Search results matching tags 'uncategorized' and 'physics'

Physics Teaching 2.Uh-Oh

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:11:51 GMT

My first talk! Given at the STANYS 2011 Physics Breakfast on November 8th, 2011 in Rochester, New York

Links to resources mentioned in the talk:

Feynman’s blackboard at his death
Hake’s “Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses“
Bowling Ball & Mallet exploration
Whiteboarding
Modeling Instruction
PhET Simulations
Angry Birds in the Physics Classroom
Instant feedback with orange pens
Doxie scanner - educator’s price
Worked Examples and Practice
Standards-based Grading
Active Grade and Blue Harvest online SBG gradebooks
Blogs –> Check the side bar!
Physics teachers on Twitter
Global Physics Department

A huge thank you to Gene Gordon for inviting me to speak at the breakfast. It was great to share my passions and meet my virtual colleagues face-to-face!

Tagged: 21st-century, angry birds, assessment, education, inquiry, Khan Academy, lab, lesson, modeling, physics, physics education research, problem solving, resources, standards-based grading, teaching, technology, whiteboarding

Newton’s 3rd Law (or How to Make Effective Use of Video for Instruction)

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:26:22 GMT

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:
Download the high-quality video clips for each collision.

Discuss.

Tagged: demonstration, Khan Academy, physics, teaching, technology, video

Cross-class Collaboration Projects

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:00:16 GMT

Today’s post comes from Daryl Taylor, a high school physics and astronomy teacher in Connecticut. It was originally posted in response to this question on the NSTA Physics Listserv: “Has anyone had students collaborate with another class in a different locality for any class projects or assignments?”

I have, and love to, run collabs with various schools around the world just about any chance I can.

We’ve recently run a parallax project (Astro-based) with a physics class in California; results weren’t great, but made the point.
I run, based on a CIESE NJIT collab project, a “Circumference of Earth” collab any time I can get a school far away and at a very different latitude; results are always within a few %; unheard of accuracy in the Fizzix classroom.
A few yrs ago, we ran a collab with a Forensics class in South Jersey. They were doing a “Who Done It” type of project and they (a teacher I used to work with) enlisted my Fizzix class help. They sent us images of blood spatter and foot and hand prints and the “crime” scene in general. My kids had to research and learn a little “blood spatter” physics, (including enlisting a guest expert from the local police dept!) and submitted their “FBI (Fizzix Blood Investigators) lab report” via PDF files and a Skype session. The Jersey Forensics class then went further and held a mock trial type thing with their Mock Trial Team and we watched as the audience and expert witnesses via Skype. Was great fun and kids (and I) learned the proverbial ton.
Year-long project with another school to build a “self-sustaining human habitat in a locale considered non-habitable”. Kids decided to build a habitat under the Pacific Ocean (I thought the Moon or Mars, but NOOOOooo….) complete with alternate energy sources (including a ‘back-up’ nuclear plant…) and even a specific population hand-picked by the “planning committee”. Really cool. Did a lot of Distance Learning stuff and covered topics that absolutely amazed me.
Also based on a CIESE project, The Boiling Point Project, I try to find a physics and/or chemistry class somewhere at a very high elevation, like Boulder or Denver or Mexico City, to run two collabs at once: boiling point of water and acceleration of gravity. If properly equipped and labs are run precisely, results on both are great. Email, text, and Skype are used to keep classes up to snuff with each other. In fact, each Lab group includes two of my kids and two of their kids so they HAVE to share and collab differently than a self-contained classroom situation.
I’ve even just taken a basic high school lab like diffraction and ran a collab (Co-Lab, get it? I crack myself up….) with another school just to get twice the data and more worthy results. Also gets kids involved outside the “four walls”. It’s also quite cool to collab with a local or not-local college on regular class labs. They normally have fancy machines that go ‘ping’ while we don’t. Run the same lab and compare. Sometimes, the expensive machines that go ‘ping’ do no better than a meter stick and persistence. Sometimes the expensive machines that go ‘ping’ kick the meter stick’s butt.

Hope this helps. Anyone want to join some collabs this year?

