Modeling Workshop Project PI: Prof. David Hestenes

This report was compiled in Dec. 2008 from project final reports written in 1999 and 2000.

Physics Modeling Workshops for School Technology Infusion

A two-year grant in the Eisenhower Higher Education Math-Science Program (1998, 1999) administered by the Arizona Board of Regents

Principal Investigator: David Hestenes

Co-Principal Investigator and Project Director: Jane Jackson ()

Department of Physics, Box 871504

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona 85287-1504

SUMMARY

Arizona students’ understanding of the force concept doubled to tripled after two years of teacher implementation of the Modeling Method of Instruction. Two four-week modeling workshops in summers 1998 and 1999 cultivated school leaders in science reform with technology, and these leaders extended the Modeling Method to ninth grade and junior high in four modeling workshops in summer 2000. Fourteen universities nationwide replicated our Modeling Workshops in summer2000.

BACKGROUND

In 1998 and 1999, the Arizona Board of Regents awarded $50,000 each year to ASU for a series of two four-week summer Modeling Workshops for 22 high school physics teachers. Concurrently, Northern Arizona University (P.I. Dan MacIsaac) was awarded $50,000 each year for similar workshops for another 18 teachers. Teachers with no experience using classroom technology were asked to attend the NAU workshops. In 1999, the University of Arizona (P.I. J.D.Garcia) began a similar two-year Eisenhower-funded grant for teachers in southern Arizona.

In 1998 the Arizona Community Foundation awarded $25,000 to ASU to buy 25 of these Arizona teachers classroom technology to implement the Modeling Method of Instruction in high school physics. At the advice of the MicoRel Division in Tempe, of the Medtronic Corporation, the Medtronic Foundation awarded $15,000 for classroom technology for the other 15 teachers (all in metropolitan Phoenix) in these workshops. These two equipment grants resulted in eleven schools providing computers for the teachers’ classrooms in that year. Arizona StRUT, a company funded by Intel, Motorola, and other corporations, donated several refurbished computers to each teacher who applied for them. In 1999 the Medtronic Foundation awarded another $15,000 for 20 needy physics teachers who use Modeling Instruction. We and the teachers are deeply appreciative.

HIGHLIGHTS OF RESULTS

We are pleased to report the following results of the workshop series at both universities.

Arizona students’ gains in understanding of the force concept doubled to tripled after two years of teacher implementation of the Modeling Method of Instruction, as measured by a widely used objective instrument, the Force Concept Inventory.
Most teachers’ understanding of the force concept improved to mastery level, and teachers’ problem solving skills improved, as measured by the Force Concept Inventory and another objective instrument, the Mechanics Baseline Test.
The number of computers in classrooms of teachers doubled, and the number of scientific probes for data-gathering tripled. The Medtronic Foundation and Arizona Community Foundation grants account for the majority of scientific probes obtained.
Some schools reported increased enrollments.
The modeling workshops cultivated school leaders in science reform with technology, and these leaders began to expand the Modeling Method to ninth grade and junior high in five modeling workshops statewide in summer 2000 for teachers in isolated rural schools, inner city Phoenix, and suburbs.
Fourteen universities nationwide replicated our Modeling Workshops in summer 2000.

The purpose of this grant was to create a corps of leaders in school technology to support continuous improvement of science courses in their schools. Inservice physics teachers participated in 18 full days of training in summers1998 and 1999 and two days of follow-up in subsequent academic years. They improved physics pedagogy by incorporating the modeling cycle, inquiry methods, critical and creative thinking, cooperative learning, and sound use of classroom technology. They improved their physics content knowledge in mechanics by immersion in this subject during the workshops. They formed or strengthened their local physics alliance to support physics teachers professionally.

Anticipated outcomes identified in the proposal were:

for the physics teachers: expertise in the scientific use of classroom technology, increased content knowledge, better instructional strategies, and an infrastructure for lifelong professional development.
for the student population: better understanding; long-term, more students taking physics and an increased enrollment of underserved students.
for other science teachers: more familiarity with classroom technology and its appropriate use in their curricula.

All short-term outcomes were met. The project was a resounding success!

Modeling Workshops

In three to four week summer Modeling Workshops, teachers revamp their high school physics course to incorporate technology and insights of educational research. Instruction is organized into modeling cycles that engage students in model development, evaluation, and application. Students collaborate in planning and conducting experiments, use MBL probes and software to collect, organize and analyze data, and present to the class their group's experimental procedure, interpretation, and findings. Modeling Instruction is a detailed implementation of the National Science Education Standards.

