Part III The First Decade (1996–2005): Initiating the Paradigms in Physics Program
¶Part III reviews the history of the first decade of the Paradigms in Physics program in which the faculty reformed the upper-level curriculum to initiate juniors and seniors into ‘thinking like physicists.’ The framework for this study was adapted from studies of organizational decision-making (Beach [2–3]). The questions guiding Part III of this study were:
- What was the educational reform context within which the faculty initiated revising the upper-level physics curriculum?
- What was the culture of the department at that time? In particular, what were the participants' beliefs about teaching and learning?
- What motivated making changes and how did the faculty form a coherent vision for the new program?
- How did the faculty develop and communicate plans for this new curriculum?
- How did they get approval for, implement, institutionalize, and begin disseminating the new courses?
Data sources for this part of the qualitative study included a file of documents created during the initiation of the Paradigms in Physics program and stored in the office of the faculty member who had served as the Principal Investigator (PI) of a series of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants that had funded the on-going development of this reformed curriculum. The lead author audio-recorded interviews with the six faculty members still on the faculty who were involved in designing and implementing this reform, including two who had served as chair of the department during this time period. The lead author also audio-recorded interviews with two individuals who had been undergraduate physics majors as well as graduate student assistants, and one who had been a graduate assistant during the first version of the reformed curriculum. Also consulted were materials on a wiki documenting the program and journal publications describing the reformed curriculum. The lead author selected excerpts from the interviews to illustrate the insights of these individuals with respect to the issues stated above.