[email protected]

p Sliško
Josip
Facultad de Ciencias Fisico Matematicas
Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla
Puebla Mexico
Puebla,
[email protected]
What is traditional lecture-based physics
teaching and why it doesn‘t work?
What is active physics learning and why it
works better?
Why group active learning sometimes does not
promote self-regulated learning?
Why and how an „online + classroom“ design
might help?
One man is talking and many students are listening and
taking notes (somewhere in Europe in XIV century).
One man is talking
talking, writting many formulas on
blackboard, making physics show and, still, many
students are listening and taking notes (XXI century at
the MIT).
This is teacher-centered
teacher centered teaching in which a teacher
delivers the main part of the content a 1000 page
physics texbook in two semesters.
The only way to do such an inmense task is to consume
all classroom time.
Students listen to the teachers and copy what is written
on the blackboard.
In recitation sessions students practice end-of-chapter
problems and in lab they follow coock-book
experimental tasks to „learn“ that already seen formulas
are correct.
Humans learn best by doing things
things, by making and
correcting errors.
In order to do things perfectly
perfectly, humans need to
constantly improve their performances. Beside a lot of
p
practice,, theyy also must think criticallyy and creativelyy on
what they do.
It is well understood in sports and musics. Nobody will
learn to swim listening someone talking about swimming
(and hydrodamics) nor will someone learn to play violin
listening someone talking about violing playing (and
Fourier analysis).
Somebody said that lecture
lecture-based
based teaching is a process
in which the content of teacher’s notebook is passing
(via blackboard) into students’ notebooks without
passing through either teacher’s or students’ minds.
g from fast p
g
A tryy to learn something
presentation of a big
quantity of new inofrmation is similar to a dangerous
intent to drink water flowing out of a fireman’s hose.
Students are doing physics: observe,
observe describe,
describe explain
and predict physical phenomena.
In all these thinking processes,
processes students make use of
their previos ideas and experiences.
When previous
Wh
i
id
ideas
d
do nott work,
k students
t d t try
t new
ones, proposed by them or by teacher.
New knowledge is the result of sense making of new (or
revisited old) experiences.
Priscilla Laws (Dickinson College) designed a course in
which students learn physics by doing physics.
Students, with the help of computers
Students
computers, take data about
phenomena and make sense of them.
Active physics learning is,
is metaphorically
speaking, an “idea market” on which students try
to sell own and buy ideas of others.
others
Good students are those who do not either sell
or buy ideas easily.
Active physics learning is so called “self
selfregulated learning” whose theory was
elaborated by late Paul Pintrich and others.
others
A good self-regulated learner is able to activate,
monitor and controll all necesseary resources
(conceptual, cognitive, metacognitive, affective
and contextual).
Some students,
students regularly those which are notnot
so-good learner, avoid to provide their initial
ideas in explanatinatory,
explanatinatory predictive and problemproblem
solving tasks.
In the time assigned for writting down personal
ideas they act as they “think hardly”, then write
and delete. They are quite happy when
“personal thinking time” is over.
In this way, they loose opportunities for starting
to learn about and to practice self-regulated
learning.
Personal thinking should be done online,
online as an
evaluated homework, before classroom group
session.
session
In this way personal thinking is assured for
those who want to improve their learning.
Students can not change their personal answers
as they often do in classroom.
The problem of sending the same answer from
different e-mail addresses should be somehow
addressed.