Probing physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association

Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the interconnections within students' store of conceptual knowledge. The tasks have students respond spontaneously to a term or problem or topic area with a sequence of associated terms; the response terms and timeof- entry data are captured. The tasks were tried on introductory physics students, and preliminary investigations show that the tasks are capable of eliciting information about the stucture of their knowledge. Specifically, data gathered through the tasks is similar to that produced by a hand-drawn concept map task, has measures that correlate with inclass exam performance, and is sensitive to learning produced by topic coverage in class. Although the results are preliminary and only suggestive, the tasks warrant further study as student-knowledge assessment instruments and sources of experimental data for cognitive modeling efforts.Comment: 31 pages plus 2 tables and 8 figure

Designing Effective Questions for Classroom Response System Teaching

Classroom response systems (CRSs) can be potent tools for teaching physics. Their efficacy, however, depends strongly on the quality of the questions used. Creating effective questions is difficult, and differs from creating exam and homework problems. Every CRS question should have an explicit pedagogic purpose consisting of a content goal, a process goal, and a metacognitive goal. Questions can be engineered to fulfil their purpose through four complementary mechanisms: directing students' attention, stimulating specific cognitive processes, communicating information to instructor and students via CRS-tabulated answer counts, and facilitating the articulation and confrontation of ideas. We identify several tactics that help in the design of potent questions, and present four "makeovers" showing how these tactics can be used to convert traditional physics questions into more powerful CRS questions.Comment: 11 pages, including 6 figures and 2 tables. Submitted (and mostly approved) to the American Journal of Physics. Based on invited talk BL05 at the 2005 Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (Albuquerque, NM

Resolución de problemas basada en el análisis : hacer del análisis y del razonamiento el foco de la enseñanza de la física

Usando los resultados provenientes de la investigación educativa en áreas tales como concepciones alternativas, diferencias entre expertos y novatos, adquisición de esquemas, sobrecarga cognitiva y análisis jerárquico, hemos desarrollado un marco para pensar sobre la organización del conocimiento y su uso para la comunicación, y sobre el razonamiento y la resolución de problemas. Basados en este marco y en nuestras reflexiones sobre el aprendizaje y la enseñanza, hemos creado una metodología didáctica llamada resolución de problemas basada en el análisis, diseñada para promover tanto la comprensión conceptual profunda como la capacidad de resolver problemas eficientemente a través de enfocarse en el análisis y el razonamiento como un puente entre las dos. Presentamos aquí una progresión de objetivos de enseñanza que lleva a los estudiantes de ser aprendices novatos a ser «resolvedores» de problemas más eficientes y más reflexivos. Para cada objetivo, resumimos los resultados relevantes de la investigación cognitiva y describimos las recomendaciones didácticas que se pueden derivar de ella. Luego hicimos la lista de algunas estrategias didácticas útiles para promover ese objetivo en particular y, finalmente, indicamos algunas prácticas de aula que deberían ayudar a que los estudiantes progresen desde esta perspectiva.Summary. Using the results of educational research coming from such areas as alternative conceptions, expert-novice differences, schema acquisition, cognitive overload, and hierarchical analysis, we have developed a framework for thinking about knowledge organization and its use for communication, reasoning, and problem solving. Based on this framework, as well as on our own reflections on learning and teaching, we have created an instructional approach called analysis-based problem solving that is designed to promote both deep, conceptual understanding and proficient problem-solving ability, by focusing on analysis and reasoning as a bridge between them both. We report here on a progression of instructional goals that takes students from novice learners to more proficient, more thoughtful problem solvers. For each goal, we summarize the relevant cognitive research results, and describe the pedagogy that can be derived from it. Then, we list some modes of instruction useful for promoting that particular goal, and finally, indicate some classroom practices that should help students make progress within the approach

Why STEM Learning Communities Work: The Development of Psychosocial Learning Factors Through Social Interaction

STEM learning communities facilitate student academic success and persistence in science disciplines. This prompted us to explore the underlying factors that make learning communities successful. In this paper, we report findings from an illustrative case study of a 2-year STEM-based learning community designed to identify and describe these factors. A directed content analysis of 119 student narrative documents resulted in 6 content codes organized into two primary categories: academic self-regulation, STEM identity, metacognition, and self-efficacy comprise the psychosocial or ‘affect’ learning factors that students identified as improved as a result of their participation in the learning community; and interaction with faculty/staff/STEM professionals, and interaction with peers represent the aspects of the learning community that students identified as meaningful learning community experiences related to their academic development. In addition, we analyzed 3 sets of code co-occurrences to understand how the content codes interrelate. Our findings indicate that certain psychosocial learning factors are developed through social interactions within the context of learning community participation, which may help explain the positive effects of student participation in learning communities

SIISP: Self-Efficacy Intervention to Improve STEM Performance [Poster]

Poster presented at the 2018 STEMM Equality Congress in Amsterdam, October 11-12, 2018. OBJECTIVES: • Develop, test, document, and disseminate a practical,scalable intervention to increase self-efficacy in university STEM students. • Develop and validate an efficient instrument for measuring university STEM self-efficacy, growth mindset, and perceived academic control in university STEM students. • Improve our understanding of the dynamics of self-efficacy— the factors that lead to growth, especially for traditionally under-represented, at-risk demographic groups

Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning

This pdf file is an article describing the advantages of using Classtalk technology in the classroom to enhance classroom communication. Classtalk technology cab facilitate the presentation of questions for small group work, collec the student answers and then display histograms showing how the class answered. This new communication technology can help instructors create a more interactive, student centered classroom, especially when teaching large courses. The article describes Classtalk as a very useful tool not only for engaging students in active learning, but also for enhancing the overall communication within the classroom. This article is a selection from the electronic Journal for Computing in Higher Education. Educational levels: Graduate or professional