Active Learning at Berry (ALaB)

Modern Physics (PHY 307) and Thermal Physics (PHY 410)

2009-07-02T19:31:00.003-04:00

Also in my first year at Berry, I taught two upper level classes -- Modern Physics in Fall 2008 and Thermal Physics in Spring 2009. For the most part I taught these as lecture courses, as I was preparing both classes for the first time, and was not familiar enough with Active Learning techniques to prepare classes in that way. The only exceptions were that I did give online quizzes to ensure that students did the reading before class, and (since the classes had 7-8 students in them) asked questions of the students frequently in lecture to keep them engaged.

The students responded fairly positively to the Modern Physics class, though a number did say class time could have been used more effectively. Hopefully by incorporating some active learning techniques, class time activities will be more varied and at the same time more focused on students' difficulties. I haven't yet gotten course evaluations for the Thermal Physics course.

For this coming year, I'm teaching Modern Physics again, as well as a new Solid-State Physics course in the spring. Having read Todd's post about the success he had with worksheet activities in his Quantum Mechanics course (PHY 420), I plan to design and incorporate in-class worksheets to supplement (or replace) some of the lectures in both courses. Also, in the Modern Physics course, I can use my experience from last year to choose the lecture coverage more carefully to address the concepts students find most challenging.

There were some nice computer visualization-based materials described at the AAPT New Faculty Workshop last week, including Easy Java Simulations (EJS) and some tutorials on quantum mechanics (developed by Chandralekha Singh at the University of Pittsburgh) which make use of EJS. A couple of students from Modern Physics recommended more use of visualization in their course evaluations, so I plan to incorporate that. I'll also try to create (or borrow) some EJS simulations for solid-state physics.

Also at the New Faculty Workshop, a program for teaching upper-level physics at Oregon State, called "Paradigms in Physics", was described. Having looked at the website, there are some nice ideas for in-class activities which are useful for upper-level courses.

Finally, I'm aiming to create a lab portion of the Modern Physics course for Fall 2010; our department ordered equipment to use for those labs this summer. I plan to do in-class demo's using this equipment this fall. I want to use the "learning cycle" sequence (predict-observe-describe-explain) associated with the Interactive Lecture Demonstrations method as much as possible for these demos, to make sure that students confront their expectations/preconceptions and are engaged by the demos.

Taking over PHY 111/112 from Todd Timberlake

2009-07-01T20:54:00.003-04:00

In my first year teaching at Berry, I was fortunate to inherit some useful active learning materials from Todd Timberlake for PHY 111/112, which is the algebra-based physics intro sequence taken mainly by pre-med and pre-vet students at Berry.

I used two main active learning techniques in the course, both continued from Todd's methods. The first required the students to take online reading quizzes to ensure that they came to class prepared. These were due at 8:00am the morning of each class. This is a form of "Just-in-Time Teaching", in that (in theory) looking at the responses to the students' quizzes could enable me to adjust the lecture's content in response to students' difficulties.

The second technique was to pose conceptual questions to the students during class, interspersed with mini-lectures, which the students answered using electronic "clickers". After answering individually, the students discussed the question in small groups and had an opportunity to revise their answer. This is an example of "Peer Instruction", popularized in physics instruction by Eric Mazur at Harvard.

I think the techniques benefited the students, but my implementation can definitely be improved for this coming year. During the first semester, my online quiz questions were too difficult (on average), leading to frustration by some students who were doing the reading but not getting the online quiz questions. I mostly corrected that during second semester, with better results. Also, with my long commute to Berry, I wasn't able to compile students' responses to online quizzes before class and use them to modify the emphasis in class. This year, I will have the questions due at 9:00pm the night before class. I also may use the "Interactive Learning Toolkit" software available from Mazur's website, rather than Berry's VikingWeb courseware. (VikingWeb unfortunately will not automatically compile question-by-question response data, and it takes ~45 minutes to do by hand for a class of 40 students.)

For the Peer Instruction, during the first semester, I often skipped the group discussion portion of the technique in an effort to cover more material in the class. I've learned since that this is the most important part of the technique. I corrected this during the second semester. However, there were other specific aspects of my technique that were not as effective as they could be, as I learned last week at the AAPT Workshop for New Physics Faculty (a very useful workshop). For example, it's been found that a time-limited period in which *pairs* of students attempt to "convince each other that they are correct" is much more effective than a more open-ended general discussion among three or four students, as I'd been doing.
There are other specific changes I'm going to make based on recommendations of the workshop as well.

