BERG > Project NEXUS UMCP > Papers and Presentations

Presentations at the World Conference on Physics Education, Istanbul, Turkey, July 1-6, 2012.

Plenary talk

The Role of Context and Culture in Teaching Physics: The implication of disciplinary differences

Edward F. Redish
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Preparing physics majors and future physics teachers are the way we propagate our profession into the future. But for many physics departments, a major component of our instructional effort is teaching physics to students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). For a number of years, the University of Maryland PERG (Physics Education Research Group) has been meeting with faculty in other disciplines to reform physics instruction to better meet their students’ instructional needs. Currently, we are participating in project NEXUS (National Experiment in Undergraduate Science Education),¹ a multi-university multi-disciplinary effort to reform science education for biology majors and pre-medical students.² As part of this project, we have held many hours of discussion with faculty in biology and chemistry and have carried out extensive probes into student perceptions about the relations among the disciplines. These interdisciplinary conversations have revealed unexpected barriers and cultural differences among the sciences, both for faculty and students. These diverse scientific cultures and their different perceptions of contexts make it challenging for physics faculty to understand how their non-physicist STEM students will interpret their instruction, and make if difficult for students to connect what they learn from classes in different departments. I will present some attempts to overcome these barriers and will consider the implications for teaching physics to STEM students.

Supported in part by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the US National Science Foundation.

References:

1. NEXUS UMCP
2. Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (AAMC, 2009).

Contributed oral symposium

Changing perspectives through interactions of diverse communities

A. Vaz, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Edward F. Redish, University of Maryland, USA

Dean Zollman, Kansas State University, USA

Collaborative interactions occur at a variety of levels in science education, from students working together on a classroom task, to instructors and administrators negotiating the content or pedagogy of a class, to researchers trying to make sense of what they see in students’ behavior. Each of these interactions occur in a multi-level cultural context, and often one that brings together two or more distinct cultural perspectives.

In this symposium we present four studies of collaborative interactions conducted by PER groups in two different countries. Members of these groups were responsible for / intensely involved in key curricular reforms: at the University of Maryland (UMD), the physics course for the “National Experiment in Undergraduate Science Education” (NEXUS), and at the Colégio Técnico, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), the high-school level “Currículo de Física em Espiral” (CFE). Such involvement had some bearings on the investigations each group has conducted lately. These studies were chosen as examples of four levels of collaborative interaction in physics education:

Here are brief summaries of the four studies.

Study A: Faculty collaboration – Designing an interdisciplinary physics course

The goal of the NEXUS course reform is to recreate the introductory physics course for life science majors in a way that better fits the needs of biology majors and pre-health care professionals. Specifically the project is attempting to create a course that builds general scientific competencies and is perceived of as of authentic value in understanding biology by both biology students and faculty. A large team of physicists, biologists, and chemists have gotten together for extensive discussions of this course, both on general content and to discuss specific issues. Although all of the participants are scientists, each brings elements, orientations, and expectations from their particular scientific discipline. These scientific sub-cultures often conflict in the language they use and the assumptions they (perhaps tacitly) make, even for the “same” topic. One example is the way the different disciplines talk about molecular binding and energy. In this part of the symposium we will present an example of distinct disciplinary perspectives and how they were resolved in our course design.

Study B: Research collaboration – Crossing the levels of action

A significant component in the NEXUS physics class are group physics problem-solving activities that have authentic biological value. These are worked on by students in groups of 3-5 in small-class environments, facilitated by teaching assistants. The development of the course materials are based on a research/design model in which student behavior is videotaped and then analyzed by the research team. These observations weave together three distinct levels of group interaction and practice:

1. Student learning -- In this course, students are asked to learn to "think like physicists" and to seek consistency across their disciplinary science knowledge.  This often challenges students' cultural assumptions about learning and the scientific disciplines. In our focal episode, we see some students readily taking up tools from physics while others are actively striving to draw on knowledge from chemistry and biology courses.
2. Education research – The research team analyzes videotapes of the student discussions on the task and it takes a group activity to extract meaning from student dialogue.
3. Curriculum reform – What the research group learns from their analysis has implications for teaching practice that need to be renegotiated with the instructional level members of the team.

We will analyze the implications of the group interactions using videoclips of student behavior and field notes of the research group discussion.

Study C: Theoretical Collaboration – Resorting to scholarly fields of knowledge

When PER investigators study new classes there is a risk of only seeing what they expect. The risk might be even higher if previous research results were used in the design of the curriculum. The study we present here resulted from an attempt to improve classroom observation of high school students in the new CFE physics class. We wanted to detect barriers to students’ cognitive development during enquiry, collaboration, and dialogical argumentation. We saw that some groups created effective learning opportunities occasionally, but no groups did it with consistency. Since we inferred that gender issues were involved, we analyzed our observations using Connell’s Social Theory of Masculinity. We will illustrate this process presenting data about groups where the boys’ patterns of behavior inhibited collaboration among students. These patterns became particularly clear when we analyzed the role some girls played in mixed gender groups.

Study D: Student-Researcher Collaboration – Group interview about classroom instances

The CFE reform relied on students’ discovering learning opportunities in physics classes for themselves. To evaluate the extent to which this occurred in the curriculum, we devised a research methodology inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and stimulated recall technique. We interviewed groups of eleventh-grade students who had participated in the curriculum themselves. They were prompted to recall their own experiences by watching video recordings of tenth-grade students engaged in similar activities. This helped the researchers understand actions and cognitive processes in the collaborative classroom activities of the tenth-grade students in the video. In addition, the collaboration with the eleventh-grade student observers helped researchers understand those students’ own experiences and development in CFE activities. For example, the eleventh-graders reported that when they experienced the activity, they no longer expected teachers to be the only source for knowledge. They made explicit how they re-elaborated the solution of many problems and cognitive challenges they faced in physics classes. They made statements about immediate effects that some class activities had. They also talked about long-term effects, for instance, learning to make sense of lab and class activities. The interview structure encouraged them to talk about problematic situations previously encountered and to analyze the difficulty initially experienced with some of the concepts and practical problems they were presented with.