A. Problems Motivating JJC Faculty to Try Computer-Dependent Learning Strategies.
Two key problems motivated the Joliet science faculty members to begin using what Curt calls "the second generation" of computer technology:
- student learning was low (that is, they were not developing a conceptual understanding of course topics and materials); and
- student engagement was weak.
Of foremost concern to Curt and his colleagues was the problem that students were not developing a real understanding of the material being taught; in other words, they just weren't "getting it." The JJC
bricoleursa
suggested different reasons for this.
Curt pointed out, for example, a general dissatisfaction with the lecture method of teaching: "Lecture doesn't necessarily transmit any information. For a long time I've been somewhat aware of students' difficulty in understanding physics, and I became convinced that no matter how much I told them the right answer, they still didn't pick it up--that becoming a better lecturer does not have a better impact on them."
Geoff White, a computer lab technician who works with Curt, observed how students come in with mental habits, perhaps learned in previous courses and other life experiences, that
prevent them from understanding what science really is.2
For example, the students often "don't want to predict," Geoff said. "For me, making predictions and coming back to verify them is the crux of science. If they're not catching that, then they're missing a lot of what science is."
Geoff White is the Physical Science Lab Supervisor for the JJC Department of Natural Resources. He is responsible for maintaining the lab equipment for chemistry and physics courses.
(HERE LINK) Marie Wolff, Curt's chemistry colleague, noted that before she implemented such teaching techniques as guided inquiry or group work, students had difficulty comprehending basic reading assignments. "The students didn't read with a purpose," she commented, and consequently "they would feel swamped by this reading and would complain about the book being hard to read and not understandable."
Even the students expressed similar concerns about not "getting it." One explained, "[In typical courses, the lectures] and books tell us how to do physics problems, but they don't tell us what we're doing. We don't have a clue what we're doing."
So what did Curt do about this concern that students were not really understanding physics? First, he looked around, nationally, and found that his students' failure to learn in the way that he and his colleagues--and for that matter, his students themselves--want is far from unique to JJC.d This insight led Curt to get engaged with a growing national network of physics educators who are experimenting--with significant successes--with new ways of achieving their goals for introductory physics students.
The faculty and the students interviewed at JJC also expressed concern about low-level student engagement. Marie articulated the idea that students these days are different--an idea that
we've all heard faculty express in conversations recently.
3 She believes that the media really are changing students' attention span and that this affects the way
they respond in their academic courses.e
The students we interviewed gave us different reasons why student engagement might be a problem. One of the students in Curt's Engineering Physics course explained, in so many words, that students are very strategic and will do just what they have to, and only at a pace that works for them, in order to get a degree. "A lot of people need Physics 1... to complete a degree," this student noted, "[but] aren't really interested in the class."
The students in the Basic Physics course further explained that students lose their will to get deeply engaged in courses when they experience an intimidation barrier. "The class is two hours long and we do a lot of labs," noted one student, "so people were just intimidated by long sessions that meet only twice a week. People get
turned off by that."4
Fortunately, Marie and her JJC colleagues are not folks who merely observe these changes in students' values and behaviors. They thought through their goals and began using active learning strategies--whether enabled by computers or not--to achieve these goals. And like so many other science faculty across the nation who have begun using these methods, they found that these new strategies are energizing not only their students, but themselves as well.
B. Learning Goals the JJC Faculty Seek to Achieve.
The specific learning strategies employed by the JJC bricoleurs were strongly influenced by their goals for student learning. In particular, they wanted students to:
- develop real conceptual understanding of the material presented;
- develop insight into how scientists "know what they know;"
- develop analytical and problem-solving skills;
- develop greater awareness of technical terms.
(HERE LINK) Bill Hogan, Curt's physics colleague, stepped back from the particulars and gave us a "big picture" answer to our question about goals for student learning. He wants to develop in students a lasting interest in physics:
My big goal is to contribute to a person's education in a way that makes a difference. In other words, if my contribution is a significant one, it goes way beyond this semester. It is going to last, it is going to inspire the students, give them a foundation or basis for being interested and for understanding these topics.
Like educators everywhere, the bricoleurs at JJC want to foster
deep learning and life-long learning skills in their students.5 They want to challenge students to think about science analytically, to develop thought processes that enable them to connect the classroom world to the real world, and to build a "foundation" that will endure "far beyond one semester."
For an in-depth discussion of teaching goals, see Getting Students to Make the Connection: A Discussion of Curt's Teaching Goals.
Creating the Learning Environment
The JJC bricoleurs are among the growing number of faculty who are designing their courses as
learning environmentsf.
To meaningfully examine these learning environments, we first consider the relationships between the problems and the goals that motivate the
bricoleursa
to create alternative learning environments:
The JJC bricoleurs are able to choose from an array of learning activities to achieve these goals. Their specific choices are, in general, guided by two underlying teaching principles:
The JJC faculty give highest priority to the first teaching principle--shift major responsibility for learning from the faculty to the students. This entails actively engaging students in a set of mental processes that allow the students to restructure and add to what they already know. The JJC bricoleurs effect such processes using curricula based on "predict-observe-explain" or "elicit-confront-resolve" (a variation of predict-observe-explain) models.