On the whole, I think the Workshop, along with my experience last year, has motivated me to further change how I view my role as professor from "comprehensively explaining" in class to "creating a highly-functioning, thought-provoking environment, covering the most challenging parts of the material with expert guidance". I'm going to concentrate on improving my implementation of the Just-in-Time-Teaching and Peer Instruction this coming year, but will also incorporate some of the principles of Interactive Lecture Demonstrations in my classroom demonstrations.

PHY 430: Quantum Mechanics

2009-06-22T14:12:00.002-04:00

PHY 430 is a junior/senior level course in quantum mechanics for physics majors. The material covered in the course is pretty standard for this level (I use the Griffiths text, which is probably the most common one used for this course, and cover most of the first half of the book). I have struggled to incorporate active-learning into this course because quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive. Because the class focuses on the mathematical formalism the material is highly technical. I do work in some discussion of the experimental basis of quantum mechanics, as well as some issues regarding the interpretation of the theory - but these come mostly in the form of writing assignments (PHY 430 is a writing-intensive course, part of Berry's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program).

This past semester (Spring 2009) when I taught PHY 430 I finally decided to start working in some active learning. At that point PHY 430 was the only class I taught where I spent most of class time lecturing - and I didn't like the fact that I was still lecturing in that class. So during the semester I managed to create a series of group tutorials for the students to complete in class. We did these tutorials for a little over half of the class periods. One tutorial was based on some Open Source Physics simulations created by Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni of Davidson College. I created the rest of the tutorials by going through my lecture notes from the last time I taught Quantum Mechanics and deciding which steps in the derivations/examples the students could do on their own. So I still lectured a fair bit (just under half the class periods), and I gave them a lot in the tutorials - but they spent most of their class time DOING quantum mechanics rather than hearing me talk about it.

It went surprisingly well. The students were able to get through the material I wanted them to get through. We had a couple of delays when tutorials took longer than I had anticipated, but we were able to catch up later on. And overall I think the students learned the material very well. Their performance on tests was quite good. It was a small class (6 students) so it's hard to say if this would have worked with a larger class - but I was pretty happy with it on the whole.

The tutorials I created are not fantastic. I would say they are definitely not as good as the materials I have created for PHY 101 or AST 120. But I think the tutorials are more effective than lectures. Since, for the most part, the tutorials covered exactly the same material as my lecture notes would have I didn't really have to sacrifice any "coverage" in order to include more active learning. I'd like to continue improving the tutorials, so that they can lead the students to genuine insight instead of just a formal understanding of how quantum mechanics is done. Hopefully I can make tutorials (or some kind of active learning method) a bigger part of the course in the future. But I'm definitely not going back to all lecture.

AST 120: The Copernican Revolution

2009-06-22T09:13:00.002-04:00

AST 120 is a course on the Copernican Revolution originally created by Paul Wallace. I took over teaching the course in Fall 2008 and taught it again in Spring 2009. During the Fall 2008 semester I developed a series of active-learning curricular materials for this course, which I will describe here.

The materials I developed consist of 25 activity worksheets designed to be completed by groups of 4 students during a 75 minute class period (with some time left over for lecture/discussion). The worksheets guide the students through an exploration of astronomical phenomena (mostly naked-eye observations of stars and planets) as well a variety of theories that have been proposed to explain these phenomena. Most of the activities require the use of computer simulations for making simulated observations or visualizing theories of planetary motion. I have created 53 open-source computer simulations for use with these activities. I have also adapted 10 laboratory exercises, originally developed by Paul Wallace and designed to be completed in a 120 minute lab period, to include more active-learning through the use of computer simulations. Finally, I have created two major project assignments that are designed to assess student understanding of the course material.

The first sequence of activities focuses on observing the motion of the sun, moon, stars, and planets. Most of this is done using Starry Night, a commercial planetarium program. (Some, but I don't think all, of the activities could be done using open-source software like Celestia and Stellarium.) Students observe the (apparent) daily motion of the sun and stars, the monthly motion of the moon, the annual motion of the sun, the synodic and zodiacal periods of the planets, and the precession of the equinoxes. They discover that "signs" of the zodiac are way off from their standard astrological definitions (which were correct when they were formulated about 200 BC, but precession has changed things). Students also complete labs in which they use a celestial globe, observe a simulated gnomon (sundial), study the phases of the moon and make their own moon observations, and learn about the constellations during a night lab.

