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.

Hrepic, Zollman, Rebello: Journal of Science Education and Technology (2007)

Comparing Students’ and Experts’ Understanding
of the Content of a Lecture
Zdeslav Hrepic, Dean A. Zollman, and N. Sanjay Rebello Journal of Science Education and Technology 16, 213-224 (2007)

In spite of advances in physics pedagogy, the lecture is by far the most widely used format of instruction. We investigated students’ understanding and perceptions of the content delivered during a physics lecture. A group of experts (physics instructors) also participated in the study as a reference for the comparison. During the study, all participants responded to a written conceptual survey on sound propagation. Next, they looked for answers to the survey questions in a videotaped lecture by a nationally known teacher. As they viewed the lecture, they indicated instances, if any, in which the survey questions were answered during the lecture. They also wrote down (and if needed, later explained) the answer, which they perceived was given by the instructor in the video lecture. Students who participated in the study were enrolled in a conceptual physics course and had already covered the topic in class before the study. We discuss and compare students’ and experts’ responses to the survey questions before and after the lecture.

Colicchia, Hopf, Wiesner, Zollman: The Physics Teacher (2008)

Pinhole Glasses
Giuseppe Colicchia, Martin Hopf, Hartmut Wiesner, Physics Education, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany & Dean Zollman, Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, The Physics Teacher 46, 26-27 (2008)

Eye aberrations are commonly corrected by lenses that restore vision by altering rays before they pass through the cornea. Some modern promoters claim that pinhole glasses are better
than conventional lenses in correcting all kinds of refractive defects such as myopia (nearsighted), hyperopia (farsighted), astigmatisms, and presbyopia. Do pinhole glasses really give better vision? Some ways to use this question for motivation in teaching optics have been discussed.1 For this column we include a series of experiments that students can complete using a model of the eye and demonstrate issues related to pinhole vision correction.