The need for classroom technology; effect of two technology grants

Modeling Instruction is best implemented with computer lab stations of three students. Thus 8 to 10 student-used computers and sets of MBL probes are needed for a typical class.In surveys that we conducted of the 220 Arizona physics teachers in 1997, we found that few of them had adequate classroom technology. Most teachers had at least one or two computers (though often antiquated like Apple IIs), but they lacked laboratory interfaces, microcomputer based laboratory (MBL) probes, and software to enable the computers to be used effectively as scientific tools.

For many teachers in our program, getting probes is hard unless teachers are fortunate to have a benefactor like the Medtronic Foundation to jump-start the process by providing an incentive for their school to match funds. The results were excellent! (The story is told in final reports to the Medtronic Foundation and the Arizona Community Foundation: ASUMedtronicReport99-00.doc and AzCommFndReport1999.doc .)

THE FIRST MODELING WORKSHOP AT ASU (SUMMER 1998)

The mechanics workshop is described in detail elsewhere;see the course description and sample daily calendar for PHS 530 at we describe only specificsof the 1998 workshop.

Demographics of the 22 high school teachers who participated are:

7 teach outside the Phoenix area

5 are female

7 teach at rural/small town schools

5 teach at urban disadvantaged schools

Fifteen teachers had no previous experience with the modeling method of instruction, three had participated in pilot modeling workshops in the early 90s and were updating, and four had taken the (shorter) ASU undergraduate course, PHY480: Methods of Teaching Physics in a previous academic semester.

The total number of students taking physics in their courses was about 1600 in 65 sections. The median percentage of girls was 50%, and of economically disadvantaged minorities was 20%.
Local Eisenhower (or other) funds pledged were $7800. All but one teacher received the funds, to the best of our knowledge.
All teachers acquired e-mail and were subscribed to their listserv at ASU.
The workshop was rated outstanding and extremely useful by every participant.
Almost universally, teachers agreed that four weeks are necessary and sufficient to fully learn the modeling method. Only two teachers stated on their evaluations that they would have preferred three weeks.
The workshop leaders, Sean McKeever and Sheila Ringhiser, received universal acclaim for the high quality of their instruction.
The October visits by the workshop leaders were exceptionally innovative! Sheila Ringhiser observed Susan Poland’s classroom teaching, then they traveled to David Hill’s school and observed him. Those three then visited Mark Barner’s classroom. All said that this was valuable because each of them learned good teaching strategies and could see the teaching conditions of the others, which were quite different due to different economic situations.

Problems encountered and changes needed in future similar projects:

Local Eisenhower funds, which were intended to reimburse local teachers for housing, travel and lunches, were declined by one teacher whose school district refused to give advancement on the salary scale if local funds were used to support her in the workshop. Three other teachers reported the same policy against “double dipping”. The solution is to recommend that LEA funds be used for instructional materials for implementation.
The follow-up weekend in October was attended by 17 of the teachers. Others had conflicts: athletic coaching, a wedding, church responsibilities, and sickness. The teachers valued the weekend, for they hadn’t had time in the summer workshop to do the last unit; but a better strategy must be found to allow full participation. Some said that working on a weekend gave them no time to recuperate from the week’s work so they were exhausted. Two Saturdays in the fallshould work better.
Workshop leaders told us that, since they are peers, they feel uncomfortable about discriminating in course grades.
We need to develop strategies for building local physics alliances and training in leading school inservices. There wasn’t much time for either of these activities during the workshop, and the teachers had their plates full with learning the modeling method. Next summer the teachers will be ready to focus on these concerns.
At least three full-time weeks were needed by the project director to administer and evaluate the project.

Summary of quantitative research findings (a full report is available from Jane Jackson)

Student data: In spring 1998, teachers administered the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to their physics students to establish a baseline. All students in the 1998-99 academic year took the FCI in the first week of class. They took the FCI again in April 1999 as a posttest. All FCI results include data of 129 students of four teachers in the NAU modeling workshop, since they submitted complete data on time to be analyzed.

Results for courses of the 17 teachers who sent us all three data sets (i.e., baseline ’98 posttest and ‘98-99 pretest and posttest). (Three figures are available as print copy from Jane Jackson.)

The average student FCI posttest score was 49.4%, compared with the baseline of 41.3% in spring 1998, for over 800 students in matched courses of 17 teachers. This is a good improvement, slightly less than in our national Modeling Workshop Project.

