NSF Grant to Fund Collaborative Physics Education Research Effort
Contact: Aimee Dolloff (207) 581-3777
A collaborative effort to investigate student learning in physics and to create curriculum designed to make it easier for students to understand physics recently received funding through August 2011 thanks to a $337,214 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Researchers from the University of Maine’s Department of Physics and Astronomy are collaborating with colleagues at Arizona State University Polytechnic, and California State University — Fullerton to conduct the three-part study. Cal State Fullerton received an additional grant tied to this collaborative effort for $162,763, bringing the project’s total funding to just under $500,000.
“In education research, it’s especially important to have collaborators in your work. There are four faculty working on this, and we all bring different expertise to this project,” Associate Professor John Thompson of UMaine’s Department of Physics and Astronomy said. “I enjoy collaborating, because in discussing ideas and results, I come to more realizations and get more ideas for follow-ups than if I were alone. The other advantage to collaboration is that you can collect data from more students, and from different types of students.”
In the first phase, the researchers are evaluating students before and after instruction to see what the students know when they enter the class and what, if anything, they’ve gained by the time they leave.
Once the researchers have identified the issues that students have with specific concepts, they design curriculum to address any obstacles. These materials are then tested during the course. The teaching style that’s used also is based on results from education research. The instructors don’t lecture, but rather act as facilitators who prompt students with questions instead of giving direct answers while the students work in small groups on worksheets, called “tutorials.”
The third project component will be to determine how well the curriculum worked. Assessment questions are used to see if there is improvement in the class as a whole, especially on the issues discovered in the initial research.
The end goal of the project is to produce a set of tutorials that can be used in courses to improve student learning and student conceptual understanding, and to serve as a model for additional research in the field of physics education.
“Our goal is to develop curriculum that can be disseminated nationally, or even internationally to improve learning in physics classes,” Thompson said.
He noted that physics education research at the university level is well ahead of other sciences and mathematics in the ability to produce curriculum at the introductory level based on research and pedagogical reform, but that this project also has other potential implications for other disciplines.
“Our work could serve as a model for other disciplines to reform teaching in their more advanced courses,” Thompson said. “Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of this work — we have links to chemistry, engineering, and math – may lead to more conversations between disciplines on how best to have students learn the concepts and the applications across disciplines.”