Years of work together. Ron Thornton from the unit from Tufts University and Priscilla Law's from Dickinson College. And we form during that time something called the activity-based physics group. And a number of different people were part of that group at one time or another. In fact, Joe reddish, who spoke to you at at a colloquium in the fall, was a member of our group at 1 during that time. And really the work with them are the pillars supporting the materials that I'm going to talk about here. And then, as Federica mentioned, that the group was awarded the 2010 American Physical Society excellence in Physics Education Award. And then I would also like to thank the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Education for funding a lot of the work that was done to, that ended up in the development of these materials. So first, an outline of my talk. I'll first talk a little bit about the educational problems that are addressed. The characteristics of active learning environments. A little bit about in-class interactive lecture demonstrations on which the home adapted ones are based. And then the main part of my talk is on home adapted interactive lecture demonstrations. I'll talk about the design features and show you some examples. And then a few words towards the end about distance active learning labs using a device called the IO lab. And then finally, questions and wrap up. So what are the problems that we've tried to address by this work? So it's been known for quite a while now because of some very interesting research that started to be done in the 1980s, that students who come into an introductory physics course, whether it's at the high school or the college level, have definite views about physics, or at least some areas of physics. And those views are often wrong. But they are based on observations that they've made in doing experiments during their lives like riding bicycles, driving cars, walking, running, and things like that. And research has shown PER has shown that the vast majority of students in an introductory physics course, we'll leave the course with the same incorrect views and little understanding of physics concepts. If the course is taught in a traditional way. And this is regardless of the skill of the instructor. So in summary, if no effort is made to engage students in the learning process, they will not learn physics concepts. And now with the pandemic, we have been faced with many learning environments that are worse than traditional. So the question is, are there ways that we can maintain active learning for our students during this time? So I, immediately back a while ago thought of Bart Simpson, I will not learn concepts in my Zoom physics class. Or what about sheldon? How can they possibly not learn from my perfectly logical, sublimely entertaining Zoom lectures? And by the way, this is kind of a little bit of an in joke because the journal that Sheldon is supposedly reading is the American Journal of Physics, which is a pedagogical, mostly a pedagogical journal. So the proposed solution over the years is active learning environments. And just to make it clear, these are not meant to replace, but rather to complement more quantitative work, problem-solving and so on. So what do I mean by an active learning environment of this type? What are the characteristics? So first of all, the instructor's role is mostly as a guide, not as the authority. So students as much as possible construct their knowledge from their observations. We use a learning cycle where students make predictions, make observations, and then compare those. And this challenges the beliefs that students bring into the course. We encourage collaboration with peers because we know that if information is prevented is presented to students in Clear ways that students can learn very well from each other. And the thing we, we like, always like most when we were doing computer-based labs, is when three students were sitting in front of a computer screen and one of them was pointing to the result on the screen and appealing to that result and explaining things to the other two. Our laboratory work itself is often used to learn basic concepts. And then finally, the, the main aspect, the use of Physics Education Research Validated active learning materials in all components of the course. So one type of active learning material is that we develop our interactive lecture demonstrations. And so I want to spend some time describing in-class interactive lecture demonstrations as the precursors to home adapted interactive lecture demonstrations. So the question we asked 30 years ago is, or was, Can an active learning environment be created in a large or small lecture? And the answer up until the pandemic has been yes, through the use of interactive lecture demonstrations. So let me describe for you what interactive lecture demonstrations are. And I'll use as an example, a set of interactive lecture demonstrations on image formation. So the strategy involves an eight-step process. And I'll try to illustrate the eight steps for you. So in the first step, the instructor describes the demonstration and does it for the class without the results displayed. And in the case of the demonstrations that I'm going to talk about, the image formation ones. I actually would not do the demonstration, but I would show the students, excuse me, show them the apparatus because if I did the demonstration, I would already been should be showing them the results. But when you're using computer-based tools to collect data, you can do an experiment and not, not collect the data. And that's what I mean by doing the demonstration without displaying results. The next step asks the students to record their individual predictions on a prediction sheet. So let me show you what a prediction sheet looks like. And this is a sample prediction sheet, the one that we would use for the image formation IL these. And by the