The second sequence of activities deals with the astronomical theories of the Ancient Greeks (Eudoxus, Aristotle, Apollonius, Hipparchos, Ptolemy). Computer simulations are used to help students visualize the geometrical constructions used in these theories and also to show what these theories predict for the motions of the planets as seen from Earth. The simulations help students see the real power of the Ancient Greek theories (even though we now know these theories are incorrect). For example, the theory of Eudoxus could produce retrograde motion which is the most striking feature of the motion of the planets. The theory of Ptolemy could produce retrograde motion AND properly correlate that motion with changes in the brightness of the planet. Active engagement with these Ancient Greek theories shows how scientific theories evolve and are replaced by theories with greater explanatory power. A lab in this section allows students to recreate the observations and calculations used by Eratosthenes to determine the diameter of Earth.

The next sequence deals with the revolutionary heliostatic theory of Copernicus. Again simulations are used to help students visualize the theories and how the relate to observed motions of the planets. With the aid of the simulations students can determine the orbital periods of the planets and measure the size of the planetary orbits (relative to the size of Earth's orbit). They also discover the the Copernican theory predicts parallax effects that are not observed, and learn that this problem can be resolved if the stars are MUCH farther away from the sun than Earth is.

After Copernicus we briefly study the work of Tycho Brahe. Students learn how to use parallax measurements to determine the distance to astronomical objects. They use this method (along with simulated observations in Starry Night) to find the distance of the moon, sun, and Halley's comet from Earth. They also use a computer simulation to examine the relationship between the astronomical systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho.

Next is a sequence of activities on Kepler. Students use computer simulations to explore Kepler's idea that the planets were confined to spheres nested between Platonic solids. They also examine simulations that illustrate the development of Kepler's theories on planetary motion. They construct an orbit for Earth using a compass, straight edge, and three observations of Mars. Finally, they complete a lab exercise in which they apply Kepler's three laws of planetary motion to a variety of problems.

A sequence of activities on Galileo's telescope observations and physical theories is next. Students use computer simulations to reproduce Galileo's measurement of the height of mountains on the moon and see how Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus refuted the standard Ptolemaic theory. Students use a computer simulation of Galileo's sunspot observations to determine the rotational speed of the sun, and also apply Kepler's laws to the motion of Jupiter's moons to find the mass of Jupiter relative to that of the sun. Simulations and experiments are used to investigate medieval ideas about motion as well as Galileo's ideas about falling bodies and neutral motions (close to the modern concept of inertial motion).

The final sequence of activities deals with the theories in Newton's Principia. Students use simulations and mini-experiments to learn about Newton's laws of motion. More simulations illustrate how the right centripetal acceleration can produce a circular orbit, and how an inverse square centripetal force can reproduce all three of Kepler's laws. Finally, they examine Newton's argument that projectile motion on Earth is qualitatively the same as the motion of the moon, illustrating the universal nature of gravity.

For the first project students are given observational data for a fictional solar system. From this data they must construct both Ptolemaic and Copernican orbits for their home planet/star, as well as for two other planets (one inferior, one superior). After calculating the orbital parameters they must draw diagrams representing the orbits for each of the two systems. This project assesses student conceptual understanding of these two astronomical systems, as well as factual knowledge about astronomical terms and calculation methods. In the second project students must write a paper defending the Copernican system against an attack from a fictional Aristotelian (I wrote the attack myself, but it I used arguments derived from 17th century primary sources, mainly Galileo's Dialogo). This project assesses student understanding of Galilean/Newtonian physics and how these physical concepts led to the overthrow of the old Aristotelian/Ptolemaic system and justified the acceptance of the Copernican/Keplerian system.

Student response to this course has been very good. The students seem to enjoy the activities and they like working with the computer simulations (especially Starry Night, but they like the simulations I created as well). Overall I have been very pleased with the way this course has gone and I plan to continue teaching it this way indefinitely.

Paul Wallace has written a textbook for this course which I have modified. We plan to publish the textbook in a few years (it's not quite publication-ready at this point, although the students have been pretty happy with it).

Anyone interested in this course and the simulations and curricular materials I use should go to http://facultyweb.berry.edu/ttimberlake/copernican/ where the open-source simulations (but not Starry Night) and activity/lab worksheets can be downloaded for free.

Update on PHY 101 and 302/402

2008-08-01T22:07:00.003-04:00

I have now taught PHY 302 and 402 (Classical Mechanics I and II) using a Moore-like method. I have also taught PHY 101 again, using an activity-based approach with emphasis on philosophy of science. See my posts below for more information about how I teach these courses.

