{"id":269,"date":"2009-07-30T13:22:57","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T20:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/?p=269"},"modified":"2009-07-30T13:22:57","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T20:22:57","slug":"on-teaching-psychology-and-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2009\/07\/30\/on-teaching-psychology-and-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"On Teaching Psychology and Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

What?\u00a0 <\/em>I’m a member of the weekly reading group at the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative <\/a>. Today we discussed an article that empirically demonstrates performance gains (measured by scores on a standardized test) as a result of “Interactive Engagement” teaching methods, when compared with traditional lecture based instruction (Hake, 1998<\/a>). A course was coded as using “Interactive Engagement”\u00a0if\u00a0the instructor\u00a0used teaching methods aimed at promoting\u00a0a conceptual understanding of the material via interactive activities\u00a0accompanied by peer and instructor feedback through discussion.\u00a0The sample was huge and diverse, involving 6542 students from 62 courses in a variety of high school, community college, and university settings. I learned today that this paper is a citation classic in physics, and one of the key drivers of physics teaching reform.<\/p>\n

So What?<\/em>\u00a0 The data make a compelling case for incorporating interactive techniques in the classroom by linking them to learning gains.\u00a0I already use many interactive techniques in my courses,\u00a0largely because of more tangential research (and because I have more fun than when I lecture — and shouldn’t learning be fun?). Research in cognitive psychology shows that deeper processing results in greater\u00a0comprehension and memory; deeper processing\u00a0can be enhanced by interactive\u00a0techniques.<\/p>\n

More broadly though, as I learn more about physics education, I’m surprised to see a striking connection to problems we often face in psychology education. In both disciplines, it seems, people come to intro courses with a vast amount of experience interacting with our subject matter: physical objects and people, respectively. One of the aims of intro courses in both disciplines is to disabuse people of some prior assumptions about how the (physical or psychological) world works, and replace them with discipline-specific understanding and ways of knowing. People have some intuitions about the world that need to be adjusted — and sometimes rejected entirely — in order to understand the discipline. I’m reminded here of a message from Ken Bains’ book: set up an experience in which\u00a0existing paradigms don’t work, and help build these back up.<\/p>\n

Now What?<\/em>\u00a0 Knowing about this article makes me want to find more papers that test the hypothesis that interactive activities\u00a0result in better learning\u00a0— and to figure out how to measure that in\u00a0my courses.\u00a0I also plan to think very carefully about\u00a0what kinds of activities are most useful\u00a0for facilitating comprehension in my contexts (e.g., 500\u00a0students vs. 20 per course).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since realizing the parallel between physics and psychology instruction, I’m interested in learning more about physics pedagogical research\u00a0and figuring out in what ways we are conceptually similar in our teaching-related challenges (and hence what I can pull from their literature). I’m also interested in figuring out what ways we (need to) differ as disciplines when teaching the next generation of scientists and\u00a0informed\u00a0citizens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What?\u00a0 I’m a member of the weekly reading group at the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative . Today we discussed an article that empirically demonstrates performance gains (measured by scores on a standardized test) as a result of “Interactive Engagement” Continue reading On Teaching Psychology and Physics<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4281],"tags":[4805,4806,4807,2443],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections-from-professional-development-activities","tag-cwsei","tag-interactive-engagement","tag-paradigm-shift","tag-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}