That the JJC faculty are very committed to the second teaching principle--enable learning to occur in diverse ways--is evident in their decision to provide various ways of learning in each course. This principle is important to them because it helps "level the playing field" for students who may have a high capacity to learn, but who are not inclined to learn by listening to and reading largely abstract material. As Bill Hogan puts it, these are the students who are "learning because of the things we do."
The JJC bricoleurs have not only chosen a set of introductory principles that they believe are most important for their students to understand (as exhibited by their course syllabi). They have also chosen a set of learning activities that "weave together"--that is, that work synergistically--to achieve their goals for student learning (see Learning Goals the JCC Faculty Seek to Achieve). As with all the case studies appearing in the LT2 site, the activities are organized into three categories:
- Computer-dependent activities that faculty believe simply would not be possible, or at least not feasible, without computers.
- Computer-improved activities that faculty believe work incrementally better with technology but can still be implemented without it. (The JJC faculty did not give us examples of this type of activity.)
- Computer-independent activities that can be done without technology.
The hope is that [the computer work we are doing now] will feed nicely into how I am interacting with the students and how the students are interacting with each other, even when we are not in lab... that these parallel activities will feed into each other.... Now, I'm not sure if the technology, in and of itself, is essential to start doing this "elicit, confront, resolve" approach. But it might be essential. It's not the only reason it works, but the technology allows us to do it, and this new way carries over into the rest of our class.
--Curt Hieggelke
Below, we provide information on the synergistic set of learning activities that the JJC bricoleurs use to create their effective learning environments.
A. Computer-Dependent Learning Activities
The JJC faculty employ three learning activities in ways that would not be possible without what Curt calls the "new generation of computer technologies that demand active engagement of the students." These activities are:
- Hands-on experiments (real-time hands-on acquisition and analysis of data using electronic probes, and computer interfaces to provide connections to real-world events). The instructors require the students to undertake hands-on experiments in which they use electronic probes or other electronic input devices, such as video cameras, to gather data. Students then feed this data into computers, where it is converted into digital format. Students then use graphical visualization software to make sense of the data they are analyzing.
- Visualization, graphical representation, and simulation. Once students understand the relationship between the data-gathering and analysis activities, the JJC faculty can provide their students with software-enabled exercises that help them visualize, graphically represent, and simulate the principles at work in physical systems.
- Interactive Lecture Demonstrations
(ILD).6
ILD activities depend on both a computer-sensor projection system and the fact that students have begun to develop, through the hands-on experiments, an understanding of the relationship between data-gathering and analysis activities. The computer-sensor projection system allows all the students to observe the graphs being generated while a professor carries out a demonstration. Throughout, the professor engages the class by asking students to predict what's going to happen to the graphs on screen. Students then watch what actually happens and are asked to explain what happened and why.
(See We can do things with a computer that years ago took hours to do: Faculty Discuss Computer-Dependent Learning Activities.)
I read it, and then I see it, and then I know it.
--Joan, Basic Physics Student
| Students running an experiment and capturing it on video
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For Joan, and for other students, these computer-dependent activities provide clear illustrations of concepts that might remain murky if the students were to rely solely on "reading the book and answering questions." The students we talked with explained how even the most mundane activities they took part in outside of class reminded them of concepts they'd learned in their physics labs. For years, science teachers have been assigning hands-on experiments--with and without the help of computers--in an effort to "convince students that what we talk about in class is true" and to force them to "predict, observe and explain" the data with which they're presented. As science students and faculty from Joliet explain, however, the effectiveness of such experiments has greatly increased since instructors have begun using computers in a "second generation" way.
(See The labs are incredible, absolutely incredible: Students Discuss Computer-Dependent Learning Activities.)
B. Computer-Independent Learning Activities
The JJC bricoleurs do not rely solely on computer-dependent activities, of course. They also incorporate activities that are computer-independent: primarily,
formative assessmentc
and group work/guided discussion. Throughout, we pay attention to how the faculty synergistically integrate all their learning activities.
1. Formative Assessment
Curt places great importance on the use of formative assessment tools as learning activities. He believes that these activities are critical in directly fostering learning and in providing faculty the information about student learning that instructors need in order to constantly adjust and improve their teaching strategies. The formative assessment activities Curt uses fall into two general groups: pre-/post-tests that have been developed recently by physics faculty around the nation and a set of activities that he calls "Tasks Inspired by Physics Education Research" (TIPERs).
Pre-/Post-tests
To be sure, Curt uses these pre-/post-tests for both "formative" and "summative" purposes (Glossary). When he uses them formatively, his purposes are to:
- foster learning by forcing students to "really think" and making them "hungry to know;"
- provide instructors with information about student knowledge that they can use to fine-tune their teaching.
Importantly, Curt and other faculty who use these formative assessment activities include them only sparingly in their course grading scheme: the "hungry to know" state of mind requires a low stakes environment, one in which it is safe to make mistakes.
(For specific examples of assessment activities, see Resource D, Pre- and Post-tests Used by Curt for Formative Assessment.
Who is Curt Hieggelke?
A "tekkie" from way back, physicist Curt Hieggelke has transformed his introductory physics courses at Joliet Junior College into meaningful and exciting learning experiences for his students--whether they are aspiring engineers, scientists, health professionals, or non-science majors. Key to his success is the use of computer-based labs that actively engage his students through real-time acquisition and analysis of data, connections to real-world events, visualization and simulation.
