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I am currently a post-doctoral researcher in physics
education research at the I first encountered the ISLE method (although it had not
been named as such at the time) in a “Teaching Physics” course that Prof. Etkina gave for physics graduate students. Prof. Etkina’s
ideas immediately resonated with me because her conceptualization of teaching
physics was about trying to answer the “why” and “how” questions rather than
the “what” questions. Namely, teachers
should help students to answer the questions: “why do we know what we know?”
and “how do we know it?” rather than the traditional question that students
ask their teachers, “what do I need to know to pass the test?” The physics facts that one learns in a physics
course are quickly forgotten when the course is over, but the understanding
of how and why physicists create their knowledge is something that can stay
with the learner for the rest of his/her life. Understanding the process of doing physics
is something that can be transferred to many activities of everyday life. It
is these process goals that build life skills, that I believe should be the
primary learning goals of any education that a student undergoes. My contribution to the ISLE project has been in two
separate directions. On the practical
side, I was one of the primary developers of the digitized physics
experiments and the physics teaching technology resource that may be found at
http://paer.rutgers.edu/pt3. I have also contributed to the development
of the scientific abilities formative assessment rubrics and activities that
may be found at http://paer.rutgers.edu/scientificabilities. On the theoretical side, I was the first
person to draw a visual representation of the ISLE cycle. I also wrote my dissertation on learning
issues to do with language. As a representation
of ideas in physics, language functions just like any other representation:
it functions to model and explain our observations of the world. Before I started focusing on language,
Prof. Etkina showed me that language was an
important part of ISLE, as are other representations. My contribution with regards to language builds,
in part, her ideas, and on Prof. Van Heuvelen’s
focus on multiple representations of knowledge. Many of my ideas concerning the role of
language in modeling our physical world have been incorporated into the ALG and other ISLE materials. |
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EARNING
