I think that physics is a subject that many people have a natural
curiosity about and connection to. Physics asks us to think about simple
physical phenomena that are around us every day and make sense
of how the world works. And people do that naturally in the course of their
experience in their life, and build up ideas about why things move the way they do.
For example, young children quickly figure out exactly hard to push on a wagon
to make it move at a nearly constant speed, not speeding up or slowing down,
or figure out how to take a projectile, a ball, and apply just the right angle and push to it
to get it to go into the basket. It takes physicists pages of algebra to figure that out.
Kids can do it intuitively. People naturally build up ideas about how the world
works and they do a great job at that. However, in many cases, these kinds of rules
of thumb that work well in everyday situations can obscure more universal
underlying patterns and principles. In the case of the wagon moving at
a constant speed, a child, a person might sort of reasonably come to the conclusion
that an ongoing motion requires an ongoing force, from experiences like that
and other experiences. But actually, Newton's Laws tell us that objects move in
a straight line at a constant speed all by themselves, with no forces whatsoever acting
on them. The action of an unbalanced force is to actually change the motion.
So, this seems to be in contradiction to the child's rule of thumb about the wagon.
And, if we think more deeply about it, we can realize how to reconcile those, which is
exactly what the inquiry-based physics labs ask students to do.
So, simply telling students that, "You know, by the way, your idea about
ongoing motion requiring an ongoing force is not quite right, here's how it
actually works..." What's been found is that that approach - just telling students -
students will not disagree with you, but they may not incorporate that new idea
in a sensible way. Instead, the new idea can be sort of interpreted in unexpected
ways as students fit it in to what they already know to be true.
So, in inquiry-based learning, we give students the opportunity to really wrestle
with the new material, the scientific knowledge that's being presented, and reconcile
it with their everyday intuitive knowledge, see where there are differences,
and see how to then reconcile and make those consistent, so that, instead of
kind of twisting the new idea to fit in with the existing common sense framework,
students can actually make sense of the new ideas in a more normative way.
Well, we have really drawn on physics education research to guide the design of the labs.
Physics education research has been an established subdiscipline within physics
for several decades now, so there is a large amount of systematic evaluation of student learning
that shows us that inquiry-based learning, the type that I'm describing, actually results in
demonstrably deeper understanding of basic concepts and reasoning than more traditional
instruction, where students are in a passive learning mode. At Western, we continually assess
student understanding in the labs, and are able to measure whether students are learning
the concepts that we would like them to learn at the depth we would like them to learn them.
Beyond learning specific physics concepts, though, we feel that an inquiry-based approach
offers larger, perhaps even more important benefits. After all, most students who complete
the introductory physics course may not be using Newton's Laws in their professional careers,
but they will be lifelong learners, and many of them will be in technical settings
and environments in STEM fields. The inquiry-based labs, because they put students
in the position of making sense of ideas for themselves, collaborating together,
checking on their own understanding to make sure they've got it, these are all important
features of independent learning. Students have a chance to practice and develop
their ability to guide their own learning, which we feel is critical for a productive career
in STEM and we believe that kind of skill in directing one's own learning
is something valuable that students can take away from the physics course, perhaps even more important than specific physics concepts.
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