Right now I just wanted to say that my most recent student evaluations from PHY 101 and 402 were the best I have ever gotten. They were just fantastic. I got lots of positive comments about the teaching methods. So if you are struggling with student resistance to new teaching styles, hang in there! You can win them over eventually.

I also have some additional evidence that my philosophy of science emphasis in PHY 101 is working. I used a survey called the EBAPS that tests student views about the nature of science. I administered the test before and after the class and saw significant gains in the categories that pertain directly to philosophy of science (structure of knowledge and evolution of knowledge).

I'm very pleased with my decision to take an active learning approach in these courses. I'll be teaching a course on the Copernican Revolution for the first time this Fall. In the past this course was taught by another professor using mostly lecture. I plan to add lots of active learning components when I teach it. I'm really interested in trying to combine a historical approach (as embodied in this course on the Copernican Revolution) with active learning strategies. I'll post here in December to say how it turned out!

PHY 302: Classical Mechanics I

2007-10-26T21:00:00.000-04:00

This semester I am taking a new approach to teaching my Classical Mechanics I course. In the past this course has been entirely lecture-based, although I have a lot of one-on-one interaction with my students outside of class because it is a class taken only by physics majors (and there aren't that many of them). I have also used computational problems to get them some hands-on computing experience while they learn classical mechanics (hopefully a paper describing this aspect of the class will soon be published in the American Journal of Physics). But this semester I am mostly abandoning lecture. Only about one fourth of our class meetings will be lectures, and these will be devoted almost exclusively to computational demonstrations (where I show them how to use computation to analyze the dynamics of classical systems). At least part of these "lectures", which are given in the computer lab, are given over to the students running some computations themselves.

For another fourth of our class meetings I am using a few of the Intermediate Mechanics Tutorials developed by Brad Ambrose and Michael Wittman. Tutorials are worksheets that lead groups of students (my students work in pairs) through a series of questions that challenge misconceptions and elicit insights into important physical principles. These tutorials are then followed up with homework assignments that are designed to test student understanding of the tutorial material and build on the insights gained in the tutorials. Typically a pretest is given before the tutorial. I have found that we often need the full 75 minutes of the class period to complete the tutorials, even though they are allegedly designed for a 50 minute class.

The remaining half of the classes are devoted to student presentation of homework problems. This is a take-off on the Moore Method, which was a method for teaching mathematics developed by R. L. Moore at the University of Texas. The strict Moore Method forbids students from working together or using textbooks - they must prove theorems on their own and present their proofs in class. I deviate heavily from this strict version, as my students definitely use their textbook and can discuss the problems with each other (but not copy). Still, the focus of the class is the students presenting their solutions. Other students are expected to critique the solutions that are presented. The presentations are evaluated on content as well as on quality of presentation. Each assigned problem is presented by a student and all students must turn in written solutions for every problem. I've been guided by all of this by my fellow physicist Chuck Lane who pioneered this approach in our department last year.

I'm only halfway through the semester, but so far I would report both great success and some disheartening results. The disheartening thing was that I started with 11 students enrolled in the class but 5 of these withdrew because they thought the workload would be too great. However, the remaining 6 are doing quite well. I was very impressed with the performance of the class on the first exam. The homework presentations have improved steadily, both in terms of correctness and style. This has also led to similar improvements in the written homework (which has not generally been the case when I've taught this course in the past). The tutorials have also been great - I plan to use them more systematically the next time I teach the course. And I'm still doing the computational problems, which seem to be going pretty well.

The mixture of tutorials and homework presentations seems to give a nice balance to the class. There isn't an adversarial environment, because a lot of the time they are working together on things. One problem is that it is hard to get the students to really critique each other - they think they are going to hurt someone's feelings. And I am probably a bit to willing to jump in and give my own critique if the other students aren't willing. But they (and I) are getting better about this. I try to prod them when I can tell they want to say something. I periodically remind them that they aren't helping their friends by failing to point our errors in their solution. I know its wrong, so their presentation grade will still suffer, and if the errors aren't pointed out then their written solution will likely get a low grade as well. Pointing out the error will help them fix it and avoid a lower grade. They aren't totally convinced, but I'll keep working on them.

In summary, it's been a very experimental semester but it seems to be going very well. I will tinker with the balance of presentations, tutorials, and lectures but I will probably not get rid of any of the three (although I feel I definitely won't increase the lectures).

