NSF Awards: 1914603, 1914572
Historically, research on student thinking about particular topics within physics has focused on what is difficult about learning physics and/or what students commonly misunderstand. This pragmatic approach to research on teaching and learning has produced a host of research-based materials that have been shown to improve students’ conceptual understandings. What researchers have not yet systematically done is to identify and build curriculum around the resourceful ideas that students commonly use as they learn physics. Our project addresses this missing piece by conducting research and developing instructional materials that support instructors in paying attention to and building from students’ resources, ideas that resonate with formal physics. One of our goals is for students to see themselves as already having resources for the kind of things physicists do and think, and we want instructors to feel supported in enacting instruction that elicits and builds from student ideas. Our video will summarize our approach and point viewers to where they can find project deliverables.
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
Hello and welcome! We are so pleased you're here.
This video gives a brief overview of our team's research and curriculum development project, which is grounded in the assumption that students come to their learning with good ideas about physics and that instruction can build from those ideas in generative ways. As you watch, we'd love to know:
We look forward to the discussion.
Amy, Lauren, Lisa, and Clausell
patrick honner
Teacher
I find this really interesting. I’ve certainly noticed an emphasis on surfacing and confronting common misconceptions in physics in my (admittedly limited) exposure to contemporary (?) ideas in physics instruction. Do you see this approach as an alternative to that, or something that can work in tandem with confronting misconceptions?
And could you give an example of common situation in which a teacher could identify and leverage a “seed of science” in a student, rather than a common misconception?
Lisa Goodhew
Assistant Professor
Thanks for these questions, Patrick! From a research perspective, I see the goal of identifying "seeds of science" as an alternative to the goal of identifying common misconceptions -- it involves looking for what is awesome about students' ideas, rather than looking for the ways students struggle. From an instructional perspective, our project proposes that instructors prioritize noticing and building on the "seeds," rather than confronting misconceptions. So it's an alternative in the sense of what goal is prioritized. However, in my experience these can work together: students have "seeds of science" that can help them move past common misconceptions, and it is helpful to be aware of both. Sometimes even common misconceptions can be seeds of scientific thinking that aren't "all the way there" yet.
An example of leveraging a "seed of science" from my own recent experience: when we're talking about electric circuits, my students tend to buy into the idea that charges move around inside a conductor until the electric field is zero. When they come across various questions or observations that "don't make sense," I find it helpful to remind them of the "charges move around until field is zero" idea and ask how it would apply in the situation they are currently confused about. Hopefully this provides a sensible illustration!
Clausell Mathis
patrick honner
patrick honner
Teacher
This all makes sense. As a classroom teacher and instructional coach I'm often thinking (and talking with other teachers) about the difference between finding what's right in student thinking and finding what's wrong. It's a seemingly small change in approach that has a big impact on culture in the classroom.
I guess I was thinking about confronting not necessarily student deficiencies, but misguided intuition based on experiences in the physical world. For example, I seem to recall that a common misconception is that when a ball is thrown up in the air, the force on the ball is at first acting upwards, and then later downwards. This isn't necessarily a result of a student "struggling" with anything, but rather seeing the world through an incorrect model of their experience. Perhaps there is no distinction between this example and the one you provided, but I have no absolutely no intuition about electricity!
Clausell Mathis
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
Hi Patrick! These are such great questions, thank you! Yes, that idea of an impetus force is something the literature reports as a common misconception, and we definitely see this idea in our data too. I agree with you that this idea is not canonically correct, in that physics would see it a different way. Building from what Lisa said, part of the work of our project is to imagine ways in which we might build from ideas like impetus force, instructionally -- often trying to find a way that the idea is continuous with formal physics. In the case of the impetus force, for example, we might see resources like "forces affect the motion of objects" or "an imbalance of forces changes their motion." These are ways in which the impetus force *aligns* with accepted physics knowledge, even though the idea is technically incorrect; from this lens, these ideas need not be confronted but can instead be explored, refined, connected, etc.
Let's keep the conversation going!
Clausell Mathis
patrick honner
patrick honner
Teacher
Thanks for the additional explanation, Amy! That definitely helps me better understand your project and goals.
