We describe the impact of physics education research-based pedagogical techniques in flipped and active-engagement non-flipped courses on student performance on validated conceptual surveys. We compare student performance in courses which make significant use of evidence-based active engagement (EBAE) strategies with courses that primarily use lecture-based (LB) instruction. All courses had large enrollment and often had 100-200 students. The analysis of data for validated conceptual surveys presented here includes data from large numbers of students from two-semester sequences of introductory algebra-based and calculus-based introductory physics courses. The conceptual surveys used to assess student learning in the first and second semester courses were the Force Concept Inventory and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, respectively. In the research discussed here, the performance of students in EBAE courses at a particular level is compared with LB courses in two situations: (I) the same instructor taught two courses, one of which was a flipped course involving EBAE methods and the other an LB course, while the homework, recitations and final exams were kept the same, (II) student performance in all of the EBAE courses taught by different instructors were averaged and compared with LB courses of the same type also averaged over different instructors. In all cases, we find that students in courses which make significant use of active-engagement strategies, on average, outperformed students in courses using primarily lecture-based instruction of the same type on conceptual surveys even though there was no statistically significant difference on the pretest before instruction. We also discuss correlation between the performance on the validated conceptual surveys and the final exam, which typically placed a heavy weight on quantitative problem solving.
In the Fall of 2013, Georgia Tech offered a 'flipped' calculus-based introductory mechanics class as an alternative to the traditional large-enrollment lecture class. This class flipped instruction by introducing new material outside of the classroom through pre-recorded, lecture videos. Video lectures constituted students' initial introduction to course material. We analyze how students engaged with online lecture videos via 'clickstream' data, consisting of time-stamped interactions (plays, pauses, seeks, etc.) with the online video player. Analysis of these events has shown that students ma…
Most STEM students experience the introductory physics sequence in large-enrollment (N $\gtrsim$ 100 students) classrooms, led by one lecturer and supported by a few teaching assistants. This work describes methods and principles we used to create an effective "flipped classroom" in large- enrollment introductory physics courses by replacing a majority of traditional lecture time with in-class student-driven activity worksheets. In this work, we compare student learning in courses taught by the authors with the flipped classroom pedagogy versus a more traditional pedagogy. By comparing identic…
The advent of MOOCs has stimulated interest in using online videos to deliver content in university courses. We examined student engagement with 78 online videos that we created and were incorporated into a one-semester blended introductory mechanics course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We found that students were more engaged with videos that supported laboratory activities than with videos that presented lecture content. In particular, the percentage of students accessing laboratory videos was consistently greater than 80 percent throughout the semester while the percentage of stud…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed the pedagogy to include research-validated practices in interactive engagement, and accomplished our goals of enhanced learning gains, sustainability, and adoptability of our course reforms. The active engagement at the heart of the Lecture/Studio format results in comparable or enhanced learning gains (as measured by validated concept surveys) when compared…
Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). We have performed a review and analysis of FCI and FMCE data published between 1995 and 2014. We confirm previous findings that interactive engagement teaching techniques are significantly more likely to produce high student learning gains than traditional lecture-based instruction. We also establish …
We report on research carried out to improve teaching and student engagement in the introductory astronomy course at the University of Cape Town. This course is taken by a diverse range of students, including many from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. We describe the development of an instrument, the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ), which we administered as pre- and post-tests to students enrolled in the course. The instrument comprised a small number of questions which probed three areas of interest: student motivation and expectations, astronomy content, and worldview. Amo…
Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students' experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices, reinforcing concepts, and inspiring students' interest and engagement in physics. Some of these outcomes can be measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS), a research-based assessment that measures students' views about experimental physics. We used E-CLASS at the University of Colorado Boulder to measu…
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement relates to learning. For the TAs, we record data to determine how they adhere to and deliver the lesson plan and how they interact with students during the lab. For the students, we use observations to record the level of student engagement and pre- and post-tests of lab skills to measure learning. We find that the frequency of TA-student interactions, especiall…
The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students' ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to suggest that people often do not retain all, or even most, of what they learned previously. How much information is retained appears to be dependent both on the individuals' approach to learning as well as the style of instruction. In particular, there is evidence to suggest that active engagement techniques in the classroom can improve students' retention of th…
Understanding Growth Mindset Practices in an Introductory Physical Computing Classroom: High School Students' Engagement with Debugging by Design Activities
Theories developed by Tinto and Nora identify academic performance, learning gains, and involvement in learning communities as significant facets of student engagement that, in turn, support student persistence. Collaborative learning environments, such as those employed in the Modeling Instruction introductory physics course, provide structure for student engagement by encouraging peer-to-peer interactions. Because of the inherently social nature of collaborative learning, we examine student interactions in the classroom using network analysis. We use centrality---a family of measures that qu…
In active engagement physics classrooms, students get opportunities to make sense of physics together through discussion. They do not always take up these opportunities, in part because of the risk of sharing their ideas and having them rejected by their classmates or the instructors. In this case study, I analyze videotaped discourse of a tutorial group's early discussions to investigate how students manage these risks in creating a safe space to sensemake. I find that the students and instructors alike rely on a common discursive resource - epistemic distancing - to share their ideas while p…
The Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy have been designed to help introductory astronomy instructors actively engage their students in developing their conceptual understandings and reasoning abilities across a wide range of astrophysical topics. The development of the Lecture-Tutorials has been informed by nearly two-decades of research into common learning difficulties students experience when studying astronomy. The results from multiple studies provide evidence that Lecture-Tutorials can help students achieve learning gains well beyond what is typically achieved by lecture alone.…
