Collective instructional experience reveals tremendous need to enhance student learning of physics concepts, solidify their problem-solving skills, facilitate faculty professional development, and promote class attendance, which should contribute to better retention in STEM disciplines. An immediate outcome of the NSF grant DUE- 1246024 is the development of active-engagement introductory physics curricula, based on the constructivist model of student thinking and learning, employing two approaches that best fit our needs at the University of Central Florida: mini-studios with lectures (MSL) and full studio (FS). Full studio courses typically involve student-centered instruction through combined lecture, lab and recitation activities in a specialized classroom that supports collaboration. This generates barriers for departmental implementation because a specialized classroom may not be available or may not be large enough to serve all students. As a response, we developed the mini-studios with lectures, which harnessed the spirit of a studio course during the three hour recitation/laboratory meeting and left the lecture in place, eliminating the need for a new classroom or meeting pattern. Additionally, these two frameworks allowed diversity in approach to suit student and instructor styles and ease in transition from lecture-centered formats.

In designing the worksheets for these integrated activities our guiding principles were: 1) Questions that require qualitative reasoning and verbal explanation are essential; 2) Students need to participate in the process of constructing qualitative models that can help them understand relationships and differences among concepts; 3) Scientific reasoning skills must be expressly cultivated; 4) Students need repeated practice in interpreting physics formalism and relating it to the real world; 5) Persistent conceptual difficulties must be explicitly addressed by multiple challenges in different contexts; Students must be intellectually active to develop a functional understanding. We adopted the Maryland Open Source Tutorials and matched them with Investigative Science Learning Environment experiments, creating new material only as needed when topics we needed were not available.

We find learning gains evaluated using pre- and post-test (Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM)) to be promising.  As evident from data (see attached Fig. 1), while learning gains depend on the instructor, overall MSL produces impressive results which are comparable to that from FS and for some exceeding those from FS. Not surprisingly, the traditional mode seems to fare the worst.  One outcome of this finding is that we no longer offer these courses in the fully traditional mode. Furthermore, the comparable learning gains from the MSL and FS modes has broader impact, as it offers a way for departments prohibited by cost, space and interest to offer studio-mode instruction to their students without the radical changes necessary for such curricula as SCALE-UP. Additionally, this result sheds light on the possibility that full studio instruction is not the best method for all institutions, students or instructors. This finding has sparked research into studio-mode courses across diverse universities by one of the co-PIs.

Initially we intended part of the mini-studio to be led by faculty and part to be led by a graduate teaching assistant (GTA). While the mini-studio is still sometimes used as low barrier exposure to student-centered teaching for new faculty, departmental scheduling constrains resulted in the entire mini-studio eventually being led by GTAs, with no observed impact on student learning. By providing GTAs and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) mandatory pedagogical training, our approach empowers them as facilitators of student learning, thereby contributing to their professional development. It also enhances their science communication skills and helps recruit talented students for futures in science education. In fact, some GTAs who were involved in the course have opted for teaching careers, even though research opportunities were available to them. 

While implementing the revised curriculum, we became interested in how the GTAs were interpreting the student-centered curriculum as well as how they were actually interacting with their students. We modified the Real-time Instructor Observing Tool to create a measure of buy-in. GTAs described how they thought the curriculum developers wanted them to spend their time in class across ten actions (such as explaining and open dialogue) and how they thought it was most helpful to spend their time. These responses indicated the GTAs understood and agreed with the course mode. However, our observations indicated that they did not actually interact with students in the way they thought was most helpful. Future research will explore how to help GTAs have their intended student interactions.

 Overall, we believe that the funding provided by this grant has enabled us to get closer to the overarching goal of making systemic changes in our pedagogy that help  improve students’ conceptual understanding, problem solving skills and science learning attitudes in introductory algebra-based physics at UCF.

Last Modified: 10/31/2017
Modified by: Talat S Rahman