A Study of the Development of the Paradigms in Physics Program

Level of student knowledge and skills.

This faculty member was open to student feedback in many contexts and sometimes found what students said and did surprising:

I think most of the surprises that have happened have been when students are giving me feedback . . . either in the homework help session by the questions they ask, or I'm walking around the room and they're working on a small group activity, the discussions we have, or the in-class questions that they ask.

The level of student knowledge and difficulty in acquiring new knowledge was somewhat surprising:

I'm not too surprised but some students are asking questions or using language where it's clear that energy and power are not well cemented in their minds, the difference between them, and realizing that I can't have intelligent conversation using those words unless everybody's on board and I worry that I'm boring some of the students but, I want to find the right balance. It's almost like I need a little video tutorial about the difference between energy and power, and the people who need it, watch it

Some students who seemed to have appropriate knowledge were struggling with applying that knowledge without explicit instructions of how to do so:

I was surprised by the number of people who told me that they found Homework 1 difficult and who had spent a lot of time on it. And some of the questions I got from people who seemed to have a pretty good command of the physics but were struggling. . .where the pieces were all under their nose. . .so it's just a rearrangement of quantities that I would hope wouldn't require me to hold their hand; I would think that they're at a point where they can figure that out for themselves, so I was surprised that some people were struggling with that, a few people who seemed to get other things just fine, struggled with something like that.

Level of student familiarity with equipment and units of measurement.

It was not only language and facility with problem-solving but also lack of familiarity with equipment that was surprising:

A lot of people learned how to use the breadboard and connect wires together and feel more comfortable with circuits than they used to; they learned that ammeters go in series with the circuit and voltmeters go in parallel and things like that; maybe I should have said that was a surprise; many groups I needed to come and show them this is how you're going to have to hook up these different meters. I had to basically let them know that the diagram actually is an accurate representation of where the wires are going to go; I don't think they, they've seen diagrams that are abstractions of the real thing, knowing how far an abstraction it is I guess is a challenge.

Also surprising was lack of familiarity with converting to metric units:

I had one question during the midterm, which was “I can't estimate the size of a parking spot.” Finally it came out “I could estimate it in feet but I don't know how to convert from feet to meters.”

Student difficulty in transferring between homework and class activities.

This faculty member also was surprised by the difficulty students had in transferring a process they had used in the homework to an in-class activity:

So Monday was the first day talking about the model for the Earth's temperature and one of the exercises I did in class was getting them to calculate the intensity of sunlight, basically we're applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, intensity of light coming off the surface of a hot object. I was surprised that the students had the trouble that they did. There was one table that were able to get that question and do an order of magnitude estimate, based on the temperature of the sun, how much light should we be getting on Earth. A lot of groups struggled with that. They previously had a homework question, where they had to think about the total power coming out of a light and how that relates to the intensity at different distances. It was an extra step to transfer because you had to think about the intensity at the surface the sun, and that's at a certain radius, and then as you get a larger radius how that decays. Yes, that was an eye opener for me; I expected that to be a lot easier for students. I hope that the stuff we're doing now where we're often jumping between intensities and powers is feeling second nature to students but I'm afraid maybe it's not.

Student awareness of the role of a physical mechanism in an explanation.

Also surprising was the difficulty some students had in understanding the importance of discussing physical mechanisms and providing microscopic descriptions in the term paper:

The biggest surprise I had this week was a student asking for some help with their term paper and I was trying to ask the student what's the physics of how you're going to be turning the energy in this hot gas into electrical energy because their term paper will be about something that tacks on to a coal burning power plant to make it more efficient and take the hot gas and turns it into a plasma and somehow extracts more energy out of it. And it was like we were speaking totally different languages. I kept saying “so how does it work?” and so “well it takes hot gas and makes electricity” but “but how, how does it work?” The idea that I want to know physical mechanisms or microscopic descriptions, that was an eye opener for me that that wasn't obvious.

Student strengths.

Sometimes some students seemed to know more than expected, however:

I got caught off guard by some of the chemistry knowledge that they already had. People asking me why do you put two electrons in a bond but sometimes you put three electrons in an orbital? It makes sense those questions and I'll be ready for them next time but I hadn't anticipated them. It's really interesting to think about what they're bringing to this topic from chemistry classes

Surprises also could be positive in terms of how the students interacted in class:

I think the fact that people were much more talkative in class I think was a nice surprise, I thought partly warming up to get to know each other, I'm sure there's an aspect of that, comfort as time goes on in class, I think it must have also been the burning curiosity about many of these things.

Toward the end of the course, the students seemed to be at ease talking with one another in class.