phys222

worked examples etc.

2010-02-02T05:20:00.000-08:00

I received a very well written email from a student arguing for worked examples, similar to but not identical with the complex problems I write. Here an excerpt of my reply:

If the primary goal is to have you learn content such as Gauss’ law, then I agree with you, the complex psets would be structured differently. However, let me ask you to consider having your primary goal to develop your ability to analyze novel problems.

Let’s take three scenarios

1) students, such as yourself, working on complex problems that are similar to what you describe, with hints, or a possible similar worked example. Then you are correct you might learn more about, e.g., Gauss law. But since you are using prior examples, or hints, the challenge on confronting a novel problem is much less.

2) students working on the current problem sets who ask the question “how do I do this problem”, then make no progress, and get frustrated. Then I agree little learning takes place, either on problem-solving skills or on, e.g., Gauss Law.

3) students working on the current problem sets who ask a more open question “what is going on in this problem”, sketch, analyze the key stages of the scenario, ask what ideas are involved, and hence start to build a frame or structure around a problem. I think these students, even if they make no further progress in the solution, have grown tremendously in earning how to tackle novel situations.

hours out of class?

2010-01-31T18:38:00.000-08:00

This week's problem-set is hard. Gauss' law problems see to fall in two categories: trivial exercises with standard geometries (line, sphere, sheet), or very hard problems with complex setups, e.g. uniformly charged sphere with a hole in it which you replace with two spheres, one the original size but now complete, and a small sphere the size of the hole but with opposite charge.

I have also received students' concerns about the amount of work. I use the guideline of 2-3 hours of work outside of class meeting times, so that is 10-15 hours of work for the 5-credit course. I wonder how many other courses follow this guideline and has the student expectation of load decreased.

problem-sets extending lecture content

2010-01-24T05:54:00.000-08:00

I received an interesting post on the course discussion board. A student was concerned that the weekly problem-sets were on material that I had not covered during lecture. My reply described how the problem-sets extended and built on the foundation from the lectures.

In the end, I think a core issue is how to communicate to students that learning while at university is more than mastering a set of procedures but being able to develop broader skills so they can solve new and larger problems.

first week done!

2010-01-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

The first week is done. All in all it went well, attendance is strong at lectures, the TAs report that students were engaged during the first inquiry lab, and that the discussions were intense during the recitations. Still there were some logistical missteps:

1) students naturally look for a list of problem-sets, lectures etc. However all is organized via a weekly learning module. This is non-obvious to students, and it is forced by webCT not being able to present a directory of lecture files to students except if they are placed in learning modules. One option I might consider is to unhide the psets so students can access it from both paths

2) some students mis-read the 8am deadline as 8pm so missed some work

Let's see if we can keep the momentum up.

inquiry labs

2010-01-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

Most labs are revised for the semester, from cookbook to inquiry labs. The goal is to increase student engagement and understanding. The inquiry labs have two key characteristics

1) Students have some control over design of experiment, e.g. create their own multiloop circuit to test Kirchhoff’s laws.

2) Students need to be given sufficient time for reflection, elaboration and application within the lab period.

In most cases we were able to keep the first half of lab same: students learn equipment, then in the 2nd half of lab they design and conduct an experiment

writing weekly summaries

2009-12-31T11:38:00.000-08:00

During conversations with students I often suggest that writing a weekly summary describing/explaining the main ideas and concepts of the week is an excellent way to review. If you can easily write the summary, then you have a good organized understanding of the material. If the ideas are hard for you to summarize, then that tells you that you need to re-look at those ideas.

This coming semester I am formalizing this and having students write a weekly review. Since there are over 500 students the logistics of this are daunting! To help with accountability each student will post their writing to CPR, a peer-assessment web-site. The web-site does an internal swap-a-roo: each student gets to look at three other student's summaries and they provide feedback. At the end, the student can read the feedback of their own summary.

How effective will this be? I might track the quality of the summaries as we progress through the semester.

personal contact in a large lecture class

2009-04-05T07:19:00.001-07:00

It is a challenge to have more contact with students when there are approximately 500 young people taking the class.

One small thing that I do is after the 2nd exam. Exams are stressful moments in a course. Before the exams I organize review sessions etc., but after the exam I look at how each student did in the 2nd exam compared to the first exam. I contact each student (via email) who noticeably did much better in the 2nd exam compared to the first and congratulate them. I also contact students who scored noticeably worse on the 2nd exam and offer to meet to plan how they/we can help.

Students reply to me after these emails, generally appreciative, and I have now approximately a dozen one-on-one meetings scheduled.