Daryl L Taylor
Main website for teachers : DarylScience.com
Main website for students : DTFizzix.com
Teacher/Personal Blog: http://darylscience.blogspot.com/
Student Blog: http://dtfizzix.blogspot.com/

Tagged: lesson, physics, project, technology

Angry Birds for Google Chrome

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:24:40 GMT

You can now play Angry Birds in Google Chrome! This makes getting footage for video analysis much easier. Here you go:

Download the video file for your own analysis. I used Camtasia Studio (free trial) to do the screen recording.

Enjoy!

Tagged: angry birds, energy, kinematics, logger pro, physics, projectile motion, resources, technology, video analysis

Khan Academy: My Final Remarks

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2011 19:01:08 GMT

Many people aren’t getting the nuances of my recent Khan Academy arguments. I’ll make my final remarks and then put this thread to rest.

Khan Academy videos are nothing new. MIT OpenCourseWare has been around for TEN YEARS now. Walter Lewin’s awesome physics lectures have been available for most of those 10 years — despite the fact they are pseudoteaching, and his students emerged with no greater understanding of physics than those of professors before him.

And I didn’t have a problem with Khan Academy (as a collections of videos) until very recently.

For me, the problem is the way Khan Academy is being promoted. The way the media sees it as “revolutionizing education.” The way people with power and money view education as simply “sit-and-get.”

If your philosophy of education is sit-and-get, i.e., teaching is telling and learning is listening, then Khan Academy is way more efficient than classroom lecturing. Khan Academy does it better.

But TRUE progressive educators, TRUE education visionaries and revolutionaries don’t want to do these things better. We want to DO BETTER THINGS.

Ironically, everything that is wrong with Khan Academy has been addressed in two previous TED talks:

Dan Meyer – Math Curriculum Makeover
Sir Ken Robinson – Do Schools Kill Creativity?

According to Dan, today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expect — and excel at — paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. How does Khan Academy foster problem posing and creativity?

Rather than instructing students with Khan’s videos, we should be inspiring them to figure things out on their own and learn how to create their own knowledge by working together. For example, instead of relying on lectures and textbooks, the Modeling Instruction paradigm emphasizes active student construction of conceptual and mathematical models in an interactive learning community. Students are engaged with simple scenarios to learn to model the physical world. In comparison to traditional instruction, Modeling is extremely effective — under expert modeling instruction high school students average more than two standard deviations higher on a standard instrument for assessing conceptual understanding of physics.

Watch one Modeling class in action. In the clip, the teacher says, “I don’t lecture at all. Instead, I create experiences for the students either in the lab or puzzles and problems for them to solve and it’s up to them to try to figure that out.” I’ve often wondered why this type of teaching hasn’t gotten more attention in the media. Maybe because the teacher is using simple things like whiteboards and bowling balls rather than shiny iPads and SmartBoards?

While Khan argues that his videos now eliminate “one-size-fits-all” education, his videos are exactly that. I tried finding Khan Academy videos for my students to use as references for studying, or to use as a tutorial when there’s a substitute teacher, but I haven’t found a good one. They either tackle problems that are too hard (college level) or they don’t use a lot of the multiple representations that are so fundamental to my teaching (kinematic graphs, interaction diagrams, energy pie graphs, momentum bar charts, color-coded circuit diagrams showing pressure and flow, etc.) Khan Academy videos do not align with proper Physics Education Research pedagogy.

I find it troublesome that the Khan Academy team is not spending time and energy on the pedagogy of teaching math and science, but rather on refining the gaming mechanics of Khan Academy in response to “good” and “bad” behavior of students working through the software exercises. The “gamification” of learning in Khan Academy has had disastrous consequences at the Los Altos school pilot.

There are some truly innovative learning technologies that have been
around for years. If Khan Academy wants to grow out of their infancy as electronic worksheet drills, I hope their team takes a look at these more transformative educational technologies, all of which have been researched and tested:

ANDES Physics Tutor (University of Pittsburgh and the US Naval Academy)
The history of PLATO
Multimedia Pre-Lectures (University of Illinois)

Khan Academy also promotes the “usefulness” of its dashboard for its exercise software. I find most of that information useless, like knowing how many times a student rewound the movie, how many times she paused it, or how long he spent on a module. Those times could be affected by distractions from family, self-imposed distractions like facebook and texting, etc.