Historically, non-disabled individuals have viewed disability as a personal deficit requiring change to the disabled individual. However, models have emerged from disability activists and disabled intellectuals that emphasize the role of disabling social structures in preventing or hindering equal access across the ability continuum. We used the social relational proposition, which situates disability within the interaction of impairments and particular social structures, to identify disabling structures in introductory STEM courses. We conducted interviews with nine students who identified wi…
The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion/lab instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the interactive-engagement (IE) elements of the course. Because so many different instructors participate in disseminating the IE course elements, we find it essential to the instructors professional development to observe and document the student-instructor interactions within the classroom. Out of this effort, we have developed a computerized real-time instructor o…
Given a physics scenario, different problem types presenting that scenario in various ways can emphasize different instructional goals. In this investigation, we examined the views of physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) about the instructional benefits of different types of introductory problems based upon the same problem scenario. Here we report on TAs' views about two of these problem types that were regarded by TAs as the least instructionally beneficial of all problem types--the context rich and multiple-choice formats. Many TAs listed no pros at all for these problem types, despit…
Research experience and mentoring has been identified as an effective intervention for increasing student engagement and retention in the STEM fields, with high impact on students from undeserved populations. However, one-on-one mentoring is limited by the number of available faculty, and in certain cases also by the availability of funding for stipend. One-on-one mentoring is further limited by the selection and self-selection of students. Since research positions are often competitive, they are often taken by the best-performing students. More importantly, many students who do not see themse…
The general problem of effectively using interactive engagement in non-introductory physics courses remains open. We present a three-year study comparing different approaches to lecturing in an intermediate mechanics course at the Colorado School of Mines. In the first year, the lectures were fairly traditional. In the second year the lectures were modified to include Socratic dialogs between the instructor and students. In the third year, the instructor used a personal response system and Peer Instruction-like pedagogy. All other course materials were nearly identical to an established tradit…
Instructor Framing and Incentives Shape Physics Students' Engagement and Learning Gains from an Inquiry-Based Electrostatics Tutorial on the Method of Images
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学物理与天文学系）
We report on a project to introduce interactive learning strategies (ILS) to physics classes at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), one of the leading science universities in France. In Spring 2012, instructors in two large introductory classes, first-year, second-semester mechanics, and second-year introductory E&M, enrolling approximately 500 and 250 students respectively, introduced ILS into some sections of each class. The specific ILS utilized were Think-Pair-Share questions and Peer Instruction in the main lecture classrooms, and UW Tutorials for Introductory Physics in recitati…
Physics education research has consistently shown that students have higher learning outcomes when enrolled in interactive-engagement courses. Consequently, many schools are actively reforming their introductory curricula. For courses where the interactive sections (labs, tutorials, and/or workshops) are mostly taught by graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), good TAs are instrumental to the success of the reform. Many studies have investigated specific interactions between TAs and students, but more can be learned through a holistic examination of TA-student interactions. Over the course…
Students who successfully engage in self-regulated learning, are able to plan their own studying, monitoring their progress and make any necessary adjustments based upon the data and feedback they gather. In order to promote this type of independent learning, a recent introductory mechanics course was modified such that the homework and tests emphasized the planning, monitoring and adjusting of self-regulated learning. Students were able to choose many of their own out-of-class learning activities. Rather than collecting daily or weekly problem set solutions, assignments were mostly progress r…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e. their epistemologies. Using data from students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud interviews, we explore how assessment features impact (or did not impact) student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video record…
The Community Engagement Frontier presents this set of three white papers, as part of Snowmass 2021. These papers address critical issues -- Power Dynamics in Physics, Informal Socialization in Physics Training, and Policing and Gatekeeping in STEM -- that make significant impacts on the experiences of the people who work in and learn particle physics. In this introductory document, we present crosscutting concepts that appear in each paper, and some advice on how to manage readers' responses to the contents. We expect that you will learn something new here. We hope that whatever you encounter…
We have investigated the efficacy of online, multimedia learning modules (MLMs) as preparation for in-class, lecture-based tutorials in electromagnetism in a physics course for natural science majors (biology and marine science). Specifically, we report the results of a multiple-group pre/post-test research design comparing two groups receiving different treatments with respect to activities preceding participation in Tutorials in Introductory Physics. The different pre-tutorial activities where as follows: (1) students were assigned reading from a traditional textbook, followed by a tradition…
A large body of research shows that using interactive engagement pedagogy in the introductory physics classroom consistently results in significant student learning gains; however, with a few exceptions, those learning gains tend not to be accompanied by more expertlike attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics. In fact, in both traditionally taught and active learning classroom environments, students often become more novicelike in their attitudes and beliefs following a semester of instruction. Further, prior to instruction, men typically score higher than women on conceptual …
Historically, the implementation of research-based assessments (RBAs) has been a driver of educational change within physics and helped motivate adoption of interactive engagement pedagogies. Until recently, RBAs were given to students exclusively on paper and in-class; however, this approach has important drawbacks including decentralized data collection and the need to sacrifice class time. Recently, some RBAs have been moved to online platforms to address these limitations. Yet, online RBAs present new concerns such as student participation rates, test security, and students' use of outside…
Recent releases of open-source research codes and solvers for numerically solving partial differential equations in Python present a great opportunity for educators to integrate these codes into the classroom in a variety of ways. The ease with which a problem can be implemented and solved using these codes reduce the barrier to entry for users. We demonstrate how one of these codes,FiPy, can be introduced to students through a short course using progression as the guiding philosophy. Four exercises of increasing complexity were developed. Basic concepts from more advanced numerical methods co…