The core idea is that if I was teaching a class of 20 students, I would be able to walk up and congratulate the students who improved, or quietly talk to those who did not do so well. In a class size of 500, it is harder to achieve this level of personal contact, but it is still possible, and it is still important or perhaps more so.

mid-semester modeling projects

2009-04-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

The projects are a highlight of the course for me and from anecdotal conversations, also for many of the students. The stated goal is for students to increase their analysis skills by taking some device they encounter regularly and model its behavior. To do this you have to analyze the science that underpins how the device works, figure out what level of detail is vital to calculate the performance, and what can be safely ignored.

The projects this year ranged from calculating how far you needed to place apart tornado sirens, to how heating depended on location in a microwave, to the time it takes to cook a pizza in an oven that cooks on both sides. For the latter project, the students made contact with engineers in the company which, last I heard, might lead to an internship.

I think part of the success of the projects is that it gives students choice, it provides room for creativity, and it is a welcome break from much of the standard work students do in the first few years at university.

Big picture: these projects help develop analysis skills that are key goals for higher education.

I plan to put together a student satisfaction survey of these projects, with perhaps some emphasis on what parts of the experience did they find most beneficial. This might lead to a publication to help disseminate the idea, but where? Self-reports may not be as good as some pre-post comparison of student analysis skills. But that study is not feasible at this point

students do well on complex problems :)

2009-03-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

This week we had our first group exam where the students work in groups of 2-3 students to solve a multi-faceted problem. The problems include more than one idea that can only be solved by the students brainstorming, analyzing the problem and building a solution. The students cannot use plug-n-chug strategies.

Progress has been great. At the start of the semester, students complained loudly that these problems were too hard and that they had no idea where to start. During the exams I walked around and students were debating, arguing, revising, exclaiming and struggling with the problems.

We graded their work using a rubric that emphasized the processes the students used. The average score was 80% which is just great. But the real key will be whether students are starting to think about problem-solving as more than just finding the right equation to use. I will be able to assess this via the end of semester problem-solving reflection paragraph that students write.

In the end my goal is to help students strive towards these higher goals. They will need these more productive approaches to the complex challenges they will face in their careers

reducing plagiarism

2009-02-27T04:24:00.001-08:00

In the mid-semester projects the students show amazing creativity. Especially in deriving and building their physics models and explanations. However we have noticed over the years that some groups cut and paste from the internet whole paragraphs (or more) for the introduction, i.e. the section that describes the device.

I have described the down-side of this type of plagiarism in lecture. Mainly the argument that in their future careers writing a report/developing a project that builds on an existing idea is an efficient and good thing to do, but the source of the idea should be acknowledged, and doing so does not harm your case/project/pitch/report. However presenting an idea as your own when it is not leads to a negative impression of you.

There are other arguments why students should not plagiarize, but I've found that this practical argument of "use the good ideas that you find, acknowledge them, then extend the ideas" resonates with the students.

This semester we are also trying a new tool that searches the web for plagiarized text. The tool is safeAssign and it is a new part of webCT. The students usbmit their draft project to safeAssign then the students and TAs see a report which contains an estimate of the amount of plagiarized text, as well as a color-coded highlight to which internet sources the text seems to have been cut-and-paste from.

So far the tool has worked with reports ranging from 0% plagiarism to over 90% plagiarized :( Since the students see the reports, the goal is for them to redo these sections before they submit their final project.

quantitative modeling/calibrated peer review

2009-02-24T17:28:00.000-08:00

A key part of the course is for students to grow in their ability to solve complex problems. One vital skill is to take a complex system and to develop an approximate, model description of it that captures the main features, but is simple enough to be tractable.

In the mid-semester projects students must come up with a reasonable model description of an device they regularly encounter and try to quantitatively calculate some aspect of it, e.g. how long it takes for a pizza to cook. In this case trying to calculate the rate of heat transfer to the pizza what it might depend on, all the way to temperature changes etc. The educational goal is for students to develop skills in figuring out how to approximately model a complex device so that the science involved is correct enough to reasonably accurately describe how it performs. Key is often to know what to leave in or out of the model.

It is also a good chance to encourage student writing skills.

The challenge has been how to get good feedback to the students on their work. The TAs are the main source of feedback, but this semester I am also trying peer feedback. Students submit their draft work to a web-site http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/ , the website then shuffles the papers, and students are then asked to give feedback on 2-3 other projects. Hopefully the benefit is both ways, by reading other projects students will develop a stronger understanding of modeling, and they will get specific feedback on their project.

