- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1758501
- First Name Earl
- Last Name Legleiter
- Institution Fort Hays State University
- Role/Position Co-PI
- Proposal Type Workshop
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics STEM content and/or convergent skills development
Goals
Experience a thinking classroom to make sense of a phenomena that can be used with students and learn how to implement it in their teaching. Learn how students can develop and use scientific models as an instructional strategy.
Evidence
1 Research has shown that active learning pedagogies, such as Modeling Instruction, are more effective than traditional lecture-based approaches 2. At Florida International University, where Modeling Instruction has been practiced for 15 years, the success is evident: o Conceptual Understanding: Students in Modeling Instruction courses exhibit a 14% difference in conceptual understanding compared to lecture courses (measured by standardized diagnostics). o Odds of Success: Modeling Instruction students have 6.73 times greater odds of success. o Physics Majors: Those who become physics majors after Modeling Instruction perform equally well in upper-level programs compared to lecture students.
Proposal
Sense making in a science class has the expectation that students think. This workshop will engage participants in a thinking classroom in which thinking to make sense of a phenomena is the norm, and students are discouraged from slacking, stalling, mimicking, and faking their way through the physics content. The goal of a thinking classroom is to build engaged students that are willing to think about any task. Thinking classroom practices create the optimal conditions for learner-centered, student-owned science thinking and learning, and have the power to transform physics classrooms. Participants will engage in thinking classroom by developing and using a constant velocity particle model by: •Observing a constant velocity toy car moving across the floor, •Recording and summarizing their observations of the car, •Developing a driving question board about their observations, •Designing an experiment that could answer their questions, •Working in small groups to make sense of the model and apply it to a new situation using a thinking task, •Discussing in a whole group a consensus model for any particle moving with a constant velocity, •Examine the pedagogy that led to student thinking and sense making of the scientific model.