way, I want you to notice several things. Number 1, this a place for the student's name. And this little note that says hand in this sheet. So in a lecture, whether it's a small or large lecture, each student would be given a copy of the sheet. They put their name on it. They know they're going to turn it in at the end of the lecture. They, we do one demonstration at a time. So they do a prediction for each demonstration when we come to that demonstration. And one very important thing that we emphasize for them right from the beginning of the course. And that is that predictions are never graded. A prediction is what the student believes based on everything they know about physics and about that situation up until the moment that they make the prediction, it can't be right or wrong. It, it could possibly describe the results correctly or not. But it's not assumed that a student would know the correct hypothesis for a particular experiment. It's only to see what based on everything they know they are thinking about it. If you don't tell students up front that you're not going to grade their predictions than they would be inclined to predict what they think you want them to predict rather than what they actually believe. So we're very careful about that, okay, so students would record their predictions. And I want you to notice that for this particular depth, the first demonstration, there's an object outside the focal point. There is a lens. We can consider it to be a thin lens. And it says draw a ray diagram to show. How the image is formed and is this a real or virtual image? So now students will be given a few minutes to do this. And then we move on to the third step. And in the third step, the students having made their predictions will have a small discussion with their neighbors. Either the person right next to them are the few people who are sitting together in the lecture and in a large lecture class. This is quite traumatic and I, I looked for a video of something and what I found the best one I found was a group of students in a girls school in Pune, a India. This is actually a week, a year ago, December. So most exotic setting where I've presented IL these and here's what it looks like. Okay, so they've discussed their predictions. And the next step is to elicit common predictions from the whole class. So here's a picture of that. This actually, this happens to be a group of students at the University of who deny in Italy. This is a couple of years ago and one student is ready to volunteer his prediction. And so several students could stand up and describe their predictions to the whole class. And then often in a large lecture class, I might take a vote and see which how many students believe that each prediction is correctly describes the experiment. And then students can change their prediction, the prediction on their prediction sheet if they feel inclined to do so. Based on the small group discussion. Then the next step is to carry out the demonstration. And I'll show you what this looks like. And so here you may have already seen in that first picture, here's the apparatus. It's a very simple apparatus for this image formation set of ILDs. There's the an arrow drawn on the board and there's a light bulb at the top and a light bulb at the bottom. And there's a large cylindrical lens. And when you turn on the two light bulbs which represent a point source at the top of the object, at a point source at the bottom of the object. What you see. So the students would see this. And then you can see, you can see of course, that the light from the top, I could cover one of the bulbs or I could put a color filter in front of one of the bulbs. And you would see that the light from the top bulb is focus to this point. And the light from the bottom bulb is focus to that point. And that is the image, the image location. Of course, I will be asking students to, to describe this, not myself. I wouldn't be lecturing to them. But you could see that the light from the bottom bulb is focus. And the light from the top bulb is actually focus. So this is a real image. If I put a screen there, there would actually be light focused on the screen and the image is inverted from the object. We would then move on to. And by the way, it happens to me it of course, that means it's a real image. We move on to Demonstration Number 2 and a demonstration number two, the students are asked what would happen if I blocked the top half of the lens with a card? And you probably have not done your cells the research on this and you may not have read about it. But the most common predictions of students, of naive students in an introductory course. If you ask them what happens if you block the top half the lens with a card. They will predict that either half of the image will disappear or that the entire image will disappear. There'll be no image. So and in fact, they are encouraged in this prediction to show how they're ray diagram is modified by putting the card there. And I'll explain that a little bit later why we do that. So let's see what this looks like. Here. I blocking the top half the lens with the card. And by the way, it's most traumatic if you start with the card above the lens and slide it down slowly and you see what happens to the light. And you can see that there's still light coming from both bulbs. So the image is still in the same place. And in fact, students can observe that the image is whole. It's still the same, but it's dimmer than it was before. And then finally we could move on. To a third demonstration is actually six demonstrations in this group. We could move on to another one where they block half of the object. And of course, if you block half of the object, half of the image will not be for. The next step is to ask a few students to describe the results and discuss them in the context of the demonstration. And there's actually results sheet which looks exactly like the