So far it has been relatively smooth, with the largest concern being that the only format you can submit is plain text, i.e. all equations, figures, tables, graphs are lost. I will suggest to the designers of the site, that they consider pdf uploads as well

Exam results

2009-02-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

The first exam came in with a class average of 55% :( There were many concerns raised on the course discussion board, one was the lack of time, so I will extend the time in the next exam by 30 min.

A more subtle issue is which questions the students did well on, and which ones they did not do well on. Across pretty much all the content areas, questions that were direct applications of a single core equation or skill scored very high. I grouped these and the average is ~ 70%.

However for questions that required a combination of two ideas, the percentage of correct answers dropped, to a class average for this group of questions of ~ 40%.

There are many calls from the students to provide a larger formula sheet, or more example problems in recitation, or... I understand this, but I do not think that this will help address the core challenge, in fact it may make it worse. Students taking the course are heading to a variety of quantitative careers, engineering, science, business. The number one goal is for students to develop skills that go beyond the straightforward application of ideas and to combine information in novel ways. I understand that this is challenge for students, and that this is not their typical experience of a university course. But I want students to strive for this higher goal.

All the components of the course are designed to give students multiple opportunities to develop these skills, the complex problem-sets, multi-faceted problems on Tue recitations, the group projects, the multi-content questions on the exams. I will continue to work with the students to help them as much as I can. I also hope that students will strive for these higher goals as well.

first exam!

2009-02-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

The first exam is Wed. I think it is a fair exam, with a mix of conceptual and quantitative questions. Some questions are designed that the majority of students should get correct to establish a reasonable floor in the score. Other questions are harder, and hopefully serve as some discriminatory power.

But as always I am nervous to see how much the students have understood and how well they do. I hope well

hard problem sets

2009-02-05T05:30:00.000-08:00

It has been a fascinating week. Each week students complete two problem sets, the first covering basic ideas and key skills, the 2nd set is far more complex. These are hard problems and have been a cause of frustration for the students.

A mini-maelstrom of complaints occurred on the course discussion board. Some of the comments were rather negative and I had to make sure I did not take them personally. However after thinking about this for a few days I decided to make two changes, a) shift the due date to Tue 8am from Mon 8am so the students have an extra day to get help from TAs, help-room or myself, and b) increase the number of attempts for each problem from 2 to 3.

I also extracted the time when students were starting the problem-sets and the score on the problem-set. Students who started the work within 24 hours of the due date got 25%, while those who started 3-4 days before the due date scored ~ 75%. With a smooth trend between these two extremes. So I encouraged students to start early and use all the resources we make available.

At lecture I also discussed the goal of these problem-sets is to build confidence so that when they see a tough problem that they can't do, they have the approach, skills, and confidence to say, OK how do I start, what principles are at work in this case, how can I make progress towards a solution, etc. These are critical skills for the future.

first week

2009-01-18T13:03:00.000-08:00

whoa, what a week. So much happened and so fast

the enthusiasm in the lecture room seems very good with students working hard on the clicker questions
first problem-sets went off with only a few technical webCT problems
the podcasts worked great, thanks to ISU's IT team
the TAs did a great job with the recitations and labs

Though I did feel for most of the week that I was running fast just to keep up :)

First day of class

2009-01-11T19:33:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow is the first day of class. I need to practice the lecture, but I think everything is set. I am excited an nervous (always happens, not matter how many times I have done this :)

podcasts!

2009-01-08T17:39:00.000-08:00

OK, it looks like I am all set to make podcasts of each lecture

the echo360 software receives a feed from my room microphone
it takes periodic screenshots of my powerpoint slideshow
then uploads the mp3 file to itunesU
students registered in the course can then access the file either directly from itunes or via a link on the calendar of webCT
students can fast-forward through the lecture to key parts

Let's see how well it works! Should help students who must miss a lecture, or want to review before exams. Let's hope it does not reduce attendance :(

finished the pre-labs!

2009-01-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've finished the pre-labs for the upcoming semester. For the first time, there will be a separate due time for each lab section, so that the assignment closes as the lab-period for each student starts. This hopefully will clear up any ambiguity and confusion about the pre-labs and will hopefully help the students with a firm/fixed deadline and also help the TA monitor the accountability.

Looking forward to tommorrow, when I lean about podcasting the lectures to iTunesU

first two tutorials

2008-12-30T16:03:00.000-08:00

I have finished the first two tutorials that the students will use during recitations.Tutorials are an effective pedagogy small groups of students to work together and discuss questions that confront misconceptions. These group discussions are held in physics recitations of 20-30 students with a TA wandering around, facilitating where necessary.

