Current Research Interests:
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Interactive Online Lectures
We are developing a system to give online lectures. The lectures are made up of PowerPoint slides that are interrupted throughout with questions. The questions are there to ensure that the students read the slides and are not just clicking through them. If the student gets a particular question correct then they will be allowed to go to the next slide, but if they get it wrong they will be asked another question and so on until they get a question correct. These online lectures are being used in Physics 100 and are also used to supplement the Gauss’ Law material in Physics 212. -
Physics 100
Physics 100 is a preparatory course for the calculus-based introductory mechanics course. It is intended to give under-prepared students the skills and confidence needed to be successful in the introductory sequence. Physics 100 is an 8-week course covering kinematics and dynamics. Students complete many of the course components on the web and meet once a week in a 2-hour discussion section. One of the online components is the newly developed interactive lectures that incorporate audio commentary and controlled navigation. Other web components include Just-in-Time Teaching, homework, and weekly quizzes. To learn more about the course and its effectiveness, contact Gary Gladding or visit the course website. -
Video Coding Software Development
We are developing software that will enable us to analyze the 800 hours of videotaped collaborative learning. Our video collection enables us to study what students do "in nature"; that is, we can study what really happens during collaborative problem solving in a physics course. The software we develop will allow researchers to play back video on a computer and very easily record the statements and interactions made by each student in a group. This data will be recorded in a database so that trends can be found. We plan on looking for correlations between a student's interactions during collaborative problem solving in class and his or her interactions with on-line homework. This software, called Coder, is currently available for researchers to use free of charge. Click here for more information. -
Mathematical Communication in Physics
There may be students who perform poorly in our introductory physics courses not because of their inability to conceptually understand the physics content but because of their inability to mathematically communicate. Indeed, a dominant contributor to student failure in physics may be related to students’ inability to represent concepts with, and extract information from, the physics equations. We have found evidence that many students view the meaning of the physics equations primarily in terms of numeric computations. These students view the computational uses of the equations as completely separate from the conceptual relationships the equations express. Our research has focused on understanding student difficulties with mathematical communication and the pedagogical practices effective at overcoming these difficulties -
The Role of Metacognition in Physics Instruction
Metacognition is important in the teaching of physics. We are exploring how to ask good metacognitive questions and the effect of such questions on the students learning of physics.
Previous Projects:
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Introductory Physics Course Reform
In 1996 the physics department began a reform of the introductory physics sequence. The reform used the findings from physics education research to improve the educational environment for the students and the teachers.
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Tycho – Web Based Homework System
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Homework A
Students are asked numerical questions based on a problem situation. The students are allowed as many entries as they need to get the correct solution. The system tells the students whether their response is correct or incorrect and gives the student the option of selecting a few, preprogrammed helpful hints. Each student is assigned random values to suppress cheating. -
Homework B
This is essentially an online quiz. The students are asked a series of multiple-choice questions, but unlike the Homework A they are not told whether they are correct or incorrect until after the homework deadline. The Homework B was developed to encourage students to understand the Homework A as they worked through it. To minimize answer sharing there are multiple versions of the homework B, which are randomly assigned to each student. -
Interactive Examples
These are difficult numeric questions that offers a detailed help sequence upon the students request. The help sequence leads the student through three different stages: a Qualitative Analysis, a Strategic Analysis, and a Quantitative Analysis using questions that engage students in a Socratic dialogue. When the student answers a question correctly, they are then asked another question to lead them through to the solution. The student may go through as much of the help sequence that they feel is necessary, and may answer the base question at any time to complete the exercise. -
Research on Multiple-choice Exams
We have studied the reliability and validity of the multiple-choice exams used in our department's introductory courses. Prior research has shown that reliable and valid multiple-choice exams can be created by expert exam writers, but our exams are created by a team of physics professors, most of whom are unaware of exam writing research. Our research has found that the scores students receive over the course of a semester are not only very precise, but are also consistent with scores they would have received if they were required to write out solutions. -
Talking Physics
When students work in groups we have noticed that poor students seem to be preoccupied with the answer and may not discuss the actual physics involved in the answer. We are exploring how students approach group work and the affect of the instructor on the students’ group work experiences. -
I-Clicker™: A Two-way Electronic Polling System
We are developing a radio frequency voting system for large lectures. Each student will have a remote that will allow them to anonymously vote on the answers to physics questions during lecture. The professor can then create a real time histogram of the students’ votes, and get feedback on his/her students’ level of understanding. The I-Clicker will help create a lecture environment where the students not only listen but also participate. The advantage over other remote voting systems is that the remotes do not need a line of sight to the receiver, and only one receiver is necessary to service a large lecture hall. -
Exam Builder
As part of the introductory physics reform, all of the exams given were changed into the multiple-choice format. We have been working on the construction of a database of every question ever given by the physics department here at Illinois. When completed the exam builder will allow course directors to search the question database by topic and will give the difficulty and discrimination of each question. This will facilitate the construction of good multiple-choice exams and will help us in our research of multiple-choice exams.
If you have questions about this page, please e-mail Michael Scott. cst