Chapter 1 Short Description of the Paradigms in Physics Program
¶In 1996, the faculty at Oregon State University reformed the entire upper-division curriculum for physics majors. This reform involved both a rearrangement of content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the infusion of a number of evidence-based interactive pedagogies that are known to engage students more interactively in a discipline. The resulting curriculum has become a local and national model for curricular reform. This curriculum includes a variety of active-engagement teaching strategies such as interactive small-group problem-solving, project-based classes, kinesthetic activities, and technology-based visualization activities.
The essential features of the Paradigms in Physics Program are:
- Truly holistic reform (the whole upper-division major), including changes to the scope and sequence of courses, pedagogical strategies, hidden curriculum, and modernization of content;
- Attention to what students actually know and are able to do: from routine formative assessment to formal physics education research (PER);
- Pedagogical strategies that align with what is known about how people learn (implemented gradually as we learn more);
- Just-in-time development of mathematical skills and knowledge;
- A computational physics sequence which parallels the physics content of the junior year paradigms courses;
- A sustained faculty learning community which has been meeting every three weeks for 22 years;
- A collaborative planning process for reform, characterized by respect for all participants, including undergraduate students, undergraduate Learning Assistants (LAs), and graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs), as well as faculty. This process incorporates department-wide vision and experience;
- Content alignment designed by experienced content experts, including a plan for the contributions of each course to major conceptual physics themes;
- Grass roots reform, encouraged by the department chair and upper administration, which has created ownership for the curriculum by a majority of physics faculty and instructors;
- A rigorous internal and external evaluation process that includes anonymous formative input from students.
By attending to the whole list of features above in an organic growth model, we have become a laboratory that studies questions of how to engage students with physically-relevant and mathematically-deep content, how instructional teams can be developed and supported and learn to welcome new members, how departments can develop, share, and sustain a vision for curriculum and assessment, how discipline-based education researchers (DBER) can best take advantage of active-engagement instructional settings to explore how students learn, how to disseminate the complex and interrelated curricular structures we have developed, and how to evaluate the results of this multifaceted process with rigor and integrity.
In Paradigms classes, we use responsive teaching methods with a wide variety of active-engagement pedagogical strategies, such as using visualization and kinesthetic activities for developing geometric understandings, or small-group problem solving activities to teach the use of various representations. All of these strategies increase communication from the students to the instructors.
Central to our dissemination efforts has been the development of a website (see: http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/. Note, this site is expected to be upgraded and moved in early 2020---check here soon for the new link.) This site is designed to encourage faculty at other institutions to adopt our curricular materials at several different grain sizes. The base layer consists of over 300 separate activities which can be browsed by either physics subdiscipline or by pedagogical strategy. Another layer discusses upper-division pedagogical strategies, some of which are unique to us and others of which are extensions of known strategies to the upper-division. The website illustrates how to use these activities and strategies with detailed examples and narratives. We have also begun articulating sequences of activities and course sequences. The activities are also indexed to ComPADRE, the physics arm of the National Science Digital Library.