The tutorials are ready for both electrostatics and electric fields. They are adapted from University of Maryland tutorials where the emphasis is on reconciling common sense and quantitative work

preparing the lectures

2008-12-19T19:31:00.000-08:00

I have now prepared the first 6 lectures. It takes me approximately 4-6 hours for each lecture; this includes

brainstorming
reading the textbook
searching for articles from the education literature about what students have most trouble with
storyboarding the layout of the lectures, i.e. what the 14-16 powerpoint slides will each be about
creating the clicker questions
filling in each powerpoint

I enjoy the process, but worry about the rate at which I am getting them done. I wanted to be half-way through the course in prep by the start of semester, which would be 20-21 lectures finished

finished first four lectures

2008-12-04T07:01:00.001-08:00

I have finished the first four lectures. One fascinating pointer I received was on student understanding of what happens when you put a conductor in an E-field. Many students think that the conductor "blocks" the E-field instead of analyzing it by superposition, i.e there are two sources of E-field, the first being the external field, the second being the field formed by the charges that are induced on the conductor. The total E-field is then zero inside, if it was finite the charges would still move

fun developing the Coulomb lab

2008-11-25T19:52:00.000-08:00

I had a fun morning developing different ways to explore Coulomb's law, trying to find a way where students could get reasonable data on the 1/r^2 dependence. We eventually settled on the repulsion between the end of a charegd rod and a pithball on a thread. By suspending the ball just above graph paper you can get reasonable measurements of both the separation between the charged objects and the how far the pithball is deflected from the vertical.

For each separation the static equilibrium condition of no net torque gives you a measure of how the repiulsion depends on separation, the results were pretty close to 1/r^2 ! It was definiately fun futzing with alternative ways to create setups.

how do we know that there are just two types of charges

2008-11-25T06:29:00.000-08:00

I'm planning to start the semester off by challenging the students with the question "how do we know that there are only two types of charges". May be useful to emphasize the nature of science, but also may go over with a thud, depending on whether students are already convinced that there are only two types of charges.

Note that it took from ~600 BC to 1800 AD, almost 2500 years, for humankind to reach the understanding that there are just two types of charges. And I plan to do this in ~30min!

different lab sections

2008-11-16T05:09:00.000-08:00

When I teach 222 I enroll all my students from the registrar side into one webCT course. However each student is officially listed (on the registrar side) as being part of a separate recitation section and a separate lab section.

The lab sections meet once a week, each lab section at a different time per week and they have an quiz/assignment due just before the lab meets, this is a pre-lab. When I have all the lab-sections in the one-course, I can’t close the pre-lab till the very end of the week, after the very last section. I’d much rather close this at the right time for each section.

A possible solution is to create a) 222 webCT all_sections that everyone enrolls in b) then ~ 20 webCT courses: one for each lab-section that only has the lab info in it. Perhaps start with a template lab-section and clone it. Each student would be enrolled in the all_sections course and their lab-section. I would then perhaps create each pre-lab on respondus, upload each pre-lab to each of the webCT lab courses with different dates of each pre-lab, 14 of them in each of the 20 sections :( = 280 respondus uploads, yuck. Unless there is a smarter way to do that.

more open-ended labs

2008-11-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

I have taken the opportunity in this past week to make more of our labs "open-ended". Rather than asking students to follow step-by-step procedures and hope they grasp the physics implications, part of the labs will ask the students to verify or test a physics principle.

For example in the magnetic field lab, they will be asked to establish the extent to which the approximations used in applying Ampere's law are accurate for a long wire and an solenoid. The plan is to have the first part of these labs follow some step-by-step examples to help students get familiar with the equipment.

Wonder what sort of evaluation I should do

draft sequence set!

2008-11-11T15:14:00.000-08:00

I have now finished the first draft of the sequence and have been able to include a few more lectures that will focus on problem-solving: most probably via a guided problem. Now onto the labs

starting to plan for Spring 2009

2008-11-10T06:02:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to plan for the new semester and am pretty excited about it. First priority is to figure out the number of lectures for the new material in 222, e-fields

All set?

2008-01-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

Every thing seems to be set for the first lecture tomorrow: TAs have been given an intro, the lecture and demos are set, the first problem-sets are online, webCT course has been "released" to the students, the clicker infrastructure is set, and the first tutorial is almost ready.

As always before the first lecture I'm excited and nervous to meet the students...

text-book at book-store

2008-01-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

Despite my best efforts to have a sig/note at the university bookstore that students could use Edition 11 or 12, apparently there is no indication to the students about this.... I'll try to track it down on Monday. I hope some students have not bought Ed 12 when they already had a copy of Ed 11.

supporting the TAs

2008-01-10T20:07:00.000-08:00

I'm getting ready for a series of meetings with the new TAs. The TAs are in the best position to help students learn, so the more I can do to help the TAs, the better the course will go.

