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Alan Van Heuvelen,
Ph.D.
Professor
Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey
FAS - Physics & Astronomy
136 Frelinghuysen Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854
(732) 445-2522
alanvan@physics.rutgers.edu
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In the 1980s and 90s I had been
developing curriculum materials that could be used to make physics courses more
interactive, that emphasized the representation of physical processes in
multiple ways, and that included more complex multipart experiment problems.
The curriculum was based on twenty years of research about learning and
helped produce outstanding student achievement on standardized conceptual
tests and on problem solving. I was invited to give over one-hundred
workshops about this work on five continents. In January 1993 after 28 years
at New Mexico State University,
I was hired by Ohio State University (OSU) to help
develop a physics education research (PER) group.
The OSU
PER group was formed with encouragement from Ken Wilson, the 1980 Noble Prize
winning physicist who joined the OSU faculty in 19xx. At OSU Wilson brought to my attention several studies
and reports about desired attributes that students should develop to have a
successful entry into the 21st century workplace. One study was a
survey by the American Institute of Physics of former physics majors now in
the workplace concerning the abilities they routinely used in their work. In
the 1990s I organized a session on “The Educational Needs of the 21st
Century Workplace” for two joint APS-AAPT
Washington Meetings. Geneva Blake of the AIP
Statistics Division gave the introductory talk for these sessions. Her
transparencies (I still have them) indicated that our former physics majors
used various process abilities more in their work than they used physics
knowledge. They were designing scientific investigations and devices, working
on and supervising teams, and communicating their work to others. Later the
Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) developed a new
criteria for evaluating university engineering colleges called ABET 2000. The
engineering colleges could no longer be accredited by completing a check list
of courses taken by their students. Instead they had to show that their
students had developed a set of abilities that were important in the practice
of engineering.
These two reports (AIP and ABET) and others that came before and after
indicated that the workplace was looking for young scientists who had
developed the abilities that scientists use in their work. I bought into this
idea and organized the APS-AAPT sessions about the
subject. However, I was uncertain about how to make my own courses more like
the practice of science. I made small efforts—like including the experiment
problems in student labs and as activities in the lecture part of the
courses.
In the fall 2000 Eugenia Etkina of Rutgers sent
me a manuscript she was trying to get published. It described a learning
system she had developed and used during 13 years of high school physics
teaching in Moscow Russia. The learning system was
exactly what I was looking for—a method to make physics learning more like
the practice of physics. I asked her if she would help me try the method
during the second quarter of the introductory physics course I was teaching
at OSU (electricity and magnetism for 90 freshmen
engineering honors students). She agreed and provided regular telephone
advice during the quarter. The emphasis was on students developing various
scientific abilities while constructing their own knowledge based on
observational evidence and testing. At the end the students had the highest
score ever reported on the difficult Conceptual Survey of Electricity and
Magnetism (CSEM)—74% compared to a 77% score by
about 40 two-year college physics professors. They learned physics in a
course where the goal was to develop scientific abilities. I have now worked with
Eugenia Etkina to integrate some of the cognitive
strategies that had been a part of my curriculum and the scientific process
abilities that she developed and that are at the heart her curriculum. This
learning system is called Investigative
Science Learning Environment (ISLE).
The development and evaluation of the ISLE
learning system has been supported by three NSF grants ($1.3 M total) and
by an investment by Addison Wesley in the publication of the Physics Active Learning Guide (ALG), which can
be used in all parts of big and small courses. The ALG has made it relatively easy for me to emphasize this process,
multiple-representation, and interactive approach in my own large
introductory physics courses. The methods used are described in another document
on this web site.
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EARNING