PHY 111/112: General Physics I and II with Algebra

2007-10-07T21:11:00.000-04:00

In my General Physics courses I use a mixture of Peer Instruction (a teaching method developed by Eric Mazur) and Just-In-Time Teaching (developed by Novak, Patterson, Gavrin, and Christian) with Physlets (Java applets with physics content developed by Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni). Prior to each class meeting students are expected to read the section of the text that will be discussed in the upcoming class. In addition, they must complete an online quiz, the deadline for which is about 2 hours prior to the class meeting time. The online quiz usually consists of 5 questions. The first two questions are generally somewhat challenging questions that cover material from the previous class meeting. Often these are Physlet Problems (problems in which students must interact with a Java applet to obtain the information necessary to solve the problem). Using Physlets helps students to connect their physics knowledge to real-world situations (as simulated by the Physlet) and also helps them to develop an operational understanding of physics terms (since they must frequently make "measurements" with the Physlet to obtain the needed information). The third question on the online quiz is usually taken directly from the reading assignment from the textbook. This question is designed to determine whether or not students have completed the assigned reading. The final two questions deal with material that has not yet been covered in class, but is slated to be covered in the upcoming class. These questions typically involve Physlet Illustrations or Explorations, which allow students to interact with a Java applet to develop their knowledge of a new concept. To answer the questions correctly the student must make use of the Physlet and pay close attention to what they see, but they do not generally have to already possess a solid understanding of the relevant concepts. These last two questions provide a lead into the class discussions, as well as an illustration of what the student has read in the text.

During the hour or so prior to each class I review the student responses to the online quiz questions. This allows me to determine which questions the class as a whole seemed to understand, and which questions gave the class trouble. This helps me to target the discussion in the upcoming class to focus on those concepts that are causing the greatest difficulty for the most students. I typically start class by discussing one of the Physlet Problems from the online quiz, and then I give a short lecture in which I present the key concepts that will be the focus of the day's class. I often use a Physlet (shown to the whole class using a computer projection system) to illustrate key points. Sometimes the Physlet will be one that students used to answer one of the last two online quiz questions, sometimes it will be one they have not seen before.
This part of the class usually last about 20 minutes, but sometimes takes longer.

The next 20-25 minutes is spent doing Peer Instruction. Students are asked a series of conceptual multiple-choice questions. They respond to these questions using an electronic response system. I encourage students to discuss the questions with their neighbors, and I also walk around the room and discuss the questions with students. Once the entire class has responded to a particular questions I display a histogram of the responses on the screen. If a significant majority chose the correct answer we usually move on after a brief statement from me about why that answer is correct. If a significant fraction of the class has answered incorrectly, I ask students to try again and usually provide a few hints about how to approach the question. We usually cover about 4-5 questions in this way.

If there is time remaining in the class I usually demonstrate the solution of a calculation-oriented problem. Most of the time I show them how to set up the required calculations, but I don't work out the solutions all the way. However, I do post a fully-worked solution to this demo problem immediately after class so that students can review this demo before attempting their own homework.

Homework assignments consist of calculation-oriented problems of my own devising, with a few conceptual questions mixed in (but not designated as conceptual - they are not readily distinguishable from calculation-oriented problems at a glance). A typical assignment consists of two questions, each of which has multiple parts. The idea is to have students examine a single scenario and, on the basis of a little bit of information, answer a series of questions related to that scenario. These homework assignments are due at the beginning of the next class period. The homework is graded during the class meeting by a student grader (almost always a physics major). The grading is essentially binary for each part of a question, but I have developed a very lenient scoring system that is designed to encourage students to attempt every part of each question. If a student tries each part of each question they can score no lower than 7 out of 10 (with scores increasing from there on the basis of correctness). Students can then pick up their graded homework as they leave class, which provides them with immediate feedback on their work. I post homework solutions online once the homework has been graded, so students have the opportunity to look at my solutions to try to understand any questions they missed.

Labs for the class focus on improving student understanding of physics concepts. Very few of the labs are about verifying the physical principles presented in class. Instead they provide an opportunity to for students to work extensively with the principles in order to develop a deeper understanding of what they mean and how they apply in various situations. The goal is to help students internalize these concepts.

Tests are given during the lab period so that students have two hours to complete the test. The tests include both conceptual and calculation problems (typically about 40% conceptual, 60% calculation - although I emphasize to students that calculation problems are ALSO conceptual). The goal of the tests is to assess students' conceptual understanding of physics as well as their ability to apply the concepts in solving problems. Almost all questions have a specific correct answer, although occasionally students are asked to estimate.