Alexander Rudolph
Professor
Very interesting presentation. I liked the animation! You did a great job of presenting the history of the study of student misconceptions and how they inform curriculum, and also the motivation for using the data collected over the years to discover student ideas that could be leveraged as resources to improved student conceptual understanding. I would have liked to see more discussion of the types of ideas you discovered student hold about physics and how they were translated into the Acorn modules. Also, I assume you collected data on the effectiveness of the Acorn modules and would have like to hear more about that. Overall, a very nice video and project!
Lauren Bauman
Research Coordinator
Thank you for watching and commenting on our video! I definitely agree it would have been nice to have more discussion about students’ ideas; thank you for your feedback! If you’re interested, I’ll share some links at the end of this post to papers we have written about the types of resources we’ve found in students' responses. These resources have helped guide the development of ACORN tutorials in a few ways; for example, we usually start a tutorial with a conceptual “priming” question that we expect to elicit a lot of resourceful ideas that can be scaffolded and built on throughout the rest of the worksheet. Students’ resources have also informed the goals and format of ACORN tutorials; for example, we’ve found students have lots of great ideas that form the basis of models for physical phenomena, so some of our tutorials aim to help students formalize those ideas. In response to data about the effectiveness of materials: the short answer is yes, we are in the process of measuring this. We still have some open questions about how to best effectiveness. Right now, we’re focussing on video analysis of students doing ACORN tutorials and revising our materials based off of these observations. We’re also in the process of developing and investigating other forms of data, like survey responses, that could help measure things like students affective experience, conceptual gains, and mechanistic reasoning skills.
Rebecca Vieyra
Associate Director of Global Initiatives
Hi, team! This is definitely exciting work, and moves us away from the "elicit, confront, resolve" approach that views students through a more negative lens, to think about what students bring as stepping-stones to more "expert" understanding.
Wit this in mind, I'm curious about a few things:
Thanks!
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
Thank you so much for your questions, Rebecca!
In terms of how our tutorials are similar to or different from these other curricula, my own sense is that we are trying to systematically elicit particular (research-identified) resources, and then support students in building models, mechanisms, and concepts from there. That feels a bit abstract, so here's an example: In the context of heat and temperature, we've found that students pretty reliably use a few resources when they're sense-making about macro thermal phenomena -- heat transfer is directional, temperature and thermal energy are related, ... (I have a short list). What our current draft of the H & T ACORN Physics Tutorial does is put a big box on the first page, and ask students to answer some concrete questions and then reflect on the "principles" they were using, and then put those up in their box. As they go, we invite them to refine, combine, resolve inconsistencies between, add, etc., to their principles, and then, toward the end, to test their burgeoning "model" in an experiment. The concrete questions we ask are ones we have seen elicit particular resources, and the process is meant to make students' ideas visible to them and support them in organizing and building from them.
I think there is a lot of overlap in the processes of our tutorials and all of the materials you mention, in that they are all trying to support students in model-building and -refining in particular ways. Ours may overlap the most with ISLE because we use a lot of experiments, but that answer may reflect more on my understanding of the curricula more than what someone who knew all of these well would say. We do take a pretty consistently resources-oriented stance toward student thinking, which distinguishes our materials from curricula that also seek to address misunderstandings or misconceptions.
The open-source website is *almost* launched and will be here: https://www.physport.org/curricula/ACORN/.
And we are currently in process of analyzing interviews with faculty about their perceptions with the tutorials. Some of our own team members express that they are hard to use because they are counter-cultural, and it can be like swimming upstream, expectations-wise, so we're exploring that as a team.
Happy to continue this conversation!
Rebecca Vieyra
Associate Director of Global Initiatives
Dear Amy,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses! Yes, laying out that concrete example about heat flow is very helpful. In my own mind, you're taking something like Diagnoser.com's "facets" of knowledge, but turning things on their head and looking at the positive attributes of "misconceptions" (hopefully I'm not misunderstanding).
As for faculty uptake, I wonder if it just is going to be hard, and therefore requires a substantial investment in professional development. For example, Modeling Instruction folks have just realized it takes 2-3 weeks of full-time investment in professional development to get people to really adopt these counter-cultural approaches. (I'm not sure how easily-adoptable ISLE is, but my finding is that the strongest advocates for it are people who have become accustomed to it through long-term exposure, such as through their masters coursework). So, I wouldn't lose heart about it being hard.
I look forward to seeing the website rollout!
Amy Robertson
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
If there were emojis here I'd give this response a big heart!