Feedback I would find WAY MORE useful:

knowing how many times a student attempted the same problem
knowing the student’s answer history to each problem; i.e, what the student’s wrong answers were
knowing the type of mistake a student made when choosing a wrong answer; e.g., did he forget to square the distance, did she apply kinetic energy conservation instead of momentum conservation, did he disregard the fact that the forces where in opposite directions, did she confuse force of friction with coefficient of friction, did he assume constant velocity when in fact it was accelerating, etc.
software that anticipates and recognizes those common mistakes (like all great teachers do) and gives the students immediate, tailored feedback during the exercise

Finally, everyone is talking about using Khan Academy as a way to do more inquiry and more project-based learning. However, Bill Gates and Sal Khan and Gates are not showing any examples about what students and teachers are doing beyond Khan Academy. The news stories are not showing the open-ended problems the kids should be engaging with after mastering the basics — instead they show kids sitting in front of laptops working drills and watching videos. The focus is on the wrong things.

Khan Academy is just one tool in a teacher’s arsenal. (If it’s the only tool, that is a HUGE problem.) Khan Academy can be useful for some kids as vehicle (build skills) to help them get to better places (solving complex problems).

Now let’s please shift the focus (yours and mine) toward the destination.

Important Talks/Media about Khan Academy

More Blog Posts Critical of Khan Academy, from me and others

We are Khan Academy, You Will Be Assimilated!

Khan Academy-Related Blogs

Khan Academy blog
Ship or Die – Jason Rosoff, KA lead designer
bjk5 – Ben Kamens, KA lead developer
Los Altos School District Khan Academy Pilot
Harsh Patel, 5th grade teacher

Tagged: education, Khan Academy, lesson, math, modeling, physics, physics education research, pseudoteaching, teaching, technology

SETI Message

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:27:24 GMT

Can you decode the following extraterrestrial message? Is it real or fake? How can you tell?

SETI.wav Listen on Posterous

Tagged: inquiry, math, physics, WCYDWT

Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:20:20 GMT

This must-watch video is from our friend Derek Muller, physics educator and science video blogger.

Derek writes:

It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven’t learned anything.

The apparent reason for the discrepancy is misconceptions. Students have existing ideas about scientific phenomena before viewing a video. If the video presents scientific concepts in a clear, well illustrated way, students believe they are learning but they do not engage with the media on a deep enough level to realize that what was is presented differs from their prior knowledge.

There is hope, however. Presenting students’ common misconceptions in a video alongside the scientific concepts has been shown to increase learning by increasing the amount of mental effort students expend while watching it.

The implication of Derek’s research, both for online science videos and for in-the-classroom science lessons, are obvious. You can find more of Derek’s videos at Veritasium.com or on the Veritasium YouTube Channel. Follow him at @veritasium on Twitter.

Tagged: 21st-century, lesson, physics, physics education research, pseudoteaching, technology, video

What Puts the Pseudo in Pseudoteaching?

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:25:24 GMT

Today we have a guest post from Derek Muller, a physics educator who runs the science video blog Veritasium. Derek is @veritasium on Twitter.

I have made some great pseudoteaching – but it was all in the name of research, let me assure you.

My interests in physics, education, and film converged in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney starting in 2004. Since nearly all forms of education involve multimedia presentations in some form (e.g. a lecture with pictures, an illustrated text, an animation with narration, etc.), I proposed that, by studying this confined unit, we can learn some of the fundamental mechanics of teaching and learning which are at play in broader contexts. My central research question was: how does one design effective multimedia to teach physics?

I made an eight-minute video on Newton’s First and Second Laws and it had all the hallmarks of outstanding pseudoteaching. Here’s a short excerpt from the video:

1. Looks like good teaching

The script was written as clearly and concisely as possible.
Ideas were demonstrated with concrete examples.
Animations were added to highlight the salient features of the examples.
Graphs for the motion were provided and explained with narration.
Research-based principles for multimedia design (developed by Richard Mayer and others) were adhered to.

2. Students feel like they are learning

Students were pre and post-tested plus a small group was interviewed.
Students reported higher confidence in the correctness of their answers on the post-test.
To describe the video, students used phrases like ‘simple’, ‘clear and concise’, ‘easy to understand,’ and ‘a good review’.

