Millikan award lecture: Students of physics—Listeners, observers, or collaborative participants in physics scientific practices?

Abstract

This article is a written version of my acceptance speech upon receiving the Millikan Medal at the 2014 Summer AAPT meeting. In the talk I shared an approach to learning and teaching physics that engages students learning introductory physics in the processes that physicists use to construct physics concepts, physical quantities, and equations, as well as to solve problems. This article describes the origins of the method, its characteristic features, research on its implementation, and available resources.

Introductory physics labs: We can do better

“…10 In an ISLE course, students work in groups to develop explanations of new and surprising phenomena and then design experiments to test those explanations. The phenomenon makes its first appearance in the form of a demonstration selected by an instructor or a simple experiment carried out by the students in groups.…”

Designing a lab course from the perspective of flow theory

“…For example, labs developed within Investigative Science Learning (ISLE) system help students develop abilities to plan an experiment, test a hypothesis, analyze data, evaluate uncertainties and assumptions, and communicate their ideas [1]. However, implementation of such labs can be challenging both for the students and the instructors.…”

Design strategies for research-based physics activities

“…In this paper, we consider labs as well as activities with a lab component, and we focus on introductory physics curricula [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Because these activities play a central role in the learning process, researchers have invested considerable effort into optimizing activities and discerning which activities are most effective [9].…”

“…Individual groups have published accounts of their philosophy of activity design [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], but to our knowledge, no comparative analysis has been performed that takes the step of interviewing the designers themselves. One reason that such an analysis is useful is that designers may update their perspectives over time and may not have published everything they know about their activities' design features.…”

“…We will also refer to publications that lab designers have written about their work [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Finally, we have interviewed the designers of the activities to find out their opinions about what makes their laboratory activities effective.…”