I typically have 40 students in the General Physics I course, and about 25 in the General Physics II course. Lab sections have a maximum of 20 students. Both classes typically meet three times a week for 50 minutes each, with one two hour lab period. Most of the students in these classes are biology or animal science majors and a large number of these students plan to go on to professional schools (medicine, veterinary medicine, physical therapy, dentistry, pharmacy, etc.).

I use the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to assess the effectiveness of my teaching in General Physics I. I was initially seeing pre-test to post-test normalized gains of about 35-40% (well above what is typical for traditional lecture courses, which tend to show normalized gains around 25%) using the method described above, but without the Physlets. Last year I used Physlets for the first time and my FCI normalized gains increased to 47% (basically double the gains seen in traditional lecture courses). I also receive reports from many students that they do very well on the physical science section of the MCAT. I have also heard reports from students who have taken MCAT review courses and say that they already know all the physics, while students who have taken physics at other institutions don't know any of it. So while there is still room for improvement, I have reason to believe that the teaching methods described above are effective in this case.

Minutes of Sep. 11 ALaB Meeting

2007-09-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

How can we link to documents (such as class handouts, syllabi, etc.) on this blog? We will need to create a separate web site that serves as a repository for these materials and then we can include links to those materials in blog posts.
Currently the blog can be read and commented on by anyone. It would be helpful if we could all receive email alerts when posts or comments are made.
Would a discussion thread serve our purpose better than a blog?
Brief discussion on Bloom's Taxonomy, which lists categories of cognitive learning: Knowledge, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Do some disciplines need to spend more time on, say, the Knowledge category in order to help students progress while other disciplines can jump straight to Application? This could explain why some disciplines have been resistant to active learning approaches.
Update on EAF grant: over $8000 remaining, only one person has not used their travel money. We should have enough to fund two consultants. Ron will try to find someone involved with EAF to serve as a consultant.
Ron Thornton's visit: we will ask him to sit in on a few classes, meet with the ALaB group, and also give a presentation that will be open to all faculty. Need to find best dates for his visit: probably a Monday/Tuesday in late October or Early November.
Where should the ALaB group go from here? We have become increasingly interdisciplinary, which is good but presents some challenges. We can still get ideas from each other, even if we then have to apply those ideas in a new context/discipline. Much of what we discuss relates to strategies that are not discipline-specific (although they may be better suited to some disciplines than others). The group can still play an important role in supporting faculty who are just starting to experiment with active learning.
We need to find a way to pool the resources of many disciplines and combine them. Currently there are several people using active learning strategies, but they are operating in separate "silos" and don't work with each other. There might be much to gain by getting these different groups (Ed Psych, Teacher Ed, Science, Humanities, Business, etc.) talking with each other. This is one important role that our group could take on.
Different disciplines may have different standards for what is recognized as innovative or progressive teaching methods. In older disciplines like science where lecture has been the norm, anything that is not lecture may be seen as innovative. In other disciplines this is not the case. For example, case studies have almost always been used in Marketing so this approach is actually very "traditional" in that field.
Grant Possibilities: the interdisciplinary nature of the group makes it hard to go for an NSF grant for the entire group, but it would still be feasible for the science faculty to pursue that option. There may be other granting agencies that would be happy to fund an interdisciplinary project (Keck, Lily, AT&T, etc.). The goal of a new grant would be to use our growing expertise to train others by holding workshops, developing web resources, etc. We would probably need outside help for this at first, and later we could do it on our own.

CHM 102: Introduction to Chemistry

2007-09-07T17:52:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm new to blogging. (This is my first time making a post to a blog -- ever.) But I'm also new to teaching chemistry for non-science majors. I've taught General Chemistry ("GenChem") for ten years (15, if you count my years teaching while I was in grad school) and I've taught Physical Chemistry ("P-Chem") for the last eight since I'd joined the faculty at Berry. Needless to say (while I'm certainly no Mathematician -- much of what my friends talk about at lunchtime I simply have to tune out if it becomes "too mathematical"), I like the more mathematical and abstract studies of chemistry. So I was worried when the Chemistry Department decided (along with my consent, of course) that I'd be teaching CHM 102, which is Berry's General Education chemistry course for non-science majors. I didn't know if teaching mathematically-illiterate students (this is to say, students who have a hard time with high school algebra) would have much of an appeal to me. But so far, so good. In the first two weeks of the semester, I've been able (I believe) to teach my students some "real chemistry". And I've been having some fun doing so.

