Active Learning challenges conventions of physics

Enabled by the University-wide Gateway Science Initiative, the physics department has begun offering an Active Learning (AL) variant of General Physics I. It is now in its second year of operation. The course was developed in part through site visits to other universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and North Carolina State University. The class is heavily modeled on MIT’s Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) physics courses.

The class meets in Bloomberg 478, which was renovated prior to the fall 2013 semester to accommodate the needs of the new course. The renovations included 10 round tables for student seating, each with a built-in, button-activated microphone. Also added were five flat screen monitors and two projectors. These were arranged around the perimeter of the room to display presentations and problems so that they can be viewed from seats around the tables. The room also contains continuous whiteboard space along its walls.

Professor Robert Leheny teaches the course during the fall semester, and Professor Petar Maksimovic plans to take over in the spring.

The AL course uses an online system called SmartPhysics for both pre-lecture preparation and homework assignments. Students are expected to view an animated pre-lecture sequence before coming to class while completing checkpoint questions on the content. These questions give students feedback on their answers, including identifying common errors.

Class time is devoted to a brief review of the content in the pre-lecture sequence, class-wide concept questions conducted using clickers and small group exercises done on handouts or the whiteboards. During class-wide discussions, students use the microphones at their tables to speak to the class.

Homework is also conducted through SmartPhysics. Students have 10 chances to enter the correct multiple choice or numeric answer for a given part of a question. The system will alert students if they commit common errors, such as using the wrong given value or being off by a factor of 10. Two of the questions are due each week as written problems.

Many students thought that group work was a valuable part of the AL course.

“Out of 80 people in a class, there’s bound to be many people who aren’t going to get it, and there are bound to be people who are going to get it,” freshman Will Scerbo said. “Group work helps people teach each other as opposed to simply sitting there.”

Chistine Konicki, a sophomore at MIT, concurred.

“The best part of the TEAL physics was actually the fact that they put several kids at a table together so that they could reason through concept questions and group problems together and collaborate,” Konicki wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “I made quite a few friends because of how closely we had to work together during TEAL sessions.”

Other students were concerned about the group dynamic.

“If we do [a problem] in a group, sometimes I won’t understand how another person is doing it,” freshman Ashley Xie wrote in an email to The News-Letter.

Leheny said that the use of SmartPhysics is important to facilitating the class discussion.

“The idea is to flip the classroom so you do that first exposure to [the] material at home,” Leheny said. “You use the class time more effectively, where we can interact in a way where it’s not just a one-way flow of communication. But to have that use of class time, you need to show up having heard of the material. I heard it when I was a student, and I used to say it when I was teaching other courses: for decades physics teachers have told students, ‘Read the textbook before you come to class.’ And it’s never happened in the history of physics.”

Leheny explained that the new teaching system exposes students to the lecture material more thoroughly before they come to class.

“What I think is true is that you guys as students will watch the pre-lectures... Based on the data, there are some students in the class who whip through it pretty quickly, skip along and get to the checkpoints. But most students are watching it at least in real time. If it’s 25 minutes, they’re spending 25 minutes. Many students are spending more time, so they’re rewatching things. Before the exams you see some people watching three or four times. It works in a way that asking students to read the textbook would never work,” Leheny said.

Sophomore Sasha Maraj spoke about her use of the SmartPhysics program.

“I like the pre-lectures, because you can rewind and fast forward. I like the online questions; I like how they tell you, ‘Oh, you forgot something,’ or maybe you’re wrong by a magnitude of 10 or something. So I like that feedback because it’s easier than just saying, ‘No, you’re wrong’ when it could just be a decimal.”

Many students have previous exposure to physics, so the value of the pre-lectures varies based on the background that students have.

“I don’t really watch the pre-lectures because I learned most of the material in this class last year, but I do the exercises. For next semester, because I’ve never taken electricity and magnetism with calculus, I will be watching those pre-lectures, definitely,” Scerbo said.

Other students commented on the effect of class size and teaching assistants (TAs).

“There were some negative aspects in both [physics] classes [at MIT] due to the inclusion of TEAL,” Konicki wrote. “First, the classes were really large (my table was meant to have only 8 students but wound up with 13 crammed in together), and I felt that there weren’t enough TAs around to compensate. I’ve also found that in large classes, the lack of closeness with your instructor makes it harder to ask questions.”

Maraj spoke about the importance of having accessible TAs in the physics course at Hopkins.

“I really like that they have the TAs there to help you. I was in physics for [biology majors], actually, before I switched over, and I thought that it was a really good way to approach it, because it’s a problem-based class. It’s an applicable science. I think it’s a more effective way to learn because you have people right there.”

Konicki’s TEAL class had roughly 130 students; the Hopkins AL class has 76 enrolled students.

The course is graded on an absolute scale. Leheny said this is important given the structure of the course and is aimed at preventing competition.

“Particularly in a class like ours where students are working together, you want the class to have a collegial atmosphere and not a competitive atmosphere. You can imagine if you’re grading on a curve, and you’re sitting there spending one class after another helping a student in your group learn the material, you’re going to say, ‘This is self-defeating.’”

Some have credited the AL teaching style with helping improve student group learning. When the TEAL course was first offered at MIT, engineering faculty supported it as a way to introduce students to group work.

“They didn’t like working in groups at MIT, apparently. There was a lot of pushback from the students that actually got the level of the president hearing about it. One... thing that saved them is the engineering faculty came out and said, ‘No, this is great that you have the students working in groups, because you’re breaking them in for us,’” Leheny said. “The engineering faculty are saying [that] this is getting students used to the idea that figuring out how to work productively in a group is an important skill.”

The AL course is an extension of the physics department’s efforts to introduce more peer engagement into introductory physics courses.

“The name in the course is Active Learning, but I consider that a little bit of a misnomer in the sense that it’s an unfair distinction with the main course,” Leheny said. “People have developed, and you can pursue an Active Learning type format in a lecture hall. You have the clickers, you can have class-wide discussions and you can have students talk to their neighbors.

“What our class is recognizing is that if you think that’s a good way of learning physics, you can do it a lot better with students not all sitting in an auditorium... Professor David Neufeld, when he was teaching 101 [the traditional course], had really embraced that idea. He was using the clickers very heavily, and there was almost no lecturing, similar to our [AL] class.”

The support of the Gateway Sciences Initiative, started in 2011 by then-Provost Lloyd Minor, was important to these efforts.

“We got the wherewithal to do it based on the support we got from the provost’s office in the Gateway Science Initiative, and that same initiative also... helped pay for the classroom that we use, [including] all the whiteboards and the tables and the monitors,” Leheny said.

The course is showing recognizable signs of success, according to Leheny.

“Last year, when Professor Neufeld was teaching, we actually gave the same exams in 101 [traditional physics] and 107 [AL] to really test this idea of the value of the new class,” Leheny said. “The students in 107 did a little bit better, not dramatically better. That was the first time I was teaching it, so the students might do a little better this year. But we’re not running that experiment this year.”