A First Year Experience: Teaching “How Things Work” for non-science freshmen at Sewanee

1. A First Year Experience: Teaching “How Things Work” for non-science freshmen at Sewanee Course Design & Assessment Workshop The ACS Reform of Introductory Science Courses for Non-Science Majors Program Rollins College, January 9-10, 2004 Supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles Ben Szapiro Department of Physics The University of the South

2. OUTLINE • The First Year Program (FYP) • Design of the new course (HTW) • Implementation • Course materials • Examples • Assessment and Evaluations • Conclusions, Questions

3. The First Year Program • Implemented in 2002, second year. Increase retention, improve advising, enrich academic life. • $1,200 FYP Budget plus $7,000 Faculty Replacement. • Restricted to first semester freshmen plus AP. • Students pre-enrolled over the summer (preferences). • Seminar style (under 15 students). • Faculty is also advisor, all students live in the same dorm. • Writing intensive. • “Hands-on, Minds on”. • Minimize lectures, engage students in active learning.

4. 10 TIPS FOR FYP SUCCESS Diane W. Strommer 1) Understand Your Students (where are they coming from, where are you coming from). 2) Clarify Course Objectives (assignments, activities, quizzes are supporting elements of course goals, not goals themselves). “Content to cover” vs. “what students will achieve at the end of the process (able to understand, to do, to apply general principles, or other outcomes)”. 3) Pay particular attention to the first class (sets the tone, is the appetizer that provokes hunger or spoils appetite?). Explain course goals and then use Icebreakers (for instance, pair students to gather info about one another and then introduce them to the class). Use nametags. Pose a question like: Name 3 ways in which college will be different from high school. Skills needed to succeed in college? Share a defining event with the class (identify common experiences). 4) Establish a Climate for Learning (comfort zone to participate, build self-confidence and trust). Create base groups (4-5 students, cooperative learning). Research on learning suggests beginning a class with a brief activity to foster reflection (“What is the most important thing learned from our last class or assigned reading”). 5) Abandon the Non-Stop Lecture (active vs. passive learning). In lectures students pay attention about 50% of the time and retain about 50% of that. Traditional Discussion (professor posses a question to the whole class) is not much better (80% of the time is the professor talking). Learning as a “spectator sport”. vs. Small Group Discussion. To learn means: break new info into meaningful chunks, make connections between them and things we already know. Students need to generate their own examples of the concepts and explain them to someone else. “Faculty teach as faculty like to learn, but not as students learn best”. Abstract/Reflexive learners are only 10% of high school seniors. Variety of learning styles requires variety of teaching styles. Attention span, learning styles, lifelong learning skills need to be at the forefront of teaching strategies.

5. 6) Involve Students with Varied Activities. Break class in small groups. Active learning: Maybe a good idea to explain to the students (who might prefer a passive lecture style): • a) Research on learning shows that students learn more when they work actively and collaboratively in groups in class. • b) Developing skills in working in groups will impact future employment. • c) Content in the group tasks will be on exams or projects. • 7) Provide opportunity for Reflection. Quality journal writing might help. • 8) Take Risks. Takes about 3 years of experience to get it right. Be aware of teachers’ fears: not adequately prepared, expose ignorance, glazed eyes and bored faces from students, ambivalence about power (grade and credentials) over their lives. • 9) Include Upper-Class Students. Student mentors are key, use them wisely, empower them, and assign them responsibilities in guiding discussions. • 10) Develop a Support Group. Steal liberally from the activities and ideas of other FYP faculty, regular meetings and communication.

6. Some Cognitive Principles (Joe Redish) Principle 1: Individuals build their knowledge by making connections to existing knowledge; they use this knowledge by productively creating a response to the information they receive. Corollary 1.1 . Learning is a growth, not a transfer. It takes repetition, reflection, and integration to build robust, functional knowledge. Corollary 1.2 . Building functional scientific mental models does not occur spontaneously for most students. Repeated and varied activities that help build coherence are important. Principle 2:What people construct depends on the context – including their mental states. Principle 3: It is reasonably easy to learn something that matches or extends an existing schema, but changing a well-established schema substantially is difficult. Corollary 3.1 . It's hard to learn something we don't almost already know. Corollary 3.2 . Much of our learning is done by analogy. Corollary 3.3 . “Touchstone” problems and examples are very important. Corollary: 3.4 . It is very difficult to change an established mental model.

