Section 5.12 Documenting student experiences.
¶With the participation in the project of the external evaluator, the faculty were able to have baseline studies conducted before launching the new courses as well as formal studies of the new program. At the end of the three years, the evaluator reported the following findings concerning a comparison of student success with the traditional and reformed curriculum:
...comparing the Physics GRE scores with the pre-Physics GPA indicated that the Paradigms improved the support for the learning of physics for average and below average students. In the traditional program, students struggling early tended to withdraw, changing to other majors. However, similar average and below average students in the Paradigms were more often retained and supported in their continued work with physics at no apparent expense to the above average students. In the Paradigms, students quickly recognized the importance of working together, both the strong and the weak students. And their work was continuous over the term with courses changing every three weeks. The extensive group work appeared to contribute to a stronger support mechanism for average and below average students, students who typically need additional support to engage in the processes.
The external evaluator also summarized findings about students' enhanced analytic problem solving abilities, increased perception of the integration of mathematics and physics, increased ability to interpret the multiple notations they encountered in using a variety of textbook resources, and perceptions of their own learning through the spiral nature of the curriculum. The evaluation report, for example, quoted a student in reporting:
...reflecting over the year, however, students recognized how the courses complemented each other. “They built on one another pretty well. Fourier analysis was learned in one course and used in the next Paradigm and then in others as well. They introduced a concept and then more in depth for the next use.” It may be that this repetition, with each level developing more depth, helped the average and lower students remain in the Paradigms.
The external evaluation provided extensive documentation of the students' perceptions and accomplishments as well as on-going feedback to the faculty as issues occurred. The PI noted how important this feedback had been in helping them to become aware of what the students were experiencing and to make adjustments as needed:
What (the external evaluator) did was to tell us honestly, as someone with some expertise in institutional and curricular change, to tell us honestly what she saw. And to be a safe place for people to report what they were experiencing, a safe and an anonymous place, and then it was the responsibility of the group to figure out what to do about that...she also just gave a lot of feedback each three weeks; What were students finding was useful in this course? She asked (the students) nice open-ended questions: What was causing problems?...
One pragmatic example involved the timing of homework:
...one of the things she uncovered, in the different 3-week courses, faculty were requiring homework to be due on different days, and that the students couldn't coordinate their personal lives, they could not change the coordination of their personal lives every three weeks, and we just put down a rule, that said if you're going to have anything due it has to be due on Wednesday or Fridays so that the students knew that Tuesdays and Thursdays had to be their main work days and they could arrange their personal lives or their other courses or whatever around that and that made a huge difference
Students might not have communicated this kind of information to faculty but were able to voice their concerns to the external evaluator.
Several graduate students chose to study what was happening in the new courses. Studies included a Master's thesis on common features of effective small group activities (Meyer, 1998) and a doctoral dissertation on ways upper-division students use visualization in their problem solving (Browne, 2002).