This application addresses broad Challenge Area (12) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education (STEM) and specific Challenge Topic 12-OD-104: Innovative Approaches to STEM Education. One of the central missions of the STEM curriculum is the teaching of problem solving skills. This goal is one of the major reasons that introductory college physics is often required of majors in chemistry, biology, premed and other health science majors. Unfortunately, research literature shows that ? Most students in introductory physics courses use novice techniques to solve problems [5, 17] ? Over 90% of problems in even reformed introductory college physics textbooks enable novice-like problem solving approaches rather than encouraging expert-like ones [19] ? Most introductory courses reduce students'general expertise and their confidence in their own problem solving ability [7, 8]. Cognitive psychologists showed in the early '80's that experts approach problem solving in a qualitatively different way from beginners (novices) [5]. Several pedagogies have been developed to teach expert characteristics [9, 10, 20-23], among the best being Modeling Instruction. Introduced in 1995, Modeling Instruction was used by 6% of high school physics teachers in 2005 and has continued to grow in popularity since [24]. Unfortunately, colleges lack the K-12 emphasis on keeping teachers'teaching skills current and often teach physics in a large-lecture format which precludes implementation of Modeling Instruction. The college-level modeling initiative, Remodeling University Physics, has not been widely adopted [25]. The central goal of this application is to evaluate whether elements of a new pedagogical approach to problem solving success can be integrated into an existing introductory college course without disruption of the course format or syllabus. Based on ideas from modeling instruction, Modeling Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS) is designed specifically to help students learn expert problem solving habits within the framework and syllabus of an existing introductory course. The MAPS pedagogy was initially deployed and further developed in a very successful three-week mechanics review course taught in January 2009. The review raised test scores on MIT exam problems (which are not solvable by plug and chug novice methods) by over one standard deviation, gave unprecedented gains on most categories of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), and dramatically increased students'problem solving confidence. To achieve this objective we have to address several research questions: ? How effectively can we integrate MAPS into MIT's traditional introductory course? ? Can we find an improved measure of expertness by combining aspects of the CLASS survey, the MIT exam problems and the Mechanics Baseline Test into a new expert inventory (that we're developing with NSF support)? ? How effective are the instructional materials that we are developing to teach MAPS pedagogy? ? Is our open source WikiTextBook supplement accessible to students and successful as measured by the above instruments? Building on the success of our review course and the materials developed for it, we have laid the groundwork to address our central question: can we demonstrate that our MAPS pedagogy can increase the expertise of students when used as a supplement in a traditional introductory course? If we learn how to succeed at this, we will have a real chance to foster expert problem solving skills across a wide range of introductory courses. Public Health Relevance: The project we describe in this application seeks to develop and evaluate a physics pedagogy that instructs students away from solving problems through the novice methods of equation hunting or memorization. We are developing and testing a pedagogy that promises to help students develop a universal approach to scientific problems that begins with a structured idealization of the situation and leads to an exploration of the connection between the details of the idealization employed and the principles applied in the solution of the problem. This goal is relevant to public health because physics is a required element of the curriculum for premedical and other health science students and because it constitutes progress toward meeting the recommendation of the 2004 Working Group on Admissions Requirements for the Harvard Medical School that the """"""""experimental basis of ideas, not rote recitation of principles, should be emphasized in the undergraduate science curriculum."""""""" [1]
The project we describe in this application seeks to develop and evaluate a physics pedagogy that instructs students away from solving problems through the novice methods of equation hunting or memorization. We are developing and testing a pedagogy that promises to help students develop a universal approach to scientific problems that begins with a structured idealization of the situation and leads to an exploration of the connection between the details of the idealization employed and the principles applied in the solution of the problem. This goal is relevant to public health because physics is a required element of the curriculum for premedical and other health science students and because it constitutes progress toward meeting the recommendation of the 2004 Working Group on Admissions Requirements for the Harvard Medical School that the experimental basis of ideas, not rote recitation of principles, should be emphasized in the undergraduate science curriculum. [1]
