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Register a new userSocratic Dialogs and Clicker use in an Upper-Division Mechanics Course
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The general problem of effectively using interactive engagement in non-introductory physics courses remains open. We present a three-year study comparing different approaches to lecturing in an intermediate mechanics course at the Colorado School of Mines. In the first year, the lectures were fairly traditional. In the second year the lectures were modified to include Socratic dialogs between the instructor and students. In the third year, the instructor used a personal response system and Peer Instruction-like pedagogy. All other course materials were nearly identical to an established traditional lecture course. We present results from a new instructor-constructed conceptual survey, exams, and course evaluations. We observe little change in student exam performance as lecture techniques varied, though students consistently stated clickers were the best part of the course from which they learned the most. Indeed, when using clickers in this course, students were considerably more likely to become engaged than students in CSM introductory courses using the same methods.
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We demonstrate how students use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but the process of constructing, testing, and refining these models is much less common. We focus our attention on a lab course that has been transformed to engage students in this modeling process during lab activities. The design of the lab activities was guided by a framework that captures the different components of model-based reasoning, called the Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to assess students written work and to identify how students model-based reasoning differed from activity to activity. Broadly speaking, we were able to identify the different steps of students model-based reasoning and assess the completeness of their reasoning. Varying degrees of scaffolding present across the activities had an impact on how thoroughly students would engage in the full modeling process, with more scaffolded activities resulting in more thorough engagement with the process. Finally, we identified that the step in the process with which students had the most difficulty was the comparison between their interpreted data and their model prediction. Students did not use sufficiently sophisticated criteria in evaluating such comparisons, which had the effect of halting the modeling process. This may indicate that in order to engage students further in using model-based reasoning during lab activities, the instructor needs to provide further scaffolding for how students make these types of experimental comparisons. This is an important design consideration for other such courses attempting to incorporate modeling as a learning goal.
We investigate students sense of ownership of multiweek final projects in an upper-division optics lab course. Using a multiple case study approach, we describe three student projects in detail. Within-case analyses focused on identifying key issues in each project, and constructing chronological descriptions of those events. Cross-case analysis focused on identifying emergent themes with respect to five dimensions of project ownership: student agency, instructor mentorship, peer collaboration, interest and value, and affective responses. Our within- and cross-case analyses yielded three major findings. First, coupling division of labor with collective brainstorming can help balance student agency, instructor mentorship, and peer collaboration. Second, students interest in the project and perceptions of its value can increase over time; initial student interest in the project topic is not a necessary condition for student ownership of the project. Third, student ownership is characterized by a wide range of emotions that fluctuate as students alternate between extended periods of struggle and moments of success while working on their projects. These findings not only extend the literature on student ownership into a new educational domain---namely, upper-division physics labs---they also have concrete implications for the design of experimental physics projects in courses for which student ownership is a desired learning outcome. We describe the course and projects in sufficient detail that others can adapt our results to their particular contexts.
The use of lab notebooks for scientific documentation is a ubiquitous part of physics research. However, it is common for undergraduate physics laboratory courses not to emphasize the development of documentation skills, despite the fact that such courses are some of the earliest opportunities for students to start engaging in this practice. One potential impediment to the inclusion of explicit documentation training is that it may be unclear to instructors which features of authentic documentation practice are efficacious to teach and how to incorporate these features into the lab class environment. In this work, we outline some of the salient features of authentic documentation, informed by interviews with physics researchers, and provide recommendations for how these can be incorporated into the lab curriculum. We do not focus on structural details or templates for notebooks. Instead, we address holistic considerations for the purpose of scientific documentation that can guide students to develop their own documentation style. Taking into consideration all the aspects that can help improve students documentation, it is also important to consider the design of the lab activities themselves. Students should have experience with implementing these authentic features of documentation during lab activities in order for them to find practice with documentation beneficial.
In the Fall of 2013, Georgia Tech offered a flipped calculus-based introductory mechanics class as an alternative to the traditional large-enrollment lecture class. This class flipped instruction by introducing new material outside of the classroom through pre-recorded, lecture videos. Video lectures constituted students initial introduction to course material. We analyze how students engaged with online lecture videos via clickstream data, consisting of time-stamped interactions (plays, pauses, seeks, etc.) with the online video player. Analysis of these events has shown that students may be focusing on elements of the video that facilitate a correct solution.
Reliable and validated assessments of introductory physics have been instrumental in driving curricular and pedagogical reforms that lead to improved student learning. As part of an effort to systematically improve our sophomore-level Classical Mechanics and Math Methods course (CM 1) at CU Boulder, we have developed a tool to assess student learning of CM 1 concepts in the upper-division. The Colorado Classical Mechanics/Math Methods Instrument (CCMI) builds on faculty consensus learning goals and systematic observations of student difficulties. The result is a 9-question open-ended post-test that probes student learning in the first half of a two-semester classical mechanics / math methods sequence. In this paper, we describe the design and development of this instrument, its validation, and measurements made in classes at CU Boulder and elsewhere.
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