prediction sheet. They can write whatever they want on the results sheet and take it home with them so they have a record of what they did. Here. Again, I was looking for a photo of what this looks like. This is actually a group of educators are actually a group of physicists at a meeting, workshop at a meeting in Japan and taught them Otsu. And here is one participated in the, in this workshop in front of a 150 other participants, sharing or describing the result of the demonstration and explaining it to them. And then finally, the last step. If appropriate, eye, you can ask students if they can think of another I physical situation that would give the same result or an application of this. And I like to, to ask for an application. And I hope that's through some student will volunteer that this is like closing down the aperture on the lens in a camera. Or like walking into a bright room and having the irises on your eyes shut down. And yet, you can still see everything that's in the room. You still see the whole image. You've just blocked out some of the light. So those are the eight steps. And these steps are repeated for each of the demonstrations in a sequence and a sequence of demonstrations that's meant to take up a whole lecture hour. Often has six or seven different demonstrations in it. Okay, I'm going to I noticed there were a couple of comments or questions. I'm going to see if I can do that. But anyway, if you prefer, we can keep them my piano. If you prefer to ask that now, I can I can do it either way is fine. So if I see your comments there, if if I see another if I see another chat entry, I will go and look at it, but I'll assume for the moment that we're going to have questions at the end. Okay? Okay. People, when they have questions in the chat so that they are high, then I see that when I'm either way the question and the answer don't bother if there is anything. I will interrupt you. Okay. That's good. Thank you. All right. I'm back in my talk. Okay. Now, this is a question that has to be asked. And prior to the mid, the early or mid 1980s, I was rarely ask because we always assumed that a student who did well on our exams actually obviously understood the physics concepts because we didn't really test to see whether they understood the concepts. We tested whether they could do the problems. And many students who were clever enough could do the problems at the end of a chapter. Similar ones without actually understanding the physics. So we never really knew, but nowadays, it's in physics education, research. It's felt that if he try something new, it behooves you to test whether it's actually more effective or not. And so do students learn better from image formation ILDs? And this question has been asked in the research that my colleagues and I have done by developing multiple choice conceptual evaluations. And in this case there's an evaluation called the light and optics concept, actual evaluation. It uses research-based and research Val of David multiple choice questions that are based on previous research that use more open-ended research. And in this case, I'll just mention one set of questions. There's a set of questions called the image formation questions that correspond very closely to this set of demonstrations. The students are shown a picture where there's a, there's a stamp, the object, there's a lens, there's an image there shown the image. And then they're asked a number of questions. What would happen if you changed various things in this situation? And When you do this is pre and post-test. And let me be very careful. Pretest is before you've taught anything on optics. And post traditional instruction is after you've done everything you would normally do in the optics part or the image formation part of your course. So reading the textbook, whatever lectures you're going to give, whatever homework they're going to do. Applying the, the thin lens equation, the lens maker's equation and so on. And when you do pre and post in that sense, and this is for a large number of students. My introductory physics courses used to have about 200 students in them. The gain from pre to post, this is a somewhat smaller group because I divided the group into two parts. One part that, that, that saw the demonstrations. But you find only a 20 percent gain from all of the traditional instruction they're going to have. So what does this Bart Simpson again under treat her and proud of it? Well, no, it's, it has to do and I'll actually, I'll tell you in a little bit one of the reasons why students have a problem with this conceptually, after an hour of these ILDs, the image formation ILDs, the gain from the pretest is 80 percent. So they are quite traumatic in the learning gains that students have from doing them. There's one last question on this test. That's also an image formation. And it's, it's kind of strange. Ray diagram. The rays are drawn. They're not special race. They don't go through the focal point. They're not parallel to the axis. They don't go through the center of the lens. And there are two rays from the top and two rays from the bottom. But the image is shown and it's a real image on the screen. And the question is, continue these four rays through the lens to the screen. Now, if you understand what a lens does, then you would immediately know that for a perfect lens, the two rays from the top of the object have to go to the bottom, to the, to the head of the image arrow. And the two rays from the foot of the object arrow have to go to the foot of the image URL. And yet, after traditional instruction, only a third of the students get this question right. And after the students have done the in-class image formation ILDs, more than three quarters of them get it right. Okay? So why are they effective? Well, if you ask students to make predictions, then it requires them to consider their beliefs before the observe the physical world. So the ILDs build