Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2013
Volume 58, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2013; Denver, Colorado
Session C7: Invited Session: Excellence in Physics Education Award Session: smartPhysics |
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Paul Cottle, Florida State University Room: Governor's Square 16 |
Saturday, April 13, 2013 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
C7.00001: Excellence in Physics Education Award Talk: Initiating and Sustaining Reform in Introductory Physics Instruction: The Illinois Experience Invited Speaker: Gary Gladding Almost fifteen years ago the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois embarked on a program to systematically reform all of its introductory courses. I will describe the evolution of this program to the present day. In particular, I will discuss how this reform was initiated and how we have been able to sustain this change over the years, leading to the developments that will be discussed in the next two talks. I will first discuss how and why the decision was made to undertake this program. Both external and internal forces were at play. I will then describe the initial implementation which was guided by the then current physics education research. We made changes to all of the course components; we introduced just in time teaching and peer instruction into the lectures, collaborative group learning into the discussion sections and predict-observe-explain activities into the labs. I will then discuss the more difficult problem of sustaining these reforms. I believe there were two keys to our success. First, an infrastructure was created that supported the participation of the majority of our faculty in the teaching of these courses. Second, we established our own physics education research group which has become the source of continued developments in our instruction. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 13, 2013 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
C7.00002: Transforming the lecture experience at the University of Illinois Invited Speaker: Tim Stelzer Students' unprecedented access to content on the web is providing a unique opportunity to transform the role lectures in education, moving the focus from content delivery to helping students synthesize the content into knowledge. We have introduced a variety of activities to facilitate this transformation at the University of Illinois, including web-based preflight assessments of student understanding before lecture, peer instruction (clickers) to assess and facilitate student understanding during lecture, and web-based multimedia pre-lectures designed to provide students with content before lecture. In this talk I will discuss the pedagogical motivation for introducing these activities, and the impact they have had at the University of Illinois. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 13, 2013 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
C7.00003: Pedagogy meets Technology: Optimizing Labs in Large Enrollment Introductory Courses Invited Speaker: Mats Selen It is widely believed that hands-on experiments are an indispensable part of a good education in physics, yet how many of us can say that we are truly satisfied with the labs we provide in our own large enrollment introductory courses? What would these activities look like in a world without budget, space, and time constraints? Would they happen before, during, or after lecture? Would they be long or short? Would they be done in a classroom or at home? Would students work in groups or individually? How do these answers depend on the activity and on the student? To help us explore these questions we have developed Interactive Online Labs, a low cost wireless system that allows students to work individually or in groups, doing real hands-on experiments at home guided by software or in a classroom lead by an instructor. In this talk I will describe the IOLab system and will show preliminary results from clinical studies involving students in our introductory courses. [Preview Abstract] |
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