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I started teaching physics in 1982 in the former Soviet Union. At that time all Soviet students had to take
5 years of physics (7th to 11th grade, which was the last high school grade).
The same teacher taught all 5 years. When you have students for so long, a
question of goals becomes very important: what will these students take away
from these 5 years? If they only take away Newton’s laws and other physics content,
which they are unlikely to ever use, maybe these years could be spent better.
These thoughts kept me awake at night and led to the creation of a new
physics curriculum, which my school principal allowed me to implement and
which eventually became the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation. This curriculum
made students active participants in the construction of physics concepts so
their classroom life was somewhat similar to the practices of real physicists.
It had a goal of engaging students in activities that simulated various
processes though which practicing physicists acquire knowledge. It helped
students develop scientific reasoning, and focused on evidence underlying new
ideas. Students could take these abilities to their future lives and apply
them every day. Additionally, I found that my students learned the concepts
and laws of physics much better. Using the new curriculum helped produce
significantly more physics majors than other efforts undertaken by my
colleagues.
When I came to the US and started working at Rutgers
GSE teaching pre- and in-service elementary and
high school teachers how to teach physics and physical science I met Alan Van
Heuvelen, who was an expert in multiple representations.
Alan got very excited about my system because he thought it addressed the
goals of the future workplace and was an answer to the ABET standards for
engineering schools that he was implementing in his university physics
courses. We combined my process approach with his multiple representations to
create what was later called ISLE. It was Suzanne Brahmia
from Rutgers, our co-PI
on the first NSF grant who came up with the name. It was in 2000. That year
we received our first NSF grant to develop ISLE, then
in 2003 we received another one to develop formative assessment activities to
go with it and instruments to evaluate how students acquire scientific
abilities. Now we are working on the third NSF grant (funded in 2005) to
study whether students in ISLE courses transfer these abilities to new
content areas. In 2006 Alan and I published a book (two additions – a student
and an instructor) of activities that can be used in an introductory physics
classroom by an instructor who wants to implement ISLE,
it is called The Physics Active Learning Guide (ALG).
In addition we have two websites: one with digitized physics experiments
conceptualized through the lens of ISLE http://paer.rutgers.edu/pt3 and one more with formative assessment
activities and rubrics http://paer.rutgers.edu/scientificabilities.
Although the ALG and other
resources have sets of activities, ISLE is not a curriculum that prescribes
an instructor what tasks to do and in what order. It is more like a mind set.
To become an “ISLEist” one has to reconceptualize what she/he does in the classroom to help
students learn. For example you want your students to learn that every point
of a light bulb sends light in all directions. As an ISLE instructor you
first think what students will observe to come up with this idea, then how
they will represent this idea in different ways, then how they will test it
(means design new experiments whose outcomes they can predict using this
idea) and finally what applications this idea has to their lives. You need to
create situations where your students will compare this idea to the one that
most of them have – that each point only sends one ray. If you acquire this
mindset, then the ALG and other resources that we
provide will be merely a supplement to your own curriculum. Right now I use
ISLE in all courses in the Rutgers Ms.Ed. +
physics/physical science certification teacher preparation program. If you
live in NJ, you can enroll in any of these courses as a non-matriculated
student.
These courses are:
· “Development of Ideas in Physical
Science
· “Teaching Physical Science”
· “Research and Teaching methods in
x-ray astrophysics”
· “Multiple Representations in
Physical Science”.
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EARNING