Over the last four years, I've been teaching GenChem (both semesters, the second of which is often referred to as "Baby P-Chem") using Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL -- please, visit www.pogil.org to learn more). In such a classroom, I have my students learn the important concepts of chemistry while working in small, self-managed teams on a ChemActivity. (POGILers prefer "ChemActivity" to "worksheet". I've even heard of some POGILers who call them "funsheets" instead!) A ChemActivity has the students explore a "model" (perhaps real, perhaps virtual data that models a chemical or physical phenomenon), then answer critical thinking questions about the model to help them invent a concept or develop their understanding of the concept, and then they work out a number of exercises in which the concept is applied. At the end of each class, I ask my students to do some metacognition and assess their understanding of what they were supposed to have learned that day. Each student of a team has one or more roles: there's a Recorder (who fills out the Recorder's Report, which contains the team's official answers to the questions and exercises within the ChemActivity); there's a Strategy Analyst (who makes sure that the team is staying on task and using their classtime appropriately, and this individual is also assigned the task of filling out a form that helps him/her assess the team's learning that day); there's a Recorder (who is called upon to present his/her team's answer to questions and/or exercises on the whiteboard of the classroom for all the class to benefit from); and there's either a Spokesperson (who represents the team to the other teams and to me as the course instructor) or a Technologist (the one who is responsible for using his/her calculator when such a device is needed to complete exercises).

While the students are working on the ChemActivities in their groups, I monitor each team's conversations and help teams that are struggling on questions and exercises. While I'm not the best at holding my tongue, I do what I can to help lead the students to "the right answer" without just giving it to them. When a mini-lecture would benefit the class, I provide one.

So this semester, I'm not teaching GenChem. I'm teaching CHM 102, the "non-majors' class". But I wanted to teach it using POGIL. And, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to be working. Each day we start with a ~10-minute quiz which tests the students on (1) their understanding of one or more concepts that hopefully they learned during the previous class period and (2) their understanding of one or more really important topics that was in their reading assignment since the previous class period. And then I have the students assemble into teams (usually consisting of three people, due to the fact that I'm teaching the class in a room with "stadium seating" and I feel that sitting three-abreast allows for a well-functioning team) and they go to work on a ChemActivity. I've found that sometimes I can adapt my GenChem activities into a CHM 102 activity without too much effort. But I've already had to write two (out of five) "from scratch". So I know that I'll be investing a considerable amount of time during the semester. (But, to be fair, I was awarded a Berry summer course development grant and I didn't use my summertime to develop materials. Oops! So I'm paying for my "lazy" summer now.)

Because CHM 102 is offered during 75-minute timeslots for class periods, I've decided that I'll be providing a short lecture between the quiz and the first activity, and if during a day the students will be doing more than one ChemActivity I'll give them a mini-lecture between activities. Actually, I've already seen how lecturing every now-n-then is necessary in order to give the students a foundation in order to understand a concept that the activity they're about to work through will present to them. But I'm trying not to lecture any more than I have to.

I've adopted the American Chemical Society's Chemistry in Context: Applying Chemistry to Society as the textbook. In each chapter, the student reads to learn about real-life challenges that we as a society face (e.g., global warming) and how an understanding of chemistry might serve to give us some answers to the World's problems. I've found it to be very interesting so far. Just yesterday, I had my non-majors generating Lewis dot structures of molecules on the fourth day of class -- if I were teaching GenChem I, we wouldn't have gotten to that for several more weeks!

One of the General Education goals at Berry College is to help students be able to effectively communicate their understanding of scientific inquiry. So at the end of the semester, each student will be giving a ~15-minute PowerPoint presentation of an aspect of chemistry. They'll explain why an understanding of the issue is important to "the average Joe", and they'll explain how an understanding of chemistry could be used to help "make the World a better place". To get them ready for the end-of-semester presentation, they will have to get a research project prospectus approved by me and write up a formal report of their research. I am looking forward to the presentations, and I hope that the class as a whole will enjoy learning about what their classmates found intriguing and worth researching.

To sum up, I believe that my non-majors are learning some interesting chemistry so far and will continue to do so throughout the semester. And I'm having a bunch of fun teaching the non-majors' class -- I really didn't think that I would. I just hope that I can keep my energy levels up, because teaching the class without using lecture as my primary method of instruction does require a considerable time investment on my part. But I believe firmly that the non-majors are going to have a much more enjoyable time throughout the semester while learning about chemistry.

