Section 1.3 The Paradigms Model for Curriculum Development and Research
It is not possible to study every activity that we design or every concept that we cover with a formal, publishable research project. Instead, it is essential to sustain a culture where honest and comprehensive self-assessment is the norm. To accomplish this, we use cycles of reflective development. Our teaching teams (faculty member, graduate teaching assistant(s), undergraduate learning assistant, and grader) make classroom observations of students and examine student work to establish the students' current level of knowledge. Our roles as reflective teachers in an active-engagement environment, described in Section 1.2, are key to the effectiveness of this step. We then design instructional activities (small whiteboard questions, small group problem solving tasks, kinesthetic activities, and computational tasks), homework, and assessment questions to support student learning. We deploy these activities in the classroom and revise them in a cycle of reflective practice: (a) a prep meeting before class to discuss the learning goals, anticipated student reasoning, and what conversations might helps students, then (b) conversations with students working in small groups including some groups giving presentations to the class; and (c) a post-class meeting to share our observations and suggest revisions to the materials. When necessary, we analyze classroom video and exams in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the materials and/or vet the materials in interviews with students.
Occasionally we identify “hot spots,” places where we have reason to believe that our materials are NOT working as well as we would like. These hot spots are often identified in our regular upper-division curriculum meetings or through conversations within our instructional teams (TA/LAs are a wonderful font of information), through research by others, or most often through conversations with students as they engage with our activities and homework. As responsive teachers, we have learned not to move on before most students in the class are showing clear signs of understanding a basic topic. Whenever our activities on a particular concept take consistently longer than they “should” based on our experienced practitioners' judgment, we acknowledge a problem.
At that stage, we often choose to do formal research on the concept, typically through open-ended, semi-structured student interviews using a think aloud or group protocol. These interviews are analyzed using appropriate qualitative theoretical frameworks and the results are submitted for peer-reviewed publication. For more information, see our research website [5].
Sometimes, often in response to our own discussions, we are inspired to interview expert faculty to pin an endpoint to our learning progressions. In this way we have identified a number of places where experts in different STEM fields or different subdisciplines in physics think differently from each other about a concept, leading to confusion in students who experience these different points of view. These discoveries have led to some of our most interesting and comprehensive reforms.