upon the knowledge that students bring into the course. If they build upon and maybe challenge the knowledge that students have at the time that they observe the demonstration. Furthermore, since we asked the students always to make a prediction and to defend the prediction in a small group. And actually also write down the prediction on a piece of paper that will be collected even though we say it's not going to be graded. They are engaged. They want to know what the result is. And in most cases they are pretty sure that when they see the result, it's going to agree, agree with what they predicted. So when the result does not agree with what they predicted, as is the case. And in the vast majority of cases, there's a disequilibrium. And this inspires an effective learning opportunity. And now the students have been presented with observations of the physical world that are displayed and understandable ways. And they can construct their knowledge from these observations. And it's actually also building their confidence as scientists because this is what scientists do. They make observations of the physical world and they reach conclusions from that. Just a brief note. Some of you may be wondering why do we use two light bulbs rather than use a nice ray box? And by the way, I mean, it's one reason you could consider, since I've done this all over the world, it's it means not carrying a ray box and it means that anybody can do this anywhere in the, pretty much anywhere in the world. You can find flash light bulbs and batteries. And actually you don't need a big lens. All you need is a clear plastic cylindrical container filled with water. It works just as well. The answer though, comes from physics education research, students, naive students don't understand that an infinite number of light rays emanate from each point on an object. So there's a cone of light. They think instead in terms of the ray diagrams that they draw where there's two or three rays that are emanating from that point. They don't understand that for a perfect lens. All the rays that emanate from a single object point and that are incident on the lens will be focused to a corresponding point on the image. In fact, that you can see how they get into trouble because if you block half the lens, for example, you might block one of the race that they would normally draw, or even two of them. If it, if it blocks one of the two rays, then they're in a quandary. Does that mean there's no image? Or does it mean there's half an image because there's only one ray. If you're blocking both of the rays, then there can't be an image. Those are the types of problems that students have with this situation. Naive students. So that they're thinking about a small number of special rays actually leads them tickets to their conceptual problems. So instead of just having a finite number of rays as you would with a ray box. We actually deal with all of the rays with an infinite number of rays from 2 sources. One other important question. And that is, do students learn from traditional lecture demonstrations? Because many faculty love doing demonstrations. I know I voice love doing demonstrations to my class, especially when I have a large lecture class, I would go crazy if I had to stand up there and just talk for an hour. Um, but, and there are many reasons for doing demonstrations. But the question is the students learn anything from them? And there's now research that shows no, they probably don't learn anything from demonstrations. And one of the, one of the major studies was from the mosasaurs. Eric miseries PER group at Harvard. And I just briefly stated you can look up the reference. They divided a large lecture into two halves. 1.5, they asked to make a prediction about a demonstration. The other half did not make a prediction before they came to class. The two halves came to class together, observe a demonstration. I believe it was the shoot the monkey demonstration. And at the end of class, they were interviewed and asked to describe what happened in the demonstration. The group that had made a prediction. The majority of them would describe the, the result of the demonstration correctly. Namely, you aim the dart at the monkey. And it will hit the monkey because both the monkey and the dart or under the influence of gravity after the dark leaves the gun. Those who had not made a prediction. We'll describe the demonstration that they actually just observed and describe it wrong. The majority of those students. So they will go back to what they would have believed before seeing the demonstration, even though they actually came to class and saw the demonstration. Well, if they can't actually describe the result of the demonstration correctly, it's unlikely that they will be able to learn from it. So this is a cautionary alarm for distance learning. If you show a lot of videos and, and other things during your online lectures. If you don't engage the students in some way, don't expect that they will necessarily learn anything from them because they don't learn from them live either. Okay. I'm I'm I need to move ahead here. I'll just mentioned there's a book published by Wiley. It's actually a free book. It as ILDs on 28 different topics. It has all the written materials you need. And you can download this book. I've made it available to you. The link is in footnote four of my abstract. I don't know if you all got my abstract. So it's also in the first entry in the chat window in this, in this zoo talk. So you can go there. There's also a lot more information on the home ILDs. So the question during the pandemic is, can an active learning environment be created for students working at home? And the answer is home adapted interactive lecture demonstrations. And I'll just say that back in last March, I was sitting around and thinking, what can I do? Because I knew that many people were just struggling, trying to figure out how they were