Promising Practices in Undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education: Summary of Two Workshops by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education : Higher Education. Education : Math and Science Education. Education : Engineering Education
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Published: 2011-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Cummings explained that the Physics Education Group developed the tutorials to supplement instruction in an introductory, calculus-based physics course at the University of Washington that is required for all physics majors. Approximately 1,000 students are enrolled in the course at any time. The course meets for three 50-minute classes and one 3-hour laboratory each week. Each course also has a 50-minute tutorial each week, and students have weekly online homework that is linked to the lecture material. They also are assessed through three mid-term exams and a final exam that contain material from the lectures, labs, and tutorials. Because the course is similar in structure and content to many others in colleges and universities throughout the United States, the setting is well suited for the development and assessment of instructional materials that can be adopted at other institutions.

In the weekly tutorials, students work through carefully structured worksheets in small groups, and instructors question them in a semi-Socratic manner. Designed to fit within the constraints imposed by large lecture-based courses, the research-based tutorials foster the development of reasoning skills and conceptual understanding.

Tutorial development depends on systematic investigations of student learning at the beginning of, during, and after instruction, including ongoing individual student interviews to probe their understanding in depth (Heron, Shaffer, and McDermott, 2008). Based on those interviews, the researchers write open-ended questions to ascertain the prevalence of specific difficulties. They also conduct descriptive studies in the classroom to further inform the development of their curriculum materials.

These tutorials have been assessed extensively at the University of Washington and at many of the dozens of institutions that have adopted them. At the University of Washington, students who completed the tutorial were given a posttest with questions that could not be answered by memorization. Eighty percent of the students gave a correct or nearly correct answer (compared with 20 percent without the tutorial) (Heron, Shaffer, and McDermott, 2008). Results from other institutions that have used the University of Washington tutorials include the following:

• Learning gains in introductory physics courses that used tutorials at the University of Colorado were much higher than is typical in introductory courses (Finkelstein and Pollack, 2005).

• At Montana State University, a longitudinal study showed that nonmajors retained gains they made in understanding force—as measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI)—up to 3 years after completing an introductory physics that used the tutorials (Francis, Adams, and Noonan, 1998).

• In Harvard University physics classes that used a variety of interactive strategies—including the University of Washington tutorials—the gender gap between the FCI scores of male and female students disappeared (Lorenzo, Crouch, and Mazur, 2006).

• After a large introductory physics course at the University of Colorado that used tutorials, Finkelstein and Pollack (2005) did not observe the shift toward unfavorable attitudes about physics that typically occurs in those courses.

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