I'll keep you posted!

PHY 101: Introduction to the Physical World

2007-09-01T22:57:00.000-04:00

This post describes my PHY 101 course, which is a General Education science course for non-science majors. I taught this course using a very traditional lecture approach (with PowerPoint!) for a few years, then started incorporating a few in-class group assignments. But I have become increasingly disenchanted with lecturing as a result of reading the Physics Education Research Literature and experimenting with active learning methods. So in the Summer of 2005 I redesigned my course from the ground up. Most of the active-learning materials available for a liberal arts physics course focus on practical aspects of physics, like electronics and optics. As a more philosophically-inclined physicist I wanted to teach my students about quantum mechanics and special relativity (as well as basic mechanics, etc.). So I created a series of 23 hands-on group activities to go along with 10 laboratory exercises. These activities use inexpensive materials and a variety of interactive computer simulations. The entire course is now activity-based. Students are given a worksheet that guides them through the activity or laboratory exercise, and they spend essentially all of their class time working in groups to complete the activity. I use online reading quizzes to ensure that students come to class having read the text, and I use homework from the textbook (Hobson's Physics: Concepts and Connections) to make sure they follow up on the ideas introduced in the activities. My tests are somewhat traditional, but heavily weighted toward conceptual questions (though still with some calculation required).

My first trial of this new method was in Spring 2006. Things went pretty well, but I was dissatisfied on two counts. First, my teaching evaluations were less than stellar (not bad, but not what I had come to expect). Second, and more important, I administered the EBAPS survey to my students at the beginning and end of the courses and saw no noticeable change. The EBAPS is designed to measure student attitudes about the nature of science and learning science. Although I am convinced that my activities did a reasonably good job of teaching my students physics concepts, these activities did little to change their perceptions of how science works.

For Spring 2007 I revamped several of the activities (cutting Special Relativity, sigh, but adding more on the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics). I also started the semester with two lectures (yes, lectures) on the Philosophy of Science and then incorporated questions in many of the activities that asked students to reflect on the experiments they had performed from a philosophical perspective. In addition, students were required to conduct an experiment of their own devising and report the results to the class as well as research a potentially pseudoscientific topic and present an evaluation of the topic to the class. The results were fantastic. Outstanding student evaluations and significant gains on the EBAPS in two categories (Nature of Scientific Knowledge and Evolving Knowledge) and no losses in the others. For Spring 2008 I plan to beef up the activities on the Second Law, but otherwise I will probably stay the course.

I recently gave a presentation on this class at a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. You can find out more about the class by visiting the web page I created to supplement that presentation. If you want to know more, please send me an email or just ask a question by leaving a comment.

Welcome to ALaB!

2007-09-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

The Active Learning Group at Berry College is an interdisciplinary group of faculty who are exploring active learning strategies for teaching college courses. Most members of the group have been using some form of active learning (or inquiry-based learning, or problem-based learning, etc.) in the classroom for a few years. Some members of the group are just getting started in trying to incorporate active learning into their courses. Although the group was initially composed of faculty from the sciences (including Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Psychology) it has expanded to include faculty from a much wider range of disciplines (Philosophy, Education, Marketing, etc.). The goal of the Active Learning Group is to promote a culture of active learning at Berry College, so that instructors feel comfortable using active learning methods and students feel comfortable taking courses that are taught using these methods. We have seen first-hand how active learning strategies can improve student learning in our classes.

ALaB initially received funding from the Educational Advancement Foundation. This funding enabled the initial members of the group to travel to conferences and workshops to receive training in active learning strategies, as well as to build a library of print resources related to active learning. In addition, this funding provided the initial group of faculty the time to develop active learning components for their courses. The ALaB group meets periodically to discuss reading assignments selected from our active learning library, as well as to discuss our own experiences in the classroom. So far the results have been very positive. Our work has been presented at a variety of national conferences, including Legacy of R. L. Moore Conferences, the POGIL National Meeting, and meetings of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for ALaB participants to post information about the active learning strategies they have used in their courses. In addition, ALaB members will be encouraged to post discussions about the challenges and benefits of using active learning. It is our hope that this blog will serve as a resource not only for ALaB participants but also for other faculty who are considering or already using active learning methods in their courses. Please feel free to comment on the posts. We would be delighted to hear from others who are interested in using or promoting active learning!