University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group
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Courses and Lectures
at the Varenna Summer School
on Physics Education Research (7/2003) |
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Courses
School of Education
King's College, London UK
Email: paul.black@kcl.ac.uk
Assessment and Testing
I shall conduct three session on the theme of Assessment and Testing, one in the first week, and two in close succession in the second week.
The main topics to be covered in the three sessions are as follows are set out below. The partition between the three sessions is provisional and depends in part on the rate of progress and on the interests of the group. Whilst the relevance to physics education will be clear, I shall be calling on a wider range of studies, into classroom feedback and assessment practices, than is to be found in the physics education, or even in the science education, literature. The overall foci will be (a) pedagogy (aka instruction) and (b) assessment and testing. Links to learning theory and cognitive studies will arise naturally. For each lecture, there will be both a substantive component, and a component in which I shall reflect on lessons to be drawn about the methods and/or roles of researchers: these are identified in italics in the outlines below.
First session : Reviewing research into Classroom Formative Assessment
Purposes of assessment. The formative/summative distinction. The interplay between formative action, pedagogy, and learning in the classroom. Review of research studies into formative assessment: the key concept of feedback. Commentary on the methods to be used to conduct a research review. Lessons about conducting a review of research
Second session : Research into Practice – Partnership with Teachers
Story of a project for bridging from research results into change in classroom practices. Survey of the results obtained. Obtaining quantitative evidence within the normal ecology of schools and classrooms. Applicability of the research results to practice – principles for applicable developmental research. The concept of the knowledge creating school. Implications of findings in relation to learning theories and to research on teacher change. Lessons about the research-practice interface.
Third session : Testing Systems and Testing Quality
Concepts of reliability and validity. Application to summative and formative assessments. Building national assessment and testing system – examples of several countries. Conflicts and synergy between purposes. Norm, criterion and ipsative referencing. Lessons about research, public opinion and politics.
Graduate School of Education
University of California, Berkeley CA USA
Email: disessa@soe.berkeley.edu
Models, concepts, theories: How do we think about Student Ideas?
The three parts of this contribution are connected by the central question of how we model—or even think about—students' naïve ideas and their development into physics competence.
Part I: The problem
The first part will motivate the problem of describing primarily the form, but also the content, of the ideas with which students come to physics class. The main point is that it is very easy to assess wrongly the nature of students' knowledge. We intuitively attribute knowledge to students according to what they say, but such attributions must stand up to careful scrutiny. First, we must see beyond “the answers they give” to the concepts behind those answers. Second, we must have some kind of idea of the nature of those “concepts,” even if we feel we have aptly described its content. I will argue that the form of student knowledge is important, and the question of form impinges on how we describe content.
I will illustrate the general concerns by describing some recent work by myself and colleagues in which we take on the task of undermining claims that intuitive knowledge is fairly strongly coherent, if not theoretical in its nature. I will motivate three critical issues in describing knowledge—contextuality, specification, and relational structure. By taking on accountability for these issues, we show data that strongly contrasts with recent work by Ioannides and Vosniadou, which claimed to demonstrate that intuitive conceptions of force are few (mostly one per person), coherent, and consistently applied.
Part II: Some models of student knowledge
This part reviews some older work, developing a small taxonomy of kinds of knowledge that we might attribute to students. In particular, I review two central constructs used in prior work, p-prims and coordination classes. Some more recent work by Joe Wagner in mathematics learning nicely complements our own physics work with respect to coordination classes. I will also briefly review arguments that “beliefs” is not an adequate term for describing student knowledge.
Part II: Representations and their role in conceptualization
While it is obvious, and widely recognized, that representations are critical to scientific understanding, they are often completely ignored in studies of conceptual change. In this part, I wish to introduce some ways of thinking about the role representations in conceptualization. I will draw theoretically on work by Bruce Sherin, who contrasted the nature of physics conceptualization supported by algebra with the case when learning is supported by programming as a technical representation. I will also draw on work from an older project of my group in which we taught sixth graders physics using programming (and not algebra). In this latter work, issues of conceptualization are mixed with issues of interest and motivation. Will the instruction in physics be radically transformed by computational representations? If so, how?
