Not sure

CT (eye) A bundle of parallel rays approaches the eye and some of the rays enter the eye's pupil, as shown below. No other rays enter the eye. What does the eye see? PINK: A single point of light, surrounded by blackness. GREEN: A uniformly illuminated wall of light, like a white wall. BLUE: Many scattered points of light, like stars in the night sky. YELLOW: None of these.

CT (force) In the 1600's, Otto Van Güricke, a physicist in Magdeburg, fitted two hollow bronze hemispheres together and removed the air from the resulting sphere with a pump. Two eight-horse teams could not pull the spheres apart, even though the hemispheres fell apart when air was re-admitted. Suppose von Güricke had tied both teams of horses to one side and bolted the other side to a heavy tree trunk. In this case the tension in the rope would be... PINK: twice BLUE: exactly the same as YELLOW: half PURPLE: (not sure)...what it was before.

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National Achievement Level Results across years – grade 12 science

How are we doing? (TIMSS) …

Another context rich problem You’re flying into DIA when the pilot says the plane can't land because of airport delays - you have to circle the airport. She also tells you the plane will maintain a cruising speed of 400 mph at an altitude of 15,000 feet wile traveling in a horizontal circle around the terminal. To pass the time, you decide to figure out how far you are from the airport. You notice (looking out the window) that to circle, the pilot banks the plane so the wings are oriented roughly 10 degrees from horizontal. An article in your in-flight magazine explains that planes fly because air exerts a force, called "lift", on the wings. The lift is always perpendicular to the wing surface. The article also gives the weight of a 727 as 100*10^3 pounds, and the length of each wing as 150 feet. It gives no information on the thrust from the engines or the drag on the airplane.