Zollman, Murphy, Stevens, Christel: GIREP-EPEC Plenary 2009

Web-based Pedagogical Assistance for Under-prepared Teachers of Physics Slides Paper

Dean Zollman & Sytil Murphy
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506; USA

Scott Stevens, & Michael Christel, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 152319 USA

Recently President Obama noted a serious concern about secondary science education in the United States. “Yet in high schools, more than 20 percent of students in math and more than 60 percent of students in chemistry and physics are taught by teachers without expertise in these fields.“ This problem is not new, so several years ago we begin a Web-based effort to address it. The Physics Teaching Web Advisory (Pathway) is an effort to demonstrate the ability to address pedagogical issues of many physics teachers via the Web. Pathway’s “Synthetic Interviews” are a unique way to engage inexperienced teachers in a natural language dialog about effective teaching of physics. These virtual conversations and related video materials are now providing pre-service and out-of-field in-service teachers with much needed professional development, and well-prepared teachers with new perspectives on teaching physics. The database is a growing digital library and now contains about 6,000 different recorded answers and over 10,000 question/answer pairs. An additional component is a collection of videos which can be used directly in the classroom. This collection includes both professional and teacher-produced videos. Unlike YouTube they are screened for usefulness before posting, but also will soon take advantage of the vast resources on YouTube and other similar sites. Pathway is available at http://www.physicspathway.org

Supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants 0455772 & 0455813.