Department of Physics Education
University of Kiel, Germany
Email: euler@ipn.uni-kiel.de
Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche
Università di Napoli, Napoli, Italy
Email: guidoni@na.infn.it
Rethinking physics for teaching: Research, problems, and hints
The problem
Our students' understanding and motivation in Physics is getting more and more socially unsatisfactory. By and large, we are not good enough (as we might be) in addressing teachers and students by resonance-inducing cultural mediation. Several different approaches, often supported by research, have been evolving along years, seeking for remedial strategies. Some of them will be evocated and discussed within the lectures, stressing their most peculiar features. (For instance, the ones here I informally refer to L.Viennot, J.Ogborn, F.Hermann, B.A.Sherwood, E.M.Rogers)
The point of view
The lectures will be based on a point of view coagulated across decades of classroom-based, variational, long-term research about the facets of explaining-understanding dynamics: mainly involving Physics' (and Mathematics', and Sciences') themes, at ages from 3 to 20. This way it is indeed possible to check that a major role in teaching success is played by an efficient and flexible discipline's (re)structuration, able to resonate with people's natural cognitive strategies, natural language and natural experiences properly evocated and set to work. “Rebel” mis-conceivings, mis-teachings, mis-fittings … appear in other words as substantial artifacts: evolving, for a large part, after missing, uneffective, deviating, dissonant … explaining-understanding practices.
On one side, natural cognitive strategies (ways to look-at, ways to inter-act) get at direct resonance with contextual patterns (ways to appear, ways to inter-act) according to culturally defined projections, and modelling-formalizing interfaces. At the same time correlations among contexts, directly unaccessible but crucial to efficient interpretation and control, are dealt with. In this process, two main streams of modelling-formalization strategies actually superpose and interfere, shaping any level of physical knowledge. A “macroscopic” one: ad-hoc physical variables are constructed, as invariant-then-meaningful correlations among directly accessible variables and parameters (from forces and energies to entropy, to fields' structures, and so on). A “structural” one: on the ground of matter-based correlations, new physical systems, and systems' interactions, are hypothesized out of the scale of direct experience, in turn allowing for more complex correlation structures. Finally, at “theory” levels both strategies are successfully merged and fit together.
The proposal
A rather drastic rearrangement of Physics' presentation at various school levels appears then as necessary, feasible, possibly successful: with no lowering of traditional teaching objectives, and coherently and efficiently supported by available technologies. Four ingredients appear as essential.
- Patterns of abstract discipline-based and model-intended reconstructions of facts, rooted into well apprehended phenomenologies (mechanical, thermic, light, electric, fields', matter, …ones).
- Patterns of general cognitive structures, rooted into natural perception, language, action, thinking, from which they have to be recovered to awareness to be then explicitely formalized.
- Patterns of interfering formalization and modelling schemes, on thought's side, and patterns of interfacing ways-to-look-at to ways-to-interact-with, on the side of the world actions.
- Patterns of successful behaviours in complex contexts (from everyday experience to all kinds of “physics-for”, to various technologies, etc): where success depends on the ability to disentangle “real” situations into more simple, possibly “elementary” ones, and at least partially model them on the ground of what is known or knowable (somehow getting to handle the unknown itself).
Department of Physics
University of Maryland, College Park, MD USA
Email: davidham@physics.umd.edu
Student resources for tangibility and coherence
For the past several years our group has had the opportunity to spend a good deal of time watching young children – from pre-school through eighth grade – reasoning about an assortment of questions in physical science. Watching these tapes, we’re often struck by the children’s understandings and abilities, and often in contrast to what we see in our college students. It’s also been interesting that, when I’ve show tapes of children reasoning to physicists not involved in education research, they notice many of the same sorts of things we do— they see “physics” in the kids’ thinking. Elementary science curricula, however, do not seem to address these things, possibly because we have not succeeded in describing them in a manner to allow systematic attention.
I’d like to spend some time in these sessions thinking about describing those “sorts of things” and to see how far we can get. Ideally, we could describe some overarching framework for organizing how to think about the development of expertise in physics, from early grades. The title is a first take on the most general headings we might use to generate lists. By “tangibility” I mean familiar and mechanistic—children have a rich collection of resources for thinking about physical mechanism in terms of things that are familiar to them. Children also have resources for monitoring, repairing, and extending coherence in their own and others’ reasoning. We’ll watch video of children’s reasoning in these sessions, maybe some of older students too, and I’ll venture the claim that all meaningful progress in physics can be understood as the development of resources for one or both of tangibility and coherence.
