Research-based tutorials - worksheets of carefully ordered questions and activities that engage small groups of students in active learning - produce large gains in physics students' understanding of core concepts. However, implementation at another institution is often difficult. Even when implementation goes smoothly, most students continue to think of physics as disconnected facts and formulas, and of learning physics largely as memorizing information.
To address these issues, a team of researchers and curriculum developers is refining, testing at a wide variety of institutions, and disseminating a set of tutorials that has proven effective locally at helping to foster conceptual development and favorable changes in students' views about how to learn physics. The five tutorials cover electrostatic forces, electric fields, electric potential, and two topics from the end of a typical first-semester course (torque and wave pulse propagation). They are provided as open-source, electronic documents, so that a professor can modify them for his or her curriculum and student population. To ease implementation and support productive modifications, each tutorial is linked to an instructor's guide that includes the research base and rationale underlying the tutorial, common student difficulties and also common productive student ideas on which to build, section-by-section teaching tips, and other features. To assist with teaching assistant (TA) professional development, the materials also include annotated video clips of students using the tutorials. Many video clips are embedded into video workshops, lesson plans designed for TA seminars and similar settings. Each video workshop highlights key conceptual issues and helps TAs become better at interpreting students' reasoning - a crucial teaching skill in an active-learning format. Preliminary work on these and other tutorials make such development a promising way for the tutorials to be widely used successfully.
Intellectual merit: The team takes an integrated approach to curriculum and professional development, by providing materials that facilitate their own implementation. Also, the tutorials and accompanying instructor materials are animated by a theoretical framework for describing cognition, a framework that the Physics Education Research Group has developed and continues to develop in a series of research projects.
Broader impact: The TA/faculty development and implementation resources, combined with the adaptability of the tutorials, help bring collaborative active learning to more physics courses. This adaptability is particularly important in light of recent results showing that even well-tested materials taught by exemplary instructors do not always work well when used in unmodified form with students from very different backgrounds.
