Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 11–14, 2015; Baltimore, Maryland
Session C8: Invited Session: Excellence in Physics Education Award |
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Randall Knight, California Polytechnic State University Room: Key 4 |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
C8.00001: Student resources for learning physics Invited Speaker: David Hammer Careful observations of learners' reasoning belie simple characterizations of their knowledge or abilities:~ Students who appear to lack understanding or abilities at one moment show evidence of them at another. Detecting this variability generally requires close examination of what and how students are thinking, moment-to-moment, which makes research difficult. But the findings challenge unitary accounts of intelligence, stages of development, and misconceptions. Joe Redish and others have been working from a more complex theoretical framework of innumerable, fine-grained cognitive structures we call ``resources.'' They are, roughly, ways of thinking people have that may apply or not in any particular moment. (Thinking about energy, for example, may involve resources for understanding location or conservation, or oscillations in time, or differential symmetry.) The variability we observe in student reasoning reflects variability in resource activation. Resources are to models of mind what \textit{partons} used to be to models of hadrons: We know we should be thinking of entities and dynamics at a smaller scale than we've been considering, even if we don't know their particular properties. Understanding minds in this way has profound implications for research and for teaching. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
C8.00002: Why instructors other than Joe Redish should care about epistemological framing Invited Speaker: Andrew Elby In diagnosing and addressing students' difficulties with learning physics, instructors and researchers have traditionally focused on students' alternative conceptions and math skills. More recently, researchers have attributed some students' difficulties to their epistemological beliefs---their views about what counts as knowing and learning physics---and their expectations about how to do well in a given course. In this talk, I discuss a related diagnostic lens for understanding and addressing many student difficulties. In general, a person's \textit{framing} of an activity is her perhaps-tacit answer to the question ``What's going on here?'' and her associated expectations about which behaviors are appropriate. Similarly, Redish's notion of \textit{epistemological framing} is a student's perhaps-tacit answer to the question ``What's going on here with respect to knowledge?'' For instance, in a lecture hall, suppose the instructor regularly breaks students into small groups to answer conceptual questions. Some students might epistemologically frame these small-group conversations as \textit{debate}, an opportunity to make and respond to arguments, play devil's advocate, and so on. By contrast, other students might epistemologically frame these conversations as \textit{assessment}, a place to display correct understandings and to be evaluated---a stressful activity that's not about learning. Noticing that some students learn little from small-group work in lecture, an instructor might check how students are framing these discussions. If some students frame these episodes as \textit{assessment}, the instructor could try to help students reframe the discussions, e.g., by asking each small group to come up with two plausible answers and the best argument for each. More generally, the notion of epistemological framing can expand a physics instructor's toolbox of instructional diagnoses and strategies. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
C8.00003: Excellence in Physics Education Award Talk: Learning to Listen - Implications for Interdisciplinary Instruction Invited Speaker: Edward Redish For more than twenty years, researchers in the University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG) have been developing a theoretical framework for trying to understand how students think about and learn physics -- Resources. The Resources Framework provides tools for interpreting how our students respond to our instruction. What may appear on the surface to be serious misconceptions can turn out to have a subtler explanation once one takes into account the roles played in student thinking by (1) experiential knowledge, (2) the dynamic character of their cognitive responses, (3) epistemological assumptions and expectations, (4) framing of the activity along multiple dimensions. The Resources Framework also provides tools to help us understand what knowledge our students bring into our classes and how they use that knowledge to interpret what they are learning. What we have learned in this research has powerful implications for instruction, especially in service courses where an expert is charged with teaching a discipline to students from a different discipline, such as when physicists teach physics to biologists or engineers. For more than a decade, the UMd-PERG and our collaborators have been studying how life science students respond to physics instruction. We have found many surprising results by listening carefully to what students say: Often, ``student errors'' turn out to be failures of communication between teacher and student. Many common practices turn out to be counterproductive and misleading. I will give examples from NEXUS/Physics, an introductory physics class for life science students, and I will suggest implications for instruction and curriculum development. [Preview Abstract] |
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