Key is trying to get the TAs to understand the big-goals of the course, building links between qualitative. and quantitative work and developing problem-solving skills. Crucial is for TAs to understand that students must explicitly struggle with these issues and TA role is to promote students resolving their own difficulties. Providing suggestions or direct help, will produce only short term gains

struggling with webCT

2008-01-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

I'm testing all the components of the new webCT

the calendar tool does not automatically put an event for when problem-sets are due instead the calendar event is listed as when the problem-set starts. I posted a request for help to Ask Dr C, webCT's help board
the discussion boards were very cumbersome to setup for each recitation, hence I reverted to one discussion board per problem set
I was not able to find a way for the students to document they have done the pre-lab. To make sure these are not dropped from student's radar screens, I'm making them as compulsory as the labs to pass the course

revising lectures

2008-01-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

It is now just a week away till the start of the course and I am beginning to go through a checklist of preparation. My goal is to have the material (lectures, problem sets, exams) prepared for a weeks ahead of when I will need them, so I can focus on the helping the students and the TAs.

Have now prepared the first 20 lectures, yeah! On Monday I will tryout the new webCT, clicker software, and review the first few problem sets

multifaceted problems

2007-12-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

Key to changing students' approaches to solving problems is to have the students attempt to solve multifaceted problems. These contain more than one concept, so students cannot utilize weaker strategies of searching for formulae, rather they must figure out what is happening in the problem, qualitatively analyze the prolem, and form there build a solution.

Students work on these multifaceted problems several times a semester during recitation. Twice a semester the students take a group exam on one of these problems and their solution is graded on the processes they used to solve the problem.

I have shortened the rubric for this grading. It used to run over two pages and have 10 items for the TAs to evaluate. Now it is 1 page, and only 6 items. See linked doc file

Modeling project

2007-12-06T20:38:00.000-08:00

Finished several key aspects of the modeling project, where student groups take a real system and simplify it to its essential features.

Rewrote the instructions to emphasize the goal is to improve some aspect of the system's performance, and that is why a quantitative model is a crucial tool, and that the model should be based on the key physics principles
Changed the feedback form for the draft report to focus on the three main items the students should improve before the final. This should help the students improve their final version of the project report. The feedback form was adapted from "Tomorrow's Prof" newsletter
Clarified rubric for the physics model so it more directly matches the steps strong project reports contain
Adopted ISUComm's rubric for writing quality

See this link for a doc file of the rubric

out-of-office office hours

2007-11-16T13:33:00.001-08:00

I plan to have my office in the "learning connections" space in the library

Goal is to lower any perceived barrier to coming to a Prof's office
It is centrally located
It is close to a nice coffee bar, so I can get a decent coffee
There is plenty of space
Good wireless connection

We'll see how it goes

multiple attempts at problem-sets

2007-11-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

For the weekly problem-sets, let students have two attempts, and count the maximum score as the score. Last year, I used the average score, but using the maximum may encourage more student learning, i.e. add motivation to have a 2nd attempt.

One possibility is to compare number of second attempts from year to year, see if it changes

Craig

adding photo :)

2007-11-08T07:37:00.000-08:00

Building connected understanding

2007-11-04T19:14:00.000-08:00

I am keen to help students develop a stronger connected understanding during the semester. To help with this

multifaceted problems
concept maps after these problems
exams that are always comprehensive, i.e. the 2nd mid-term exam assesses all the knowledge that has been worked on to that point
allow students multiple chances for a student to demonstrate their understanding
score for the three exams will be the highest score from the following options

45% via only the final, i.e. the first two exams don’t contribute. This will help students who develop a stronger understanding towards the end of the semester
25% via the final, 20% from the 2^nd mid-term, i.e. the 1^st mid-term does not count
25% via the final, 20% from the 1^st mid-term, i.e. the 2^nd mid-term does not count
17% via the final, 14% from the 1^st mid-term, 14% from the 1^st mid-term

Making the class seem smaller

2007-11-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about how to make the large-class seem smaller.

recitations are key, small group of 24 students, led by TA
create webCT team for each recitation
use weekly discussion board for each recitation, facilitated by TA
attendance policy: always a tricky decision, since the students are adults, and lives are complicated.

to pass the class, must attend at least 6 recitation sessions

starting to think about Spring08

2007-11-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to think about how to have multiple communication channels with students who take my physics course;

Already have a discussion board
Starting this blog so students can see how the course is developing, so I can be transparent about my goals and aspirations for their learning. Also to get feedback
I have also created a facebook account so that students can post questions on my wall

the idea is that it might be easier for students to ask a question from the space they are always at