Bulletin of the American Physical Society
74th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section
Volume 52, Number 13
Thursday–Saturday, November 8–10, 2007; Nashville, Tennessee
Session NA: Physics Education |
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Chair: Taha Mzoughi, Kennesaw State University Room: Scarritt-Bennett Center Laskey Great Hall |
Saturday, November 10, 2007 10:45AM - 11:15AM |
NA.00001: Hands-on distance learning is an effective way to boost physics understanding and skills of inservice teachers Invited Speaker: Since 1993 the University of Kentucky has been developing methodologies and resources for boosting in-service teachers' process skills and conceptual understanding of physics through various forms of inquiry based learning. With funding from FIPSE we have developed a set of distance learning courses (``Light'', ``Temperature, Heat, {\&} Energy'', ``Electricity {\&} Magnetism'', ``Force, Motion, {\&} Energy'') to teach physics concepts to rural teachers in grades 4-9. These courses consist of hands-on activities that the teachers can use in their own classrooms, and are based on a materials kit sent to each participant, allowing guided inquiry be the instructional approach. The courses are asynchronous and may be taken by individuals or small groups, for professional development or course credit, and are now being offered to teachers nationwide (see http://www.hovphysics.com). With NSF support we are now studying how much of what a teacher learns in a course transfers to the teacher's students. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2007 11:15AM - 11:45AM |
NA.00002: Physics Education Reform: An Object Lesson from Coastal Carolina University Invited Speaker: During the last two decades, researches from both the physics education research (PER) community and the cognitive sciences have determined that physics is best learned in an interactive environment where students are actively engaged in their learning. Despite this most introductory physics classes taught at American universities use pedagogical techniques that are still traditional passive lectures. It is not surprising that both student enthusiasm and student performance are generally quite low. In this talk, we will review the outcomes of PER research, and discuss our adaptation of these findings to our physics classrooms. In particular, at Coastal Carolina University, we have implemented the SCALE-UP model of Physics instruction. This model combines lecture and laboratory into single entity, emphasizes active learning, and student cooperation. It uses applications of technology including web-based quizzes and homework, online demonstrations, interactive computer simulations, video analysis, data time-series analysis and computer/instrument interfacing. We have seen a major impact on both student grades and performance on standardized tests. In this presentation, we will illustrate the SCALE-UP model and report on its positive impact on students. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2007 11:45AM - 12:15PM |
NA.00003: Web-based Homework: the Good, the Bad, and the Possibilities Invited Speaker: Web homework has become widely used in teaching physics, but is that a good thing? Research shows that requiring students to work on homework does improve student performance in introductory physics. However, a closer look shows a mixed picture, as greater student effort on the homework frequently does not translate into greater learning. Not all types of student effort and engagement in the course are the same, and that which is rewarded by the web homework is not quite the same as that which leads to greatest learning of physics. It turns out that the technology itself does not affect student performance, so to increase the value of homework we must focus on the exercises themselves. Several themes have emerged from research in physics education that are relevant in this context for improving the value of homework, including the importance of conceptual as well as quantitative reasoning, using multiple representations, and explicitly helping students develop expert-like problem solving skills. Different strategies for addressing these through web-based homework will be discussed, including the Physics Applets for Drawing (PADs). These Java applets are embedding in web-based homework and provide a way for to have students to make and interpret graphs and diagrams as part of their homework. They can be used on a variety of platforms, are graded automatically and provide feedback to the student (http://www.wku.edu/pads). [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 10, 2007 12:15PM - 12:45PM |
NA.00004: An Intelligent Tutoring System for Conceptual Physics Invited Speaker: AutoTutor is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) in which students can learn a variety of subjects through conversation in natural language with a software agent. The agent appears as a face on the screen, with a synthesized voice, and responds to typed input from the student. Student understanding is modeled from student responses, which are matched to high quality essay responses and known misconceptions and bad answers using one of several computational linguistic techniques. With ONR and NSF support a version of AutoTutor covering Newtonian dynamics at the level of Hewitt's Conceptual Physics has been developed and extensively tested. As a byproduct of this work, several thousand student responses to a small number of conceptual physics questions have been collated and mined for misconceptions. Recent work has allowed a comparison of latent semantic analysis and inverse word frequency measures of text match with expert answers. Some results from this process will be presented along with a demonstration of AutoTutor-Physics at work. [Preview Abstract] |
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