going to give lectures online. They're going to use Zoom. And I thought, is there something that can be done so students can actually do some active learning? And I thought back to our interactive lecture demonstrations and whether they could be put in an online forum. And so here are the design considerations that I came up with. First of all, as of now 26 sets of the 28 and the book had been put online. They're designed to introduce concepts or review them, just like the original ILDs are. They're designed to be just one of a number of at home components of a course. They envision students working alone online. So there's no requirement for group work or collaboration. That's not to say that you could add some group work. But I was looking for the lowest common denominator so that anybody could use them. Any faculty member can use them, regardless of whether they wanted to spend the time to set up groups or not. And what they do is they make use of the available multimedia videos, photos, graphs, simulations for students, experimental observations. And I'll just save it back. Last March, I was cooped up and I had no access to my equipment, to my office. And so I was very limited to what was available on my desktop and simulations that were available online. I've since added some things. And so now, now there are, as I said, 26 of them. So let's look at what, what they look like. Let me show you some examples. So first of all, here is the web page. And if you click on that, you go to the webpage and there it is. You see there's a list of the 26 and each one is linked to set. The information on top is a description. It's probably aimed more towards a faculty member than towards a student. So you might want to dispense with this, but basically now you can try any of these ILD. So let me first show you what does the one for image formation look like? So I'll click on here. And there is what comes up. So there is the prediction sheet, but it's an, in an online form. And if I want my students to actually fill out the prediction sheet and send it to me. And you can download a Word version of it. And I'll open that just to show you what it looks like. Whoops. And there is the word version. And students can download this and they can fill it out if they have were available to them. So but it looks exactly the same as the online one. In the online one, you see that the prediction is the same. It says draw a ray diagram. Is the image real or virtual? It's just what we just looked like. Look that and then it always says only after you have made your prediction, click to observe the images. So now, um, I think it's really, really important if you're going to use these that you impress on students. How important it is that they try to make a prediction before they observe the results. And we know this from research. It's, it, it's important to do it. And, and so I think that that's something needs to be said very clearly to them right from the start. And they're obviously they're not going to be penalized no matter what they do, but they're much more likely to learn if they actually make their predictions. Okay, so they've made their prediction and then they can see what the apparatus looks like. And there it is. And they can see what the apparatus looks like when it's turned on. Ok. And so there's the result and there S a number of questions about this. And then in the next part of this demonstration, they go and look at a simulation that's available online. This is a, a phys let. So one of the two major collections in simulations. And if I go to this part of the fizz, let you see that Here's something that reinforces what they just did. It shows a point on the object and it shows a whole bunch of rays. And I can move the point and see how it forms a point on the image. And then lastly, in this same situation, I can go to this part. I can put in a converging lens and choose a ray diagram. And there is a ray diagram. They, they, it can compare to their ray diagram. So there's an example, as you might imagine for the others. I've used the same pictures that I used that I showed you before. Okay. So let me. Back to my talk. So basically, whoops. Let me summarize the steps. How of the steps been modified? So for the whole ad home, home adapted a interactive lecture demonstrations. Student downloads, a prediction sheet. They read the written description of the demonstration, and they may view a photo, sketch or video of the apparatus. In this case, they didn't before they made an observation. The student records their individual predictions on the prediction sheet. Only after recording the predictions. Observe the demonstrations as video photos or simulation. And they see the results. They describe the result on the prediction sheet, compare with the predictions and often, and they're often ask probing questions that guide them to critical thinking about the results. And then this procedure is followed for each of the short lecture demonstrations in the home adapted eye on these. So there's no small group discussion and there's no sharing by the students except with their prediction sheet. Let me show you just a couple more to see what they look like. I have a little problem that my cursor goes away periodically. So this is, I said on Newton's third law. Again, you see the prediction sheet. Again, you can download a prediction sheet. I'll just quickly, the first demonstration involves the forces involved in pushing an object along a table when there is friction. And it's meant to get students to distinguish between Newton's first law and Newton's second law by presenting situations where there are two forces that are equal and opposite. Because they are Newton's third law pairs. And there are, under certain circumstances forces that are equal and opposite because the object is moving at a constant speed or not moving at all. And so let's look at this. They're asked to predict what happens, to