Workshop Physics

Principal Mentor:

Priscilla Laws, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Adapters:

Carroll College, Forsyth Technical Community College, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Skidmore College, University of Northern Iowa, Whittier College

The Innovation

Workshop Physics replaces traditional lectures and laboratories with guided inquiry workshops featuring microcomputers and specially designed apparatus to help students to learn by doing. Dickinson College pioneered this work in 1986 and has created an extensive activity guide and designed much of the software and apparatus to develop students' reasoning skills and enhance their understanding of essential physics concepts.

Outcomes

All six of the original cluster members continue to make progress in adapting Workshop Physics, albeit with varying degrees of success. The institution that progressed furthest began to implement Workshop Physics as soon as the project started in 1995, and used substantial portions of the workshop guide and pedagogical approach of the Dickinson program. Another, with extensive experience in activity-based instruction, used project participation to extend those instructional strategies to an additional course, adapting the spirit though not the materials of the Dickinson approach. At the other extreme, just after the project began another adapting institution's physics program was reduced to one full-time faculty member and assumed a purely service role. These changes severely limited the time available for implementing the extensive transformations that Workshop Physics requires, with the result that the course was not offered until fall of 1997. At another college, also with a declining science program, interest in the reforms has so far been limited to the project participants.

The physics department at Forsyth Technical Community College found strong support from administrators and from faculty in programs that require physics. Another institution has found Workshop Physics particularly useful for training future science teachers.

Four of the six institutions adapted large portions of the mentor's materials and pedagogy. The other two, while including some workshop elements in their introductory courses, reinvented much material and strategy to better fit perceived local needs.

All experienced common startup problems caused by demands on faculty time and the cost of and lack of technical support for an equipment-intensive program. Faculty were generally inventive in creating less expensive adaptations of the Dickinson laboratory exercises until they could acquire the necessary hardware.

Some faculty not directly involved in the project resisted the workshop approach because of the loss of control that comes with the self discovery pedagogy, with the result that two of the institutions returned to substantial amounts of lecturing, while retaining some workshop elements. In doing so they were also motivated by the need to cover more material than discovery methods permit.

Workshop Physics also encountered resistance from students who were not ready for an active learning situation and preferred to receive information through lectures. Some adapters found students unable to cope with the quantity of homework and the pace and scope of activities.

Despite the large differences in the pace and degree of adaptation and in faculty and student acceptance of the new teaching and learning style, all six institutions introduced at least some elements of workshop physics. They believe their newly designed courses to be permanent and are convinced that students learn better than with the traditional approach (see evaluation results below). The variety of uses to which these institutions put Workshop Physics principles and the range of both type and extent of adaptation demonstrate the flexibility of this model. Thus the Workshop Physics project, now in its 14th year, continues to change the way physics is taught across the country.

The Workshop Physics program maintains an automated Internet mailing list or listserv that currently has 70 subscribers, a useful addition to person-to-person mentoring.

Assessment

The University of Maryland's Physics Education Research Group conducted an independent evaluation of learning outcomes at the adapting departments. The evaluation explored student gains in understanding of basic concepts characteristically covered in introductory physics courses and student attitudes, beliefs and assumptions about physics. Results for the Workshop Physics institutions were compared with results for institutions using traditional lecture methods and a mixture of lectures and hands-on methods. The gains in understanding of basic physics concepts were assessed by two instruments that in different ways measure students' belief in the Newtonian laws of motion as opposed to their common sense beliefs. The two instruments, administered at the beginning and at the end of the course, were used at separate sets of institutions. Both showed students in Workshop Physics courses making twice or more the gains in understanding of students taught by lecture methods and 18 percent greater gains than those taught by mixed methods.

The Maryland Physics Expectation Survey, also administered before and after the course, measures the difference between students' expectations of and their actual experience in the course. It examines student beliefs about what it means to learn physics, how physics knowledge is structured, the nature of physics knowledge, beliefs about the connection between physics and reality, the role of mathematics in physics, and the effort necessary to do well. All courses showed poorer post-test results on the effort cluster of questions, possibly because students may not have put in as much effort as they expected to at the beginning. For the other five clusters of questions, the traditional and mixed sequences all showed deterioration of the pre-course results for at least one of the clusters, and four of the six traditional courses showed deterioration for at least three clusters. On the other hand, only one of the Workshop Physics courses showed deterioration on any of the five clusters. For three of the five clusters, all the workshop courses showed better outcomes than any of the lecture and mixed-method courses.

The evaluators also conducted interviews with 16 individual students at two of the adapting institutions in order to get more detail about the thinking that underlay responses to the expectations instrument. They found that students clearly saw connections between classroom learning and phenomena they encountered outside the classroom, and that most were convinced that they really could learn physics. Though most felt that they needed to understand the concepts in order to learn, about a third still felt that they could pass the course by memorizing equations and plugging them into problems. Nevertheless, most of the students would rather have been in lecture courses where they were told the concepts rather than having to figure them out for themselves. Much of this preference stemmed from their uncertainty that what they were learning on their own was "right."

The students also had a mixed, but largely favorable, reaction to working in groups. Although personal relationships were occasionally a problem, more often difficulties arose between academically weaker students, who were interested in getting through the work as quickly as possible, and their stronger peers, who wanted to make sure they understood the concepts before moving on.

Further Dissemination

Workshop Physics has been one of the most extensively disseminated innovations in higher education. A series of grants from FIPSE, the National Science Foundation and other sources have supported many well-attended workshops and conference presentations. This project, however, is the first in which the developers of the program have been able to work with institutions over an extended period of time. Conference presentations continue, as does dissemination through a Workshop Physics Web site.

Available information:

For further information, contact:

Priscilla Laws
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Dickinson College
P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
Telephone: 717-245-1242
Web site: http://physics.dickinson.edu/~abp_web/abp_homepage.html

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