1. Design strategies for research-based activities Joshua S
Design strategies for research-based activities Joshua S. Von Korff, Amin Bayat Barooni, Monica Cook, Brian Ferguson, and Kyle Simmons Georgia State University
Supported by NSF grant #
1. Goals, Research Questions, and Methods
Physics education researchers have designed research-based activities and labs, and have sometimes published accounts of their design strategies and principles. These principles could be useful to instructors who want to design their own activities. In order to find common themes in design strategies, we interviewed activity designers, analyzed their publications, and we also considered a recent American Association of Physics Teachers report on lab design [1]. We focused on activities which contain a lab component.
Goal 1: To be able to make recommendations to instructors about designing activities
Goal 2: To be able to examine an instructor-designed activity and characterize it in terms of a standard set of design features or a standard taxonomy of features, in order to better evaluate or give feedback about their activities.
Research Question 1: How do designers talk about design features, what do publications say about design features, and how can we characterize these sources jointly?
Research Question 2: What, if anything, do the designers and their publications say that may be missing in the AAPT report?
Methods: we interviewed six designers: one each for the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), Workshop Physics and RealTime Physics, and three for Modeling Instruction. Using open and axial coding, we coded the interviews as well as two major publications describing each method, in addition to the AAPT report.
2. Design plans
Design plans were a core design principle that emerged from our analysis.
Definition of design plan: A plan which relates multiple design features, topics, or course components in a structured manner.
Example #1: Learning cycles and sequences were the most significant design plans we noticed. For instance, the ISLE cycle is as follows: 1) Observation experiment: students observe a phenomenon and try to explain it. 2) Testing experiment: students design an experiment to test their explanation. 3) Application experiment: students apply their findings to new situations. Example #2: An instructional plan connects the activity with other instructional components in the course. For example, in ISLE, students must read the textbook “only after new ideas are constructed and tested” in the lab [2].
Example #3: A curricular plan relates the teaching of several topics. For instance, in Modeling Instruction, students must recognize the limitations of the models they have learned in order to motivate the transition to new models.
4. Conclusions and future work
Regarding RQ1: we suggest that design goals and design plans are closely related. In order to justify a learning cycle such as the ISLE cycle, it was necessary for the ISLE designers to describe in detail what it means to “think like a physicist.” Regarding RQ2: the AAPT report, perhaps in the interest of general applicability, did not commit to a particular version of “thinking like a physicist.” In our view, this limited its ability to emphasize cycles and sequences.
We recommend that instructors who want to design their own activities should be aware of the design plans and design goals promoted by various designers. They can then make an informed decision as to whether they want to develop their own plans and goals.
We note that the four methods described here have succeeded at producing high learning gains on assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation. We do not know whether these design goals and design plans are necessary to reliably produce such learning gains. It would be interesting to find out whether most successful instructors have thought out a plan, cycle, or goal for their class.
3. Design goals
A second major features of these designers’ approaches is the design goal.
Example #1: “Thinking like a physicist” is a goal of ISLE and Modeling instruction as well as the AAPT report, although these three approach it differently. ISLE views “thinking like a physicist” to be tied up in the generation and testing of hypotheses. As an ISLE designer stated, “if you look at little children, they actually do ISLE all the time … they would come up with hypotheses to explain evidence … and they would actually systematically test them without saying ‘I’m testing a hypothesis.’ “ In contrast, a Modeling designer views thinking like a physicist as relating to “the building, validation, and testing of models.” The AAPT report preferred to respect “local” views of thinking like a physicist.
Example #2: Conceptual learning is a goal that pertained especially to Workshop Physics and RealTime Physics; we suggest that the predict-observe-compare cycle, which is prominent in these activities, is tied up in conceptual learning goals. The AAPT report did not emphasize conceptual learning as a goal, but referred to a more general idea of “constructing knowledge.”
1. J. Kozminski et al., AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum (2014).
2. E. Etkina, American Journal of Physics 83, 669 (2015).