predict how the forces will compare the a force applied on the block versus the force exerted by the block on the hand, how those will compare as the block speeds up, as it moves at a constant speed, and as it slows down. So they make their predictions. And now they can look at video. So it speeds up, it's constant speed and then slows down. And the two forces are displayed. And the students can, can view that the forces are exactly equal and opposite during all parts of this demonstration. So then there's some questions about how did the forces, how do these, these forces compared to the frictional force? I'm just going to show you one other from this one and that is, there are the moves on to a number of collisions. How did the, for the interaction forces compared during collisions? And I'll show you one of the more dramatic ones. So here's a collision of a massive object with a less massive one, where one is moving in, the other one is at rest initially. Let's see if I can show it again. And you can see the forces displayed and see that they're equal and opposite. Okay? So that is the, some examples from Newton's third law. I'm going to skip this one. I'm going to show you I think one more. And that is one on, on the heat engine. And this is one that actually uses a real heat engine that is constructed from a glass syringe, a flask, reservoir of hot water or register read, a reservoir of vice quarter, and a pressure sensor. And this is a heat engine that's designed to raise 100 gram mass a certain distance during its cycle. So to look at the apparatus, that's what the apparatus looks like. Hot reservoir, cold reservoir, flask filled with air, the working substances air. Here's the syringe. There is the mass on top of the syringe. And here is a pressure sensor, and here's a diagram of pressure versus volume. So we can plot out a PV diagram. And I'm just going to show you what this looks like. Students are asked. To describe each of the steps in this cycle. And I'll show you them as, as I show you the video. So let me download the video. And as the video is going, I will show you that we start out with the reservoir, the flask, the working substance that the cold temperature. And we add the mass to the top of the engine and we fill in the volume manually so you can read the volume of the syringe and add the volume of the flask and that's the total volume. We now move that the working substance to the hot reservoir and wait a little while for it to reach equilibrium. You see the mass has been lifted. Volume is entered. So that's one part of the cycle. Now we take the mass off, you see the syringe popped up a little bit further into the volume again. Move to the cold reservoir. Watch the syringe moving down. The piston is moving down. And to the volume. Oops, it's almost over. And then finally put the mass back on again to begin the cycle all over again. Okay, and so there's this cycle and students are asked a number of questions about the processes in this cycle, there's, there's two isobars, as you can see, and the end processes should be approximately adiabatic since they take place in a short period of time. Okay. Additional notes about the ILDs. They incorporate prediction and observation in comparison components of the in-class ILDs. Their base closely on the in-class versions. They use quality videos, photos, graphs, and simulations. Substituted for live demonstrations. They are easily implemented immediately because they require no equipment. And I will say they have not been researched validated, although they're based on ones that had been research validated. I have every time that I've given this talk, I have welcomed people if they're in a situation where they can do research to, to talk to me about it. Obviously during a pandemic, It's not the most favorite thing for people to think about. And finally, I'll just say that these 26 had been developed since March. They're not completely refined and I welcome any feedback to improve them. Okay. I wanted to say a few words on labs. So what about the lab? We can zoom and do things on there. We can have distance learning, ILDs, but what about the laboratory? Can we do an online or distance laboratory? And it turns out that two collaborators, Eric Bowtie gum and Eric Jensen and I, had a project that ended two years ago that looked into developing online labs, distance learning labs using a device called the IO lab. And this is the device. And I'll say a little bit about it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because I'm I'm out of time. Let me just emphasize to you that none of the three of us have any financial interest in IO lab. It's a product of Macmillan Publishers. In fact, I have very definite criticisms and concerns about it, which I've expressed at many, many talks, but it is something that is usable. And let me just say what it is. It is a self-contained, easy to use, inexpensive apparatus for use at home. The curriculum is an active learning laboratory curriculum that Priscilla Law's run Thornton and I developed called real-time physics. And we, you need a management system, which in this case is called lesson player, and it's part of the IO lab software. Whoops, sorry. Let me tell you a little bit more about IO lab. It was developed by Matt sell it at University of Illinois. It's a wildly, it uses a wireless USB dongle. It rolls on three wheels along an axis. So it has an optical encoders, encoder to measure displacement, velocity, and acceleration. So it allows real-time data collection of motion quantities. And it has simple data analysis tools. It's relatively inexpensive. When we worked on this project, it was only a $100. It's a little bit more expensive now. But it contains a force sensor, a light intensity sensor, atmospheric pressure sensor, microphone temperature sensor, 3D Accelerometer, 3D magnetometer, 3D gyroscope, and, and a number of other things. It does have some bugs. The active