A Study of the Development of the Paradigms in Physics Program

Example of focusing primarily on adding activities.

One of the faculty members had already modified a traditional large lecture course with recitations by changing the recitation sections to feature activities:

...it was the traditional large lecture, recitation model, so (the TA) had the responsibility for the recitation, and then with my support, he started writing activities for those recitations...it wasn't a reform, it was what to do with recitations...it was reform in the sense that I didn't see the point of having my TA stand there and do homework problems...

This experience may be typical of skilled lecturers who decide to undertake adding activities to their instructional approaches in some contexts:

...we weren't thinking carefully about how to do group activities, we had no experience with group activities, we hadn't been trained to do activities, we had no literature so it was very much ad hoc, but I certainly was aware going into the paradigms course design that group activities, at least in my own vision, ought to be, would have to be a part of the two hour days...I think I adopted a fairly traditional, one hour lecture, mostly lecture one-hour days, two-hour days, a round of activities, and do the rest by ear.

This faculty member had succeeded in designing group activities for most of the 2 hour blocks on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not all.

I had very little difficulty coming up with two good computer-based activities for (one main topic) and also very little trouble coming up with three activities for the two weeks of (second main topic), but both ran out of ideas and felt overwhelmed with content for that last 2-hour block so did initially use it as lecture and that day has been the single hardest day to manage over the five or six times I've taught the course.

Eventually a colleague designed a successful activity for that day:

I think possibly not even the last time I taught course, but possibly not until the following year when (a colleague) taught the course, finally turned that lecture itself, just hit the bullet and turned the lecture into an activity, and then constructed an activity that got the key ideas of lecture. The topic is...far and away the hardest bit of content in the entire course, she turned it into an activity that got at some but not all of that content, which I think has been far more successful. But it took 5 or 6 times of my teaching the course and passing it off to several people, that is the most recent change in a course that I was a part of.

Later this faculty member began integrating activities into the one-hour as well as two-hour blocks but the initial perspective was to maintain a lecture / recitation structure.

Example of integrating lecture and laboratory explorations.

One of the co-PIs reflected on the experience of integrating lecture and laboratory explorations within the new paradigms class structure:

I had never really just explicitly designed activities into a course where the expectation was that the class would stop and they would work, or that there was a lab activity interspersed in it so that was different about the paradigms...The longer time blocks were built into the classes and so that gave you time to do longer things...

This faculty member's overall approach was first to think about how the labs and lecture serve the goals of the course:

You have to take a holistic look at what the course is about and ensure that, if there is a class/lab structure, you make a concerted effort to think about how the labs and lecture serve the goals of the course, how the students will view the matter...

An example of such a goal was understanding how waves reflect at boundaries:

When I was designing the waves course, one of the main lessons that I felt that the students should understand was how waves reflect at boundaries and how there's a reflection and transmission coefficient, and this also had to do with boundary conditions, and at some level that's really all that it's about

This faculty member's intent was to design a simple laboratory activity that she and the students could do and discuss together:

and so I thought about was there an activity that we could do together in the class that would really address this, that was simple, that we could all do together, and talk about it, rather than parceling them up into separate labs, which is what happens in the traditional 314 labs, they go off and do independent things...

An idea that eventually she developed into a core integrated laboratory activity for the waves paradigm course involved a long coax cable:

and I came up with the idea of a long cable, and a function generator, and I thought it would be an easy thing to do, and it turned out to be of course a lot more complicated than that, but I think simplicity is important in those kinds of in-class demonstrations but what you think is simple and what students think is simple are quite different things

There were also barriers to be addressed:

At the beginning we had issues with students not really understanding how to use an oscilloscope, which is something that we thought they knew from introductory physics, which some did and others didn't, that was a barrier, and then the real world is complicated, the particular activity that I chose turns out to be critically affected by the concept of damping, which I didn't want to get into at the beginning, but it was, so I had to work out how to get damping into all of that and then as always there is just the question of time...

A description of the eventual version of this integrated lab activity is described on the paradigms in physics wiki at (http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/activities:guides:wvcoaxlab)

Example of interspersing mini-lectures, small group activities and whole group discussions.

In discussing the process of designing the new courses, the PI noted that although colleagues mostly thought of the two-hour blocks as opportunities for integrated labs, she thought of them as having periods of twenty minutes each and chose to design such sessions as sequences of mini-lectures integrated with opportunities to do activities such as computer visualizations or small group problem-solving. A Compare and Contract Activity, for example, is described at (http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/strategy:contrast:start) on the paradigms in physics wiki. During such activities, small groups work on various versions of a problem, with intermittent whole group conversations as needed, followed by a wrap-up discussion:

In a Compare and Contrast Activity, each small group solves a slightly different example of the same calculation...Because each group is effectively doing the same calculation, it is possible, at any time during the activity, to pull the class back together briefly to give clarifying comments or to discuss problems that seem to be common to many groups.

The wrap-up discussion begins with the small groups presenting their work. The instructor encourages the students to reflect on what a calculation means, how it might be generalized, and what the limitations are. The wrap-up discussion continues with comparing and contrasting the results of the different groups:

What can students guess about possible patterns from what the different examples show? The instructor may want to confirm or deny the pattern or, immediately after the group experience, to give the general proof, if necessary. The activity is designed to give students enough experience that they are prepared to believe the result and to understand subtleties in the proof. This approach is backwards from the traditional lecture style that involves giving the general proof and then having the students work out examples for homework.

An example involves linear transformations, in which students come up with hypotheses for a rule about the geometric interpretation for determinants by looking at different cases (see http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/acts:prlineartrans and http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/whitepapers:narratives:lineartranslong

One of the interviewees who had been a TA described a student's interpretation of this instructional approach:

I still remember this wonderful conversation with (an undergraduate student); we were asking what it was like to learn in this different way, we didn't really have lectures, and he proceeded to explain to us that we lecture all the time in paradigms, the teacher will talk for about 5 minutes and then ask some questions and then there will be back and forth discussion and the teacher will talk for 5 or 10 more minutes and that active engagement discussion, which is so unusual in a college physics course, that was the norm for him, that's what he expected was ‘lecture’.

‘Lecture’ was how the course schedule identified the paradigms courses so this student was technically correct in his interpretation of the term.