Another way of looking at data is with the “Hake factor”, or normalized gain, g. This is defined as the actual gain divided by maximum possible gain. Thus the mean normalized gain, expressed as a percentage, is <g> = <(posttest % - pretest %)/( 100% - pretest %)>. For the courses of the 17 teachers who sent us all three data sets (i.e., their students’ baseline ‘98 posttest and ’98-‘99 pretest and posttest scores),<g>=32%, which is slightly less than for our national Modeling Workshop Project but much better than for traditional instructional methods. In 1997-1998, the normalized gain for over 800 students of the same teachers was estimated at about <g>= 21%, which we and others find to be typical nationwide for traditional physics instruction in high school, college and university. (We assume the same pretest FCI scores in 1997 as for 1998 - generally a good assumption),

FCI pretest and posttest data for students of all 22 teachers who had submitted both of these tests by May 10, 1999 are broken down by course type. Honors students achieved higher gains in understanding than students in regular/conceptual physics courses. This is to be expected because conceptual courses do not include all aspects of the force concept. Both increases were about 10 percentage points lower than those in our nationwide project. (AP data are analyzed but are not significant because only two courses were submitted.)

A good correlation is apparent between students’ gain in understanding with their teacher’s degree of implementation (comfort level) of the modeling method, as self-reported in October 1998. Thus <g>= 35% to 40% for students of teachers who reported a “good” to “very good” implementation, but <g>=26% for only “fair” implementation. This trend is in accord with the findings in our nationwide project.

Teacher data: 21 teachers at the ASU workshop took the FCI and the Mechanics Baseline Test (MBT) on the first day of the workshop. Sixteen teachers took the Views about Sciences Survey (VASS), which assesses their world view of science. For the FCI, the teachers’ median score was 93% (high of 100%, low of 40%). For the MBT, the median was 65% (high of 100%, low of 35%). On the VASS, all but two teachers exhibited an “expert” profile.

For the ASU and NAU workshops together: For the 16 teachers in rural schools, the median FCI pretest score was 80% and the median MBT was 58%. For the 22 who teach in suburban or urban schools, the median FCI was 87% and the median MBT was 77%. This shows that rural physics teachers came into the workshop with a somewhat poorer conceptual understanding of force and motion, and considerably poorer problem solving skills!

We find little correlation between a teacher’s FCI score and their students’ mean posttest FCI score.

THE SECOND MODELING WORKSHOP AT ASU (SUMMER 1999)

Nineteen high school physics teachers participated for 18 days in the Eisenhower-funded Physics Modeling Workshop in second semester content at Mountain Pointe High School in Tempe Union High School District in summer 1999. One-fifth were women or disadvantaged minorities; one-fourth teach at urban disadvantaged schools, and one-fifth are from rural schools. Fifteen returned after taking the first semester modeling workshop during the previous summer. The other four had previously learned Modeling Instruction in mechanics in an ASU course in “Methods of Teaching Physics” or in our Pilot Modeling Workshops in the early part of the decade.

Teachers had 30 hours per week of instruction plus homework. Two follow-up Saturday sessions were held in January, for a total contact time of 120 hours. The course carried four semester hours of graduate credit in physics at ASU. Expert high school physics teachers skilled in the Modeling Method, Jeffrey Hengesbach and Sean McKeever, were peer leaders.

The workshop continued the Methods of Physics Teaching course which thoroughly addresses most aspects of high school physics teaching, including integration of teaching methods with course content as it should be done in the high school classroom. [1,2,3,4] The workshop incorporated up-to-date

•results of physics education research

•best high school curriculum materials

•use of technology

•experience in collaborative learning and guidance.

The first few days were devoted to review and discussion of the experience of all participants in teaching mechanics by the modeling method. To facilitate this, they brought a written account of their own experience to the workshop, including difficulties, surprises, rewards and disappointments. After general discussion, participants divided into groups to prepare written reports on conclusions of the review. This analysis has two purposes: (1) To make each teacher explicitly aware of his/her own teaching practice and how it compares with the modeling method; (2) To identify pedagogical problems that need more work, either to improve the whole approach or to help individual teachers.

After this "debriefing" and further discussion of the modeling method, teachers were presented with exemplary curriculum materials and organized into action research teams (ARTs) to review and refine exemplary materials in current electricity (model-adapted CASTLE curriculum), electricity (microscopic model), and underpinnings. The goal was to work the best features of software and curricular materials into our modeling units. Teachers were encouraged to incorporate alternative materials and ideas from their own experience. They (a) analyzed models implicit in the materials, and (b) organized the materials into coherent modeling cycles. Each team prepared and presented a two-day mini-workshop to the rest of the teachers outlining the goals, underlying models, and instructional design that are essential for students to develop a coherent understanding of the material. The entire class critiqued, evaluated and discussed how to organize the units into a complete curriculum.

Modeling workshops are designed to engage teachers in collaborative critique and redesign of the physics curriculum. The teachers themselves must assume responsibility for continuing the cycle of collaborative testing and design that is essential to deep and lasting educational reform. They need infrastructure to support them in this, including teacher alliances, partnerships with the university physics department, and electronic networking. Accordingly, ways to organize and strengthen local physics alliances were addressed in the workshop. All participants continue to be subscribed to a modeling instruction listserv list at Arizona State University.