Lowering the barriers to research-based introductory physics course reform
Creators: name: Rutberg, Joshua
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: It has been well-establishing in the field of educational research that traditional educational methods such as passive lectures and labs where students follow pre-designed procedures to verify information already told to them are not effective for promoting meaningful and lasting conceptual understanding. Alongside this knowledge have come a plethora of research-based instructional strategies, often centering the student as an active participant in their own learning, which have been shown to be significantly more effective than the traditional methods. Despite this, many professors still rely on outdated teaching methods.This dissertation consists of three papers which examine different aspects of institutional change within physics departments, all with the goal of looking at how courses can be reformed. The first paper investigates the results of a partial reform – a course in which the laboratory component was reformed using the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach while the ‘lecture’ component of the course remained unchanged – in order to see if some of the benefits of the ISLE-approach remain even when only implemented in this partial way. We found that students did indeed show some improvement, if not as much as has been found with a fully reformed ISLE-based course, over a single semester of this course. This suggests that a partial implementation of the ISLE approach, while not a substitute for a full implementation, may be an easier entryway for instructors wishing to reform their own courses than having to change all aspects of their course at once.The second paper in this dissertation follows four graduate teaching assistants assigned to teach a new ISLE-based lab course as part of the complete reform of the introductory physics program at Rutgers University – Newark. These graduate teaching assistants had no previous teaching experience, which is typical of the kinds of instructors often assigned to teach introductory lab courses. Despite the lack of prior experience and the pedagogical difficulty of teaching an ISLE-based lab course we found that with regular trainings, observation, and mentoring all four of the graduate teaching assistants demonstrated some level of improvement across their first semester of teaching. In this paper we outline how their instruction changed and what training practices we found to be most effective.The third paper in this dissertation outlines the development of a rubric for measuring student performance on pen-and-paper physics problems. This rubric is meant to be used by students as a means of assessing their own work, by instructors to provide feedback to students, and by researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of a physics course in developing the skills students need to effectively solve these kinds of problems. In addition, we use data collected from our reformed courses at Rutgers University – Newark to illustrate how this rubric can be used to analyze student performance across a semester of instruction.