Department of Physics
University of Nice, France
Email: davidham@physics.umd.edu
From Epistemology to Pedagogy -- back and forth
My talks will deal with ‘research in physics education’, if ‘in’ is taken to mean ‘within’ rather than ‘on’. In other terms, my perspective on pedagogy is that of an experimentalist rather than that of a theoretician, conversely to my orientation in physics. That is, I will not develop arguments about didactical processes, but rather sketch educational situations where the problems of teaching are closely linked with poorly resolved conceptual difficulties of modern physics.
I will endeavour to show that the very practice of teaching may lead to interesting although neglected or underestimated epistemological problems, including terminological ones. Reciprocally, I hope to show that the elucidation of such problems, or at the very least their acknowledgement, may be of great help in teaching.
My examples will be taken mainly from relativity theory and quantum theory, at the level of their basic principles.
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA USA
Email: mestre@phast.umass.edu
The dependence of knowledge deployment on context among physics novices
Over the last 25 years research findings from cognitive science have helped us characterize the salient differences between experts and novices in a discipline, differences which are remarkably similar across a wide range of disciplines. In physics, studies indicate that experts' knowledge is organized hierarchically in memory, with a few major principles used to tether both ancillary concepts and procedures for applying principles and concepts to solving problems. Further, what makes memory search and knowledge application efficient for experts is their ability to chunk related concepts, procedures for applying them, and contexts in which they can be applied, into bundles that can be recalled and deployed as single units. These expert traits are lacking in beginning physics students. Novices tend to have much more amorphous, poorly interconnected knowledge stores, and principles and concepts are not necessarily bundled with relevant problem solving procedures, or with contexts in which they can be applied. Yet, despite these deficits, good novices in physics are remarkably successful at applying the knowledge they learn and in solving problems.
My lectures will focus on exploring how physics education research can shed light on when and how competent physics novices use the knowledge they learn in physics classes in different problem solving contexts. I will begin with a brief overview of the cognitive science literature as it pertains to: a) knowledge acquisition and application, b) transfer of learning to novel contexts, and c) the role of intuitions in shaping learning. Then I will discuss two different studies that we have performed that illustrate both, what knowledge students bring to bear to analyze physics contexts, and how that knowledge depends on the context they are analyzing. The first study investigated students' ability to pose solvable problems within certain constraints that were imposed to investigate the extent to which students linked their conceptual knowledge to relevant problem contexts. The second study investigated students' ability to select from several simulations of steel balls moving along steel tracks the one simulation that was a replicate of what would actually occur if the experiment were performed. Both studies are very revealing in terms of identifying what contexts students associate with physics concepts, how concepts are applied to different contexts, and how the knowledge that is learned in physics classes can impede one's ability to make common sense judgements. I will conclude by placing the findings from these two studies in the context of what we know about learning and knowledge application, and by discussing the instructional implications of the findings.
School of Education
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO USA
Email: Valerie.Otero@Colorado.edu
Cognitive processes and the history of physics: The evolution of knowledge and/or the definition of learning
The physics education research community has developed a deep appreciation for the characteristics of the learner. As a result, we have gauged instruction to address these characteristics. In doing so, subtle elements of students' cognitive processes have been revealed and researched in the classroom setting. Through micro-analyses of what students do, say, and write, we have learned that students can undergo a process of awareness and revision of their own conceptual models of phenomena, as predicted by the conceptual change model. Like the development of what ultimately becomes an accepted model in the scientific community, the development of models in the student's head is largely influenced by external social factors and also by one's own interpretation of one's observations.
Parallels will be drawn between the evolution of physics knowledge in the history of physics and the evolution of students' ideas. In both cases the questioning of, and the ultimate modification of, ideas could define meaningful learning. The physics education research presented will highlight and describe in detail, the evolution and development of two students' conceptual models.
First, I will present a brief history of cognitive science focusing specifically on the development of the notion of models as a way to describe what is going on in the student's head. Second, I will discuss the conceptual change model which has origins in the writings of Thomas Kuhn, who sought to describe the evolution and development of “facts” in the scientific community. After defining learning, I will provide results from a physics education research study that used a micro-analysis technique to investigate the cognitive processes associated with learning. I will provide specific examples of the evolution and development of two students' knowledge about electrostatics in the context of a Constructing Physics Understanding course. The cognitive and social factors that influenced learning in the classroom will be discussed and compared to an example from physics history. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this research in terms of the instructor's perspective on, and definition of, learning for undergraduate physics majors and non-majors.
