A Research-Informed Approach to Teaching Physics and Astronomy to Non-Majors

Physics and astronomy instructors are often called upon to teach courses that are primarily taken by students who will not major in our discipline. These courses often have the largest enrollments of any offered by the department, and they may satisfy a general education requirement (e.g, ASTRO 101) or they may exist to serve students from other departments (e.g., biology). Many of these students do not share our intrinsic interest in our discipline, and they may lack the mathematical background and quantitative problem-solving skills that we value. How can we create vibrate learning environments that effectively engage these students and lead to substantial learning gains? In this talk, I will describe my work in this area, focusing on two key ideas. First, I will describe how to design and utilize pedagogical discipline representations (PDRs). A PDR is a representation that is explicitly designed to enhance the teaching and learning of a topic. In some cases, PDRs are significantly simplified or altered versions of typical discipline representations (graphs, data tables, etc.); in others they may be novel and highly contextualized representations with unique features that purposefully engage novice learners' pre-existing ideas. I will discuss how PDRs can enable students to reason about complex modern astrophysical topics. Next, I will address how to teach quantitative problem solving. Teaching the skills necessary for problem-solving is often limited to solving sample problems in front of the whole class and hoping that students understand the relevant techniques we attempt to model. This approach creates a passive experience that fails to reach many students. I will describe an alternative approach that uses active engagement with sequences of Think-Pair-Share (TPS) questions. This technique allows instructors to effectively, efficiently, and simultaneously engage classes of any size in a problem-solving activity. The TPS questions frequently contain answer choices with mathematical expressions, each of which represents a common difficulty that many students experience when attempting to translate their conceptual understandings into mathematical representations. This technique leads to dramatic improvements in students' quantitative skills.