learning curriculum is real-time physics. I don't have time to tell you about the details of it, but just to say that it uses the same learning cycle. There are four modules. We're only talking about the mechanics module for right now, because that's the only one that we develop for the IO lab. I'm, I'm going to skip over this because I don't have time to go into the details. I'll just say that we developed a set of mechanics labs to go with the IO lab. They were tested at Portland State University and make it a community college, both in calculus space and algebra base, both in class and distance learning. And we saw a conceptual, significant conceptual learning gains on the force and motion conceptual evaluation for all of the groups who use them. And course evaluation showed positive attitudes towards the labs and the use of the iLab. And this is all reported in a, in a paper in the physics teacher. And you can find the link to that at the same home adapted ILD webpage that I've given to you. If you want to. I'm just going to show you one example of what I owe lab does. So here's a very simple experiment, pushing an IO lab up an inclined ramp. So I give it a push, it goes up, it comes back down. And this is what the data collection would look like. The velocity versus time and the acceleration versus time. I can expand the axes for these measurements, you can see is a little bit more noise on the force on the acceleration graph than I would like. I can measure values off of these graphs. I can take a selection of the data and apply statistics to it. So for example, for the current going up the ramp, the average acceleration is minus 1.50 meters per square second. So that gives you an idea. And this gives you an idea of what students can do. So here's two students in a, in a lab at Chumash Community College. They're looking at the same graph I just showed you, and here's what they conclude. So this, So she is observing the graph and she says the acceleration is just constantly negative until the cart hit the stop at the bottom of the track. So they're observing the results on the screen and they're relating it to the experiment that they just did. Okay, I'm not going to show you this is what lesson player looks like. Here's a list of the labs that we've developed. There's nine labs for mechanics. And these labs again, you can access them from that same webpage. They are available free to, free of charge through an agreement with Wiley. So I say to you, the lesson, engage your students in the learning process. There's many ways besides the ones that I've shown you. But even at home, it is possible. And I'm happy to help in any way I can. There's more information and I thank you for your attention and I will be very happy to answer any questions that you have. So thank you. Thank you so much. Let's thank our speaker. Virtually clapping. Feel free to unmute and clap or show your hands in other ways, digitally or physically. Thank you so much for the talk. There's so much material and there are so many questions. There are questions in the chat. So actually let me start actually with Christy, Chrissy, can you unmute and ask the question yourself? Otherwise, I can ask you for your help. No problem. Okay. So back when you were talking about the importance of small group discussions to the ILD process. How do you promote the small group discussions? Especially in large classrooms, when you have students who are reluctant to speak in class, like because English is not their first language or because they have social anxiety or whatever other potential explanations there might be. Yeah. So I mean, all you all you can do is give some encouragement. So. In a large lecture class with 200 students first, I'll actually let me first. My first answer to your question would be that it's not really that big a problem that most groups are willing in, in some way to discuss for at least a little while what they have put down on the prediction sheet, they have the prediction sheet as a vehicle, it's written there. They're asked a very simple task, namely compare your predictions and discuss them. So you're absolutely right that some students will do that more annually than others. Some will not at all. We do this over the course of the term. Eventually most students will participate in it because we're not asking them to do too much, but it is important. And, and normally when I have taught that class, I will spend a good part of the first lecture explaining why we are doing things in a different way than they have experience and most of the classes they take and why it is important to do it. Now let me say one other thing. A, our belief from the research we've done and from our experience over these years, is that the most important thing about the small group discussion is that they get enough that each student gets an opportunity to express what they believe and to get possibly some counter argument to it. The more decisive thing in this learning process we believe is actually seeing the result and any discussion that comes after the result. So, so while the small group process contributes, its probably not the most important part of this process. So even if, even if a student doesn't participate in that, it doesn't mean that they are closed out of learning. They still have the, the, the chance to make the prediction, the chance to make the observation, and the chance to hear students describe the result. Got it, Thank you very much. Very interesting. Exciting. Next is at Lehman, following the order with which question came in the chat, put your questions in the chat and I will call you. Okay. Had you Heather got lots of interesting stuff. I like the I like the example of the image formation and made a lot of sense. What I'm wondering is we have flexor periods that are 50, 500 minutes long. And so it looks to me like that might take quite awhile, you know, 25, 30 minutes. So would you organize an