Departament de Didàctica de les Ciències Experimentals
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Email: roser.pinto@uab.es
Department of Physics
University of Maryland, College Park, MD USA
Email: redish@physics.umd.edu
Introduction to cognitive models and the structure of knowledge
Education is a goal-oriented field that focuses on achieving normative gains. Much of the theoretical framings that takes place in education are oriented towards specific goals the authors are interested in accomplishing. But if our goal is to treat education as scientifically as possible, then we must develop a theoretical frame that is strongly rooted in objective observations. Much is known in the behavioral sciences that is robust and observationally based. In these lectures, we draw from a variety of fields ranging from neuroscience to sociolinguistics to create a theoretical superstructure that allows one to compare a variety of approaches. The model analyzes the individual's cognitive processes into two levels, a knowledge-structure level in which associational patterns dominate, and a control-structure level where one can describe epistemology and metacognition. Applications to the analysis of physics problem solving and assessment are presented.
Dipartimento di Fisica "E. Fermi"
Università "La Sapienza", Roma, Italy
Email: Matilde.Vicentini@roma1.infn.it
Laboratoire de Didactique de la Physique
dans l'Enseignement Supérieur (LDPES)
Université Paris 7, France
Email: viennotl@ccr.jussieu.fr
Links between common ways of reasoning, content analysis and research on teaching sequences
These sessions will draw attention on various “lines of attentions” that are relevant in the research based design of a teaching sequence in physics. In each case, I will pinpoint some “critical details” of the practice of teaching, that is some apparently minor aspects of practice which can, in fact, bring about noticeable changes. The relevance of these “critical details” will be discussed in relation to common reasoning and of course content analysis.
The “lines of attention” that will be discussed and illustrated on various topics of physics, will be the following
- “spotlighting” chosen for a given content
- how much should be explained?
- the part of images
- the intellectual activity during practical experiments
- the links between different concepts, or between concepts and experiment, coherence.
In particular, the topic of images will be illustrated on optics (elementary and waves), the topic of “spotlighting will lead us to mesoscopic approaches to friction and pressure in fluids.
Two crucial aspects will be discussed, in light of the examples discussed:
- the part of teachers' reaction to innovation
- the merits and limits of the evaluation of research based teaching sequences.
Seminars
Subatomic and Radiation Physics
Universiteit Gent, Ghent, Belgium
Email: hendrik.ferdinande@rug.ac.be
University Physics Education in Europe: the activities of the EUPEN Network and 'TUNING - phase I & II'
The European Physics Education Network (EUPEN) will be presented in its historical context as a network of some 150 physics departments in more than 30 countries of Europe. We will give examples of results about the research by the five EUPEN working groups that performed inquiries into European higher education in physics, since the foundation of EUPEN in 1996. Special emphasis will go to the collaboration with the recent Tuning educational structures in Europe project of the E.C. and its present follow-up in phase II, where convergence is searched among the higher education studies for nine disciplines in the frame of what is presently known as the Bologna process. Furthermore, the EUPEN experience will be explained in its co-operation with 'TEEP 2002', the Trans-national European Evaluation Project, which tries to establish a methodology at a European level for the use of common criteria on quality assurance in higher education for three pilot disciplines (history, physics and veterinary sciences).
Department of Physics
University of Bolgna, Italy
Email:
Institut für Fachdidaktik Physik und Lehrerbildung
Technische Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Email: Sahm@physik.tu-berlin.de
Wright Center for Science Education
Tufts University, Medford, MA USA
Email: csmt@tufts.edu
Uncommon Knowledge: Student Behavior Correlated to Conceptual Learning
For many years we have observed and videotaped students learning force and motion (mechanics) concepts in introductory physics labs that use guided discovery curricula (RealTime Physics) enabled by microcomputer based laboratory (MBL) tools. The students work in groups of three and the MBL software and hardware allow students to measure experimental results and display them in real time. Many previous studies using the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation show that most students (75 to 90%) learn force and motion concepts in this environment. By carefully analyzing the behavior of these student trios, we have identified a characteristic set of behaviors for those who learned, not ones that most teachers predict, and those who did not. We are able to characterize student behavior as they progressively learn a concept. In addition, we observe the positive and negative effects that group dynamics can have on individual student conceptual learning. Video examples will be shown and discussed.
Department of Radiation Sciences
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Email: Gunnar.Tibell@tsl.uu.se