EDUC 6470 Final Project

For EDUC 6470, a project to examine innovative teaching, to search the literature, and to develop ideas.

Possible projects

What is important about the sequence of classes in a unit?

This semester I've been teaching electronics. I taught an 8 week class that included lessons normally put off until after "the basics" of electronic components were "presented." For the next 8 weeks I'm offering a components class that might be more recognizable as an introduction to the basics of electronics. Many students are taking both. Unstudied first arguments might be either of these opposites:

1. Students who build circuits first before reviewing the basics of each component will be more motivated to learn the basics of each component.
2. Students who build circuits first won't understand enough about each component to understand the circuit as a system of components.

I will examine these concerns as I teach the second course, and see if there's any literature on this subject of sequencing within a unit. I will build a concept map to examine my own "pedagogical content knowledge" and count chunks per meeting.

Assessment

I've created a survey using Student Assessment of Learning Gains (s:14911,p:diode). I can use concept maps to assess students' development of concepts.

Parallels

I like to draw parallels to teaching in non-science subjects. In this case, I can draw a parallel between the dichotomies of basics to contextualized understandings in both subjects. For example, in english, specifically poetry, we could call iambs, troches, and rhymes the basics, and creative writing and literary analysis of an epic poem the contextualized understandings.

Related questions

• Should engineering be a part of K-12 science education, or treated separately, as in Massachusetts?
• Can we avoid mistakenly separating "applied science" from "pure science"? <bibref>Rowland:1883</bibref>
• Is the literature on sequencing only for long-term sequencing of concepts, as in Atlas of Science Literacy?
• Will this work have any translation to long-term sequencing, such as the sequencing of introductory undergraduate science?

Meta-study of PHYSLRNR

PHYSLRNR is an e-mail list for the education research group of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Questions

• What interests people on PHYSLRNR?
  • Are my interests in curriculum change ever addressed on PHYSLRNR, any more or less than in other PER venues?
• How many people post on PHYSLRNR, how often?
  • Are PHYSLRNR posts representative of the diversity of physics education research?
• Do new ideas appear on PHYSLRNR?
• Are readers affected by what is posted on PHYSLRNR, or is it merely a soapbox?

Methods

• Count posts.
• Find and count keywords.
  • Reiterate as we discover patterns.
• Measure impact by replies
• Survey readers

Relationships between innovative teaching and innovative curriculum

Driving question

How can the powerful movement in innovative teaching be brought to help the movement in innovative curriculum?

Questions

1. What innovations in curriculum are documented?
2. What innovations in teaching are documented?
3. What innovations in teaching are closely linked to considerations of content?
4. What innovations in teaching are specific to physics?
5. What innovations in teaching are specific to science?
6. What innovations in teaching are specific to my audiences?

Considerable Issues

1. There is a tension between getting more people to follow the traditional science curriculum, often touted as a path to equity and to prosperity, and changing the curriculum to address the needs of more modern people. This tension is made manifest in the efforts to open the most traditional curricula of physics and engineering to more females. [?]

Curriculum Reforms

1. Study less topics, more deeply.
2. Study new topics. The idea that the canon needs revision is introduced in "The Saber-Tooth Curriculum" by Harold Benjamin. <bibref>Benjamin:1939Saber-tooth-curAA</bibref>
3. Study only essential topics, approach new topics on a need-to-know basis.
4. Remove old subject-divisions. See Beane, James A. (1995). Curriculum integration and the disciplines of knowledge. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(8), 616. Retrieved May 4, 2010, from Teacher Journals. (Document ID: 1761432). <bibref>Beane:1995Curriculum-inteAA</bibref> Also in Kaleidoscope:Readings in education, ninth edition.

Pedagogical Reforms

Here are some of the many reforms in teaching and innovative approaches to the classroom, most which we studied in Innovative Teaching in the Sciences. For each reform, we examine whether there are any special compatibilities or possibilities for each of the curriculum reforms mentioned.

1. Guided inquiry
2. Computer aided simulations and microcomputer-based laboratories. See, for example, Redish et al. 1996: http://filer.case.edu/bjk13/RedishSaulSteinberg_Microcomputer.pdf
   1. Since it is easy to analyze results and activities on the computer, instructors can use computer-based classwork to more quickly get to the deep parts of topics.
   2. Computer simulations and labs, since much of the activities is managed by software, which is easily transferred between schools, allow the rapid spread of an instructional unit. The dilemma is that this can serve both to allow the rapid dissemination of new curricula and to allow the rapid homogenization of some curricula.
   3. Computer-aided classwork might be made and distributed to help focus courses on essential topics, while providing the instructor with performance data to quickly address need-to-know concepts.
3. Teaching what you don't know. Discussed in a book of the same name by Therese Huston, this is the situation where experts in their subject are teaching something new to themselves. <bibref>Huston:2009Teaching-what-yAA</bibref> Although this situation may merely be an expedient for schools that can't find a teacher for a new subject, I will consider it here as a reform, since it will be required when we want to teach new curricula.
   1. One benefit of teaching new topics is described by John Bean, professor of English at Seattle University, quoted by Huston: "Each time I've taught a literature course I've wanted to have different readings. The teaching that I try to do is not simply the expert giving information to the novice; I'm teaching them how to make knowledge out of stuff that's confusing." (p. 12) Can we apply this idea to science education? It might be argued that the sequence of topics in physics is too strict to allow much change in topics, but I would like to explore the argument against such a restriction.
   2. Teaching new-to-everyone topics seems quite compatible with the depth-before-breadth reform in curriculum. If a class is expected to explore a topic for longer than in a traditional survey course, everyone, including the teacher, is given the opportunity to explore how best to learn the topic.
4. Using student-generated questions. If we allowed students to pose questions in the field of the course, they might generate novel areas of research or approaches to a question. Huston suggests that leading students in a course "that involves reading primary sources, evaluating their claims, and constructing new interpretations" would be a better springboard for a professor's research. (p. 34)
5. Standardized tests.
   1. Standardized tests might help with getting courses to cover less content better, if the standards distill their conceptual array.
   2. But, they will have negative effects on the study of new topics, since they will lag the cutting edge of curriculum. They will re-establish a canon at the expense of the diversity of learning any nation needs for its citizenry, its workforce.
6. Concept inventories
   1. Concept inventory pre-tests and post-tests allow educators to measure gains in conceptual understanding, but may only help with the learning of concepts for which inventories are published. This may serve to measure how to learn some concepts more deeply, but will, like standardized tests, impede the movement towards new topics or student-chosen curriculum.
7. Peer instruction exercises ((Consider Mazur; see chapter 5 of Huston)).
8. Mind maps and concept maps. Such views of the constructed frameworks of knowledge and understanding among students may help us more quickly address the essential content, or reach the depth required in a depth-over-breadth curriculum.
9. Team-teaching
10. Teach the nature of science. Is the point of a high school physics course to help students be able to predict when a ball will clear the back fence, or to help students be more intelligent about physical science in general? A statewide test appears to give a different answer than a statewide standards document.

Maybe start with the document File:BruceWilson2002InnovativeCurriculum.pdf as an innovation in curriculum? Bruce Wilson wrote that we need to reduce the amount of required concepts in standards documents, in favor of allowing students to work on essential concepts so well that they learn them well. Leaving off issues of who gets to say what those essential concepts are, what innovative teaching is compatible with such a reform, and what innovative teaching necessitates such reform?

References

See Week 10 notes on Donald French's 2006 paper. <bibreferences />