3. Very little learning takes place

For students with no high school physics, the average pre-test score was 6.0 out of 26.
The average post-test score, administered immediately after the video, was 6.3 (on the same questions).
Some students told me that they saw their (alternative) conceptions presented in the video (e.g. The force of her hand was greater than the force of friction so the book could slide with constant velocity).

Why I think lectures and videos so often amount to pseudoteaching

1. They are outside the zone of proximal development (ZPD)

Physics involves many interacting concepts. If students don’t have deep, well-defined, ideas about these concepts, the lecture will be well beyond their ZPD (and that is before we consider mathematical ability, misconceptions, etc.)

2. Misconceptions cause mis-perception

For example a misconception about acceleration – perhaps thinking of it as velocity – would mean a student is incapable of accurately perceiving what the lecturer is saying. Furthermore, if the lecturer is saying it in a clear, casual way, the student will think they understand it and that it corresponds to what they are thinking already.

3. Misconceptions cause proactive interference

Proactive interference is a construct from cognitive science. It is a term for when a previously learned idea/behavior interferes with a newly learned idea/behavior. I experienced this when I moved to Australia because here the light switches flick down for on and up for off.

Furthermore, this means that even if students have a ‘breakthrough’ they may revert to older ideas, days or weeks later. Just as I kept turning lights off, and turning on the windshield wipers (when trying to indicate) long after I knew what I really should be doing.

4. Lack of motivation and/or attention

Sometimes we all tune out. If the information does not pass our sensory buffer, it can have no effect on cognition.

5. No opportunity to ask questions

It is impossible to ask questions of a video and difficult to do in a lecture setting.

So what can be done to increase the effectiveness of multimedia presentations?

1. Make sure students are in the zone of proximal development

It is important that students have a strong understanding of the prerequisites.
It is also important that the educator knows the alternative conceptions prevalent in his/her audience. Having misconceptions puts students outside the ZPD even if their other prerequisites are strong.

2. Help the viewer correctly perceive the presentation by starting with the misconceptions

If the ideas that students are really thinking are presented first, they will perceive them correctly. This can then serve as a starting point for explaining how the scientific concept differs.

3. Counter proactive interference by using previous conceptions as footholds

By tying into the student’s prior knowledge, the misconception acts as a conceptual peg on which the scientific knowledge is hung. According to studies on proactive interference (and science education research), the misconception is robust and likely to be recalled – so it is important that the scientific idea is closely tied to it.
The misconception should be discussed for its own merits – why is this idea so common? In what ways does it correctly reflect observations of the world? In what specific ways does it lead to inaccurate reasoning?

4. Make the presentation short and interesting. Use activities, questioning, reflection etc. around the presentation.

This should help keep attention and motivation.
Much of the learning would take place during the reflection activities.

The multimedia on Newton’s First and Second Laws that I outlined above I called the Exposition. I made two additional films, each of which included common misconceptions. One, called the Dialogue had the misconceptions presented as the genuine beliefs of one of the actors. Through discussion with the tutor character, these misconceptions were resolved. The other, called the Refutation, consisted of the same material as in the Exposition plus misconceptions stated and refuted. Here a short excerpt from the Dialogue:

After watching one of the misconception treatments, students’ confidence in the accuracy of their post-test answers improved about the same amount as after watching the Exposition. It seems watching any short instructional segment improves confidence by x. But in interviews they were more likely to say the video was ‘confusing’ or ‘hard to understand’. So how much did they learn? Scores on the post-test were significantly higher than for the Exposition treatment. In fact, students with no high school physics who watched the Dialogue nearly doubled their average score from 6 to 11 out of 26 (the Refutation was similar but not quite as impressive).

Even more interesting was how much mental effort students reported investing in watching the multimedia treatment. Students who watched the Exposition reported an average of about 5 out of 9 (‘neither low nor high mental effort’), whereas those who watched the Dialogue averaged 6 out of 9 (‘rather high mental effort’). Depending on what is presented, students watch it in a different way (perhaps more actively), and that determines how much learning occurs.

How does this view help us understand teaching and learning more broadly?