Sarah Bichler
Hi team,
how I love the "seeds of science" visual - beginning ideas growing into a wonderful tree! I also love common conceptual resources! In our work (STRIDES, NLP-TIPS), we're identifying middle and high school students' ideas. I've analyzed 1000+ responses and learned about so many fun student ideas and they are all wonderful starting points for learning. Our WISE curricula are, similar to your curricula, designed and refined with these student ideas in mind. We also work with teachers to learn how they bring in their students' initial ideas, affirming these ideas as productive, and guiding students to develop mechanistic understanding based on their initial ideas.
I'd love to compare the ideas you found for heat and temperature!
What was the most inspiring way you have seen an instructor use students' ideas as resource?
Did you gain any insight into how students feel when their initial ideas are affirmed?
How are you designing the video lessons to help teachers use ACORN lessons? Are these co-developed with teachers? What is the theory guiding these lessons?
I am looking very much forward to learning more!
Sarah
Lisa Goodhew
Assistant Professor
Hi Sarah! It is really exciting to hear from someone who is working from a similar perspective! (Also, what a cool project! I've just started dipping my toes into the world of NLP and students' ideas, and It's very interesting.) Thanks so much for each of your questions, and I'll try to respond to each here:
- For heat and temperature, some of the most common ideas we've seen are things like "heat/thermal energy flows from hot to cold," "material matters for heat transfer," or "energy is related to motion of the particles of an object." I suspect that these are especially dependent on the kind of question we've asked students -- lots of things about putting different sizes or types of blocks in contact with each other. We're really curious about students' microscopic thinking, and there is some ongoing investigation about that in particular.
-For me, the most inspiring ways I see instructors use students' ideas as resources are when they are able to suggest "mini-experiments" to test or affirm students ideas, or when they can suggest analogies that resonate with ideas that students voice. Here, I am mostly thinking about ways my undergraduate Learning Assistants leverage resources in the intro physics class I teach. They are great at picking up on or suggesting analogies!
- I think it's hard to tell how students feel when their ideas are affirmed, because it seems to me like students don't often expect it! I see their proudness when they are really convinced they have great ideas, but I think they see their ideas as great less frequently than I do, if that makes sense.
-Our video lessons will be housed on Periscope, which has a collection of video lessons for physics teaching. They include short video clips from classes where students are using ACORN Physics tutorials, and come with discussion/consideration questions to help instructors think about how students' ideas can be fruitful or how to respond to situations that seem to be common in the context of these tutorials. The discussion/consideration guides are framed around a central question that the video clip gets at, like "What ideas do students have about heat and temperature?" or "when do students pursue challenging questions?"
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
Sarah, echoing Lisa's thanks for your engagement. I wanted to add that one of the graduate students on our team is currently leading a project that is seeking to develop a tool/survey where students reflect on how they see their ideas having changed during instruction and how they felt about it. E.g., were their ideas challenged, built on, elaborated, etc., and did they feel confident, embarrassed, confused. Once we get something semi-reliable, we want to look at couplings between answers to these questions -- do instances of building on couple with feeling confident, for instance? Looking forward to checking out your work, too!
Sarah Bichler
Hi Lisa and Amy,
thanks so much for your detailed responses!
Thanks for sharing these resources. I am excited to learn about these examples that can showcase how as a teacher one can respond to student ideas!
I am most excited to learn about these ideas you commonly see. We notice these same ideas in middle school students doing our Thermodynamics instructional unit! We also notice that students often think heat and cold energy flows, or that objects can conduct coldness. I noticed the ideas you mentioned could be described as accurate but not connected or not yet elaborated. The idea of "cold flow" would be considered a misconception by many people, we try to especially work on ways ideas such as cold flow are productive for learning more. Have you seen ideas like that too?
I am looking forward to continuing the conversation!
Sarah
Amy Robertson
Research Professor of Physics
Hi Sarah! Yes, we have absolutely seen ideas like cold flow; in fact, a graduate student on our team designed a question that was meant to specifically elicit that idea after seeing it, and we are awaiting data. We framed the question not only in terms of "what do you think happens" but also "why might it be reasonable to think that cold flows" and "what are the limitations." I'd be excited to co-think with you when we get that data!
Sarah Bichler
That sounds lovely! Thanks so much again for sharing your video.