TA REVIEW OF PHYSICS 1 LABS / SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENTS June 2001

Physics 1A-B-C Week 10 Lab TA Instructions

Thank-You!

Thank you all for your dedication and help during this first large-scale implementation of the new Physics 1-series labs. Your jobs required all of you to meet with the many challenges of learning and following a new instructional paradigm, while simultaneously having to work from material that was itself facing its first real-world test. Based on the preliminary student-assessments that have been coming-in, your work has been exemplary, and we enthusiastically congratulate you on your accomplishments and contributions.

Outline of Week 10

For those of you who have volunteered to continue working on the lab program during Week 10, we will be using that time to have each of you incorporate your experiences with the labs into a collection of documents which will help future TAs to do their jobs better, as well as help us find out where we need to modify the structure of the labs. This will be an unprecedented opportunity for you to have a real and continued impact on the physics curriculum.

Your lab instructor will assign you to teams of at least two persons. Each team will have the responsibility of accomplishing three goals:

Completing the Lab-Specific TA Teaching Notes for each assigned lab.

Completing the Comments on the Lab, and Lab Manuals for each assigned lab.

Writing up the lab as a perfect student would. This need not be done in a lab notebook. We will provide suitable paper for graphs etc.

The forms you need are attached to this note. Please fill in the forms as you go, one form per TA per lab. Please be sure to label the forms with the lab (eg 1A, week 1, popcorn), your name and date. Lab equipment will be available in your lab rooms for you to set-up and use to help you with this process.

Specific Instructions about completing the forms:

I. The Lab-Specific TA Teaching Notes (page 1)will be used to help future TAs to do their jobs better. We need your experiences here. We intend to take what your write and pass it directly-on as training to future TAs, so write something that you would have liked for someone to have told you (future TAs will be reading your own words here, so write for them. Please fill-out these sections:

Pre-Lab Homework Issues
For this section, carefully consider each of the homework problems for the lab. If there is something that a future TA should have a “heads-up” about, write it down. Also include any innovative suggestions that you have about how a TA could best help their students with the homework.

Instructional Issues
The biggest part of the lab is the lab itself. We want the students to take-away as much as they possibly can from their time in the lab. As you know, the way that they really do this is by personal discovery – just giving them the answers or telling them exactly what they should do only makes for good robots and cheats understanding. There is an art to teaching, and the TAs that follow you can benefit from what you’ve learned and the ideas that you’ve developed.
In this section, draw attention to those parts of the lab that were especially challenging, and write-down for future TAs your suggestions of how to handle the problems that they might run-into. This will be the most important and useful part of this work, so please take your time to address as many issues as you can and make a good product.

II. The TA Post-Lab Evaluation Form (Lab manuals, equipment etc, pages 2&3) will be used to help us modify the laboratory curriculum for next quarter. Again, we need your experiences and comments here to help us rewrite where appropriate and to improve the educational experience.

Lab Course:
Lab Title:
Today's Date:
Revised By:

Please read page 4 before starting this. It explains the intent of asking you to do this work. We need and value your comments.

PART I: PRE-LAB CHECKLIST

Experimental Equipment Checklist (Make sure your labs have the necessary equipment):

Per-Workbench Apparatus Needed / Qty. per setup
Enrichment Apparatus Needed / Qty.
Miscellaneous Useful Materials / Qty.

PART II: IN-LAB INSTRUCTION ISSUES

Pre-Lab Homework Issues (Homework #, Issues, Instructional Suggestions):

Instructional Issues (Lab Procedure, Issues, Instructional Suggestions):

Lab Manuals

  1. Content-assessment of the lab manual.

(1)Were the pre-lab homeworks helpful in preparing the students for the lab? If not, why not? Any suggestions for modifications that would make them more helpful?
(Ans:)

(2)Was the amount of material covered too much, too little, or about right? What would you add to or delete from the lab manual?
(Ans:)

  1. Structure and organization of lab manual.

(1)Did the students find the lab manual to be well-organized and easy to understand? If not, how do you think it can it be improved?
(Ans:)

  1. Typography

(1) Red-mark a copy of the lab manual with any errors you may have found (e.g., typos, useage, etc.), along with any suggestions you may have for re-wording. Give your red-marked copy to your lab instructor at your next TA training session.

Equipment and Resources

  1. Adequacy of available equipment.

(1)Were the available lab setups adequate for the experiments performed? If not, why not?
(Ans:)

(2)Did you experience any equipment failures? If so, what failed and how?
(Ans:)

(3)Do you have any suggestions for improvements or additions to the lab equipment?
(Ans:)

Instructional Issues

  1. Student preparedness for the lab.

(1)How well was lecture coordinated with this lab?
(Ans:)

(2)What concepts were most difficult for the students? What are your suggestions for addressing these issues?
(Ans:)

(3)How well did the students do on the prelab homework? Assess difficulties, if any, for each prelab problem.
(Ans:)

  1. Experimental time constraints.

(1)Assess time-constraints for each experimental procedure. Was there enough time, or too little? What are your suggestions for improving on the time constraints?
(Ans:)

  1. Instructional time constraints

(1)Was there enough instructional time available to adequately help students with conceptual issues as well as experimental difficulties? Your suggestions for improvement?
(Ans:)

  1. Instructional difficulties and suggestions for presentation.

(1) Describe any instructional difficulties that you had while attempting to address students’ questions about the experiements and the subject matter. Did you discover any novel or effective ways to address these issues?
(Ans:)

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