(Here is Part 1 and Part 2, in case you missed them).
Sorry for the silence this week… you know how it is.
Before I begin, looks like the MIT physics department is having a few troubles of its own with the new physics curriculum. And, don’t forget to check out the First Excited State for Week 2 of the teaching journal.
I need your help. The practicals are becoming slightly tricky in terms of grabbing students’ attention for tutorial-like situation. As I mentioned last week, the students are vastly more motivated to do the activities than ask tutorial questions because they will be getting graded on the activities. We have the ability to create quiz questions on their workstation computers and we’ve tried creating a quiz question to try to draw out questions from the students. What actually happened was they spent a little while on the question, guessed if necessary (since it wasn’t worth any grades) and then didn’t ask any questions (probably for fear of not having enough time to do the lab activity).
I’ve been toying with a few ideas to try to get their participation in asking questions. The first is instead of asking the whole class a question and going over the solution, to instead go around and ask each workstation one at a time. It would take up the same amount of time for the students. The upside is that they will be much less shy and almost certainly reveal any gaps they have in their understanding. The downside is that any enlightening bit of information will be confined to that table.
In order for the whole class to benefit, I’d have to somehow engage the whole class in problem solving. One general idea I’ve had in that respect is to do away with a multiple choice quiz type question (and eliminate half hazard guesses) and instead ask an involved/conceptual problem. They could then write their answers/ideas on their whiteboards and share their ideas with the rest of the class. Alternately, if they are too shy to speak up, I could go around the class while they are working on the activities and look at the ideas on their whiteboards and discuss with them.
I think the problem here is shyness and time constraints. I’m wondering if any of you have ideas to get students to participate in sharing their conceptual difficulties with the class. Also, I’m wondering if any of you have any ideas for relatively short, interesting questions on the subject of static electricity.
Here’s a technique that I use. Maybe you can apply it to your tutorials.
I begin every lab by posing a question to the whole class. (This question is usually taken from their warmup questions. I ask them to discuss the problem within their groups, and then we will have a full class discussion about it. Often, I will have a member of each group put their answers on the chalkboard. It’s important to get as many ideas as possible out there, and not jump right to the correct answer.
Having the students discuss within their groups first helps to get their ideas flowing, and removes some of the shyness. Also, it diffuses some of the responsibility, since the students are speaking for their group, rather than just for themselves.
@excitedstate
Could you give me an example of the type of question you might pose to the class? Would it be a “calculate this…”, or a “explain why this happens”, or something else entirely?
Ideally I’d like to pose questions that do more than exercise rote skills and hopefully reveal to me (and them) any conceptual difficulties they are having. I’m wondering if I could somehow come up with an open ended physics question for them. One that wouldn’t have a definite answer, but would instead encourage them to apply various concepts they’ve learned in class in a “brainstorming” kind of way… I don’t know how I’d go about that though… I guess i’m thinking along the lines of ZapperZ’s Revamping Intro Physics Laboratory, but in a question format rather than as a lab activity. I’m just thinking out loud…
It is kind of difficult to give a suggestion without some specific context, and even harder if the length of the “practical” (i.e. “lab”) is too long to allow tutorial time. The best option is to start with a problem for them to solve in groups, one derived from the lab itself, and walk around and see what they are doing. That sort of “active learning” process is quite effective in any classroom, whether it is an open lab like yours or a small “lecture” class like mine. It works best if the problem cannot be done by equation grabbing. Like having to draw a picture of what happens.
One bit of advice, however. Your students are not shy. They are terrified that they might show even a tiny bit of weakness to the other students in the class. They are sure they are the only ones who do not understand some specific concept.
Greetings from a high school Physics teacher. One suggestion (and I’ll toss out an example) is to have them answer what they think will happen in an example case and why (not to share, but just to get them thinking about the topic), do the actual example, then ask them to explain why it happened.
As an example, and a simple static electricity demonstration, ask them what will happen if you rub a balloon on your hair (or fur, wool) and bring it close to another balloon, and ask what would happen if you rubbed both balloons and brought one near the other (having one or two hanging on a string is an easy setup). You now have a glimpse of their preconceptions, ideas, and what you need to address. The balloons can also be used to demonstrate the inverse square law for forces (based on deflection of one or both as they are brought together).
Its been over 15 years since I taught college physics labs, but one of the tricks I used to do when talking with students one-on-one was to ask (or state) something that I suspect they don’t quite get, and while asking or stating it, nod my head yes – and halfway through, start shaking my head no. I found that students tend to mimic the body movements if they’re feeling uncomfortable or insecure. If they do get it, they tend to have the confidence to not mimic my body movements, and they either keep nodding yes or they never even start the nodding.
You’re encountering a really difficult challenge that most of us who taught labs (or at least those who cared about the teaching of labs) have struggled with. You want to encourage people to be open, to not feel intimidated, and to focus on the concepts, not the rote. Many (most) of the students have succeeded by doing the opposite, and have seen those who try to focus on understanding fall by the wayside. I wish I had the magic solution for you. But I don’t. I think the most effective thing is your own enthusiasm, and demonstrating yourself that you don’t know all the answers, and making it clear that is okay.
@Mr. Paul
Wow! That’s a fantastic tip. I must try it out next time.
Thanks for sharing it!
The questions that I ask are intended to be more conceptual than calculation-based. For example, I might have them draw the force diagram for the lab we’ll be doing, or sketch a graph of the position and velocities vs. time, or something like that. I try to pick questions that I expect not all of them will get. Some of the wrong answers will be smoothed out by talking about it in their small groups, but usually there will be some misconceptions that make it into the large group discussion. Then, rather than saying who is right, I try to have the students explain it to each other.
My students are not physics majors (I think that’s the case for you too). You might be surprised about what misconceptions the students continue to hold about concepts that you think they’ve mastered.
Your “brainstorming” type questions seem more along the lines of the problems that we use for our discussion sessions. It’s hard to pitch these at the right level, not too easy so that they’re just exercises, and not so hard that they just say “I don’t know what to do.” Our professors write our group problems for us, which is nice, but they still fail to set them at the right level sometimes.