For one thing, I think it shows that pseudoteaching is audience dependent.

In the discussion above I mainly used data from the Fundamentals stream – students with no high school physics background. Students in the Advanced stream (these are students who did well in high school physics) achieved the same gains across all multimedia treatments. Any ceiling effect would have been slight because their average post-test score was 85%.

Another pseudoteaching post mentioned how Feynman’s lectures became populated with graduate students and faculty. This is exactly the kind of audience for whom the lectures would not be pseudoteaching. These learners would:

Be in the Zone of Proximal Development.
Have few misconceptions (many fewer than undergraduates).
Have better formed schemas so proactive interference has less impact.
Be intrinsically motivated by physics and therefore very attentive to the presentation.

There is a remark often made at science education conferences, usually with a chuckle, “Can’t learn anything from these talks because you know we learn nothing from a lecture.” I hope everyone recognizes the problem with statements like these. We can learn from presentations. What and how much we learn comes down to the level of the presentation, our existing schemas and misconceptions, and our motivation and attention.

Full disclosure

I have the excellent fortune to rarely teach a class of more than 14 students. Most are very bright and keen and I have virtually no discipline issues. I know every student by name and one of my mottos is “never say anything a student could say for you.” My classes are much more a discussion than a lecture and I definitely feel like this is the best method for teaching and learning.

The point of this post is not to promote one-way presentations or video lectures. It is to raise the level of discussion about multimedia (and about teaching and learning more generally). I think the transmission/construction dichotomy is unproductive and misleading. It creates a very narrow view of education (like Animal Farm – “Four legs good, two legs bad,” “hands on good, hands off bad,” “doing good, listening bad,” “newfangled good, traditional bad,” etc.) Does constructivism really support hands-on, doing, not telling? I’m not sure it does. Constructivism says ‘learners construct there own understanding actively, by thinking,’ but it does not say how this can best be facilitated. Listeners and viewers are not necessarily passive. I argue what is presented determines how the presentation is viewed which determines how much learning occurs.

References

My PhD, which includes the content from the publications below, can be downloaded here: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/pdfs/research/super/PhD(Muller).pdf

2008 Muller, D. A., Sharma, M. D. and Reimann, P.,
Raising cognitive load with linear multimedia to promote conceptual change, Science Education, 92(2), 278-296

2008 Muller, D. A., Bewes, J., Sharma, M. D. and Reimann, P.
Saying the wrong thing: Improving learning with multimedia by including misconceptions, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning,24(2), 144-155

2008 Muller, D. A., Lee, K. J. and Sharma, M. D.
Coherence or interest: Which is most important in online multimedia learning?, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology,24(2), 211-221

2007 Muller, D. A., Sharma, M. D., Eklund, J. and Reimann, P.
Conceptual change through vicarious learning in an authentic physics setting, Instructional Science, 35(6), 519-533

Afterword

Derek’s Veritasium videos are crafted using the results from his research. Here’s a great example:

Be sure to check out the entire collection Veritasium.com and at the Veritasium YouTube channel. I would like to add that Derek’s results are important and should inform our face-to-face class discussions as well.

Tagged: physics, physics education research, pseudoteaching, teaching, video

Increasing Engagement in Science

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:21:53 GMT

As part of a session on innovative practices in science at TeachMeet New Jersey 2011, I gave a presentation entitled “Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Increasing Engagement in Science”

I have posted that presentation, complete with speaker’s notes and plenty of links to further information, here: http://bit.ly/EngageSci

Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated! (e.g., is there a bigger theme I am missing, etc.) Thanks!

Tagged: demonstration, engagement, inquiry, lab, lesson, modeling, physics, physics education research, problem solving, resources, teaching, whiteboarding

Pseudoteaching Update for 2/22/2011

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:36:23 GMT

Two new posts have been added to the pseudoteaching page:

Pseudoteaching FAQ by John Burk (Quantum Progress)
John gives us the low down on PT.

Pseudoteaching: Laboratory Experiments by Dolores Gende (Journey in Technology)
Dolores takes on cook book labs and offers suggestions on how to make them more open-ended.

Please add your own pseudoteaching story!

Tagged: inquiry, lab, physics, pseudoteaching