7. You are presented with 4 cards and told that the only rules are that if one side of the card shows a vowel then the back side must show an odd number.. As a rigorous and skeptic person you are asked to check if the cards comply with this rule. What is the leastnumber of cards you need to flip if presented with the 4 cards below? 1 K 2 2 A 7 ANSWER (Circle one): 0 1 2 3 4 ?#@&! TIME TAKEN TO DECIDE (in seconds):

8. A bartender writes for each order on the front of a card the drink and on the back the age. As a bar owner you need to check if he is complying with underage drinking laws. What is the leastnumber of cards you need to flip if presented with the 4 cards below? 16 COKE 52 GIN ANSWER (Circle one): 0 1 2 3 4 ?#@&! TIME TAKEN TO DECIDE (in seconds):

9. Same logic, different difficulty! • “…These problems provide a very nice example of both productive reasoning and context dependence. In the two cases, most people call on different kinds of reasoning to answer the two problems. The second relies on matching with social experience- a kind of knowledge handled in a much different way from mathematical reasoning. • This result has powerful implications for our attempt to instruct untrained students …First it demonstrates that the assumption that “once a student has learned something, they’ll have it” is not correct. The example shows that even changing the context of a problem may make it much more difficult. Second, it points out that a problem or reasoning that has become sufficiently familiar to us to feel like 16/Coke/52/Gin may feel like K/2A/7 to our students!…” Source: E.F. Redish, Teaching Physics, J.Wiley & Sons, 2003

10. Main Objectives of HTW • Introduce students to the scientific method and basic critical thinking (and tinkering!) skills. • “Science appreciation”. Idea of “Leverage”: “A few basic principles may be applied to a large number of a situations”. • Predictive powers! Increase students confidence on analytic and synthetic skills • Improve writing and logical skills, scientific reporting. Library! • De-mystify technology. Use current technologies as motivation (CDs, cell phones, GPS, bicycles, MRI, Segways, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.). • Foster interest in life-long learning and ability to evaluate and decide. • Convince students of the need for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. • Focus on estimates rather than mathematical rigor.

11. Web Page, Blackboard • http://www.sewanee.edu/physics/PHYSICS111/PHYSICS111.html • Team taught: Randy Peterson/Ben Szapiro (first time). Coordination? • Shared advising, grading, alternated “front/back” roles. • Fun experience, offered as a summer course in July ‘04. • HTW textbook by Lou Bloomfield used sparingly (large vs. small classes). • Grading: C for satisfying requirements (3 papers) 1) “How fast can you bike?” 2) “The CD player” 3) Personal Project (3 page summary) reviewed by a classmate. • Quizzes, special projects, discussion board contributions, attendance to talks, etc. are for extra credit (no downside). • PowerPoint Project presentations in lieu of Final Exam, followed by closing dinner. Best projects voted by classmates for extra credit. • Don’t you wish that all your courses would fall neatly into place?

12. Co-curricular activities • Dinner at faculty homes and restaurants • Trip to bicycle shop (hands-on, greasy!) • Invited speakers/test run of recumbent bikes • Group bike rides (PE credit) • Visit to Hospital Cancer Center • Attendance (rewarded!) to departmental talks by invited speakers • $1,200 FYP Budget

13. AssessmentHow well are students learning?(As opposed to: How much material did I get to cover?) “Learning can and often does take place without the benefit of teaching-and sometimes even in spite of it- but there is no such thing as effective teaching in the absence of learning…. …There are gaps, sometimes considerable ones, between what was taught and what has been learned. By the time faculty notice these gaps in knowledge or understanding, it is frequently too late to remedy the problems.” Thomas A. Angelo/K. Patricia Cross Classroom Assessment Techniques

14. Assessment techniques tried • Quick recaps (25 minutes, before moving on) Break into 4 Groups 3 minutes Group Discussion, agree on a summary Election of a Group Spokesperson. 3 minutes summary given by the speaker + Q & A • Quick Quizzes (Individual, 15 minutes, Extra Credit) • Extensive rewriting of papers, with “trail”. • Mutual student grading of first draft of papers.

15. Teacher Evaluations • Students’ feedback trough informal conversations plus: • 1) Standard Questionnaire 2) FYP Questionnaire • Main pros: Intellectually stimulating, close faculty-student relationships, students feel that the faculty knows them well, good advising. Other freshmen saw HTW as “the coolest class”. 14 out of the 15 students would recommend it to an incoming student. Some students got the “inventors’ spark”. Positive role model of the AP (Melissa Glaser). Is liberating not to have to cover a given set of materials. • Main cons: Some students would prefer more lecturing and less discussion, disliked rewriting, disliked crunch at the end, some complained about math limitations getting in the way. Some students not used to “alternating teachers”, they wanted one single “authority figure”.

16. Preliminary Conclusions • Effective way to introduce students to science. • Writing intensive requirement involves lots of extra work. • Biking, exploring, field trips, etc., add an important out of classroom element to learning and getting to know them. • More flexibility on the topics, be more responsive of students interests. Revise the issue of discussion board and grading system. Use of Blackboard CMS? • Is exciting to teach with objects, brain + hands => “cooperative learning”. • By comparison, our standard intro physics courses (with its “a chapter a week” model) are drier and less stimulating. • Go into Studio Physics format. • Q & A