Intellectual Merit: This project supports and expands ongoing efforts at Oregon State University, Lane Community College and Linn-Benton Community College to promote department-wide, team-based, curricular reform. This is called second generational reform because the teams are making coherent choices in order to adapt existing Physics Education Research (PER)-based materials for clearly-defined goals tailored to the specific needs of students in Oregon, both as they transfer between institutions and as they move into the upper division. These teams are being used to choose both content and skill-based goals, such as how deeply to address Gauss' law, and how much time to spend on graphical reasoning. The teams also address scaffolding and continuity issues, and are creating capstone experiences that will be common at the participating institutions.
The faculty at Oregon State University build on experience with the development of the Paradigms in Physics program, a holistic upper-division physics reform effort. When implementing a new curriculum, there is need for each instructor to have deep knowledge of how to implement the activities, which requires pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). PCK is the teacher knowledge that bridges the gap between understanding the content and knowing good teaching practice, and it includes knowing how students will engage with content, and the why's and how's of specific teaching practices in a discipline. A crucial by-product of team-based reform is the sharing and building of community-wide PCK. A national advisory committee provides formative feedback and discussion.
Broader Impacts: There is a national need for consistent curricula used by both the state universities and community colleges as well as a need for a model that addresses feasibility and sustainability for large-scale reform. The example of multi-institutional team-based curricular reform and building shared PCK provides a strong model for institutions nationwide to implement coordinated, holistic, curricular reform. This model also addresses the difficulty of long-term sustainability, promoting shared PCK among people rotating in and out of teaching duties.
This NSF project started as a collaboration between physics professors adn instructors at Oregon State University and two local community colleges: Lane Community College and Linn Benton Community College. The purpose of the collaboration was to share and document pedagogical content knowledge helpful for the teaching of introductory physics, and to share and document activities that we each found particularly useful in our classrooms. The secondary purpose was to help align goals and methdologies (classroom norms) between the institutions since many students transfer from the community colleges to the state university, and either join mid-way into the introductory physics sequence, or join at the middle-division level with their first courses specific to the physics major. The basic methodology we set up was to have a posdoctoral assistant who observed coruses taught by each of the nine participating faculty members, documenting activities, interesting classroom moments, and conducting faculty interviews about goals and implementation. The general purpose of this postdoc was to a) document what was happening in the classes, and b) discourse with the faculty to have goals and pedagogical content knowledge be explicitly stated. The participating faculty, project investigator, external evaluator, and postdoc then met for multiple half-week workshops during each summer of the project to share activities with each other. We initially had a goal of documenting activities that could be utilized by new or part-time instructors who teach sections of these courses at these institutions. We desired to document the activities in such a way that they could be implemented with the desired goals and background pedagogical content knowledge in mind. As we began doing this process it became obvious to the participants that: a) the process of discussing activities was more helpful than having each others activities, b) we would not want new or part-time instructors to use activities without being able to engage in such discussions, and c) that alignment of goals and sharing of pedagogical content knowledge was both something that the community discourse model facilitated well, and something that would not serve us to aim to have complete overlap. Each faculty member has their own strengths and focus and while we grew our own practice and perspective hearing from others, we would not do well to try to all use the same methodology, or implement activities identically. As part of our project, we had detailed discussions on goals and a range of assessment types (including both formative and summative). Participants reported that these discussions were very helpful when in context of specific physics areas or specific activities, but that the context or activity was secondary. The context allowed for specificity and delving into details that we might otherwise miss (such as how a particular content ties into what students do in a junior year course), but the goals and assessments themselves were what we shifted within our own teaching practices. The participants all highly valued the project and thought the model of having a postdoc to discourse with about their particular course was invaluable. Participants reported that these discussions helped them prepare for the summer cohort meetings. Participants also reported that the summer cohorts were the single most valuable faculty development they had participated in. Other findings include observing a shift from a lack of seeing a common viewpoint between some participants to a respect for both the difference and similarities of these viewpoints by the second summer of meetings. Participants used an expanding set of shared vocabulary showing some shared pedagogical content knowledge, and expressed gaining a much more expansive view of particular core concepts such as assessment. This project resulted in two conference proceedings, several conference presentations, two smaller research projects (including additional funding), and professional development of a total of 11 faculty members.