entire, the whole eight step process? So would you organize an entire lecture period, 50 minutes around one such ILD eight-step thing and had like an introduction and then have them go through the process and then wrap up. Sure. Now, so so while I've I've often thought that it might, it might be pedagogically better to intersperse these lecture demonstrations into a lecture where you did maybe a couple of them and then you lectured for awhile and then you did it a couple more. Logistically. That is a nightmare. Especially if you're going to do the protocol with the, with the prediction sheet and that whole thing. So when I, so in all the times that I've taught, I've done one set of interactive lecture demonstrations, one lecture a week. So quite typically in the last probably ten years that I taught introductory physics. One day a week was always devoted to interactive lecture demonstrations. And that's all we did in that lecture. So do six or seven of these. In one lecture is still a challenge. And I use my knowledge of what I think is most important and when I think it's time to move on to something else to monitor that time because after all, I'm in charge. I can decide when we move on. It would be impossible event in an hour to do every step and to do and to spend all the time you might want to spend on every step. But one whole lecture week is devoted interactive lecture demonstrations every week of my course. You're probably thinking, but then you only have two lectures. My god. How do you, how do you cover the material in the course? And the answer is that if you have really covered, quote, the most difficult concepts that, that students have to deal with on, on the first day of the week, let's say, then you don't have to spend as much time on some of the other things that you do in later in the week and that's the way I look at it. So everything is adjusted to the idea that we're going to do certain things with these ILDs and we're not going to do them again later on. And not only we're not going to do them again, but I can actually assume that students understand them. So I decided answer your question. Yeah. Yeah. If I'm a permitted a follow-up, what do you do with the rest of the lecture on the week? Okay, so I have always been inclined to, to still ask a lot of questions in lecture. I don't like to to just treat lecture and I like to do demonstrations. But I don't do, I don't do those things in a formal way. I mean, there are people who do clicker questions all the time. They do lots of, there are lots of other active learning strategies, peer instruction and so on. I don't do that. So if you, if you came into one of my lectures on Monday, you would either be aghast or you'd say, oh great. Because you wouldn't recognize what I was doing because I'm doing ILDs. If you came in on any other day at any particular time, you might say, Oh, he's just lecturing because there are times that I am just lecturing. But, but, but my lectures are broken up by, by other things. So again, I'm kind of as I look, actually let me say one more thing on that. It has always been our philosophy in this active learning business. That we would develop materials. P are validated materials that could be combined together by the instructor who was using them in the way that he or she thought was best for the circumstances. And so for example, everything that we have published by Wiley is formatted the same way. It uses the same, even though we've one of us if isn't responsible a different person for each thing, they're formatted the same way, they have the same notation. And we insisted early on that everything be available electronically so anybody could modify them in any way they want it to once they had the idea being that you would decide what you wanted to use. I give you one example, which is my example of how I teach the course, one day of interactive lecture demonstrations. The other two days a week are much closer to lecturing. The lab is real-time physics. Every week. You might decide to do things a different way and use different materials, not, not even use our materials. And, and, and I think that's perfectly fair because you are the one who knows what your students need and what you, what equipment you have, what's the structure of your course and so on. So that's one example. Yeah, I just want to be conscious of the time and ask you if you are okay with spending a few minutes. Well, as its past five PM, it's 50 seven actually. So I just want to make sure that you have time to time. This is, this is I'm on COVID time also. So that stuff is there any pity? Me. Yeah. I have a question. So just as a background, I teach Intro Physics, but for our majors. So a lot of them, There's a lot of emphasis on them being able to solve problems and do the math might need that relates us that I've no problem figuring out how to make problem blends that test exactly that. Yeah, it's really hard to find these, you know, the one that you had with the raise about with this, the concepts, right? Each time a CDOS, it was like, this is a clever question. Do you have some tips on how to make good questions that test the concepts that are not Northwestern. I think about it, I always think about, but I'm going to make them write a little essay, but then it's really hard to grade all of those. Herbie me and multiple choice questions are easy to cheat. So how did you go and design those clever questions? Yeah, so as I mentioned, two of the conceptual tests that we have. And those tests, I don't know if you're familiar with phis port. So, so fist port that I think it's dot org. They have a bunch of conceptual evaluations there and they might actually have articles that describe exactly what you're asking for. Namely, how do you design questions? But there's a wealth of questions. I mean, we have four different conceptual evaluations. Mechanics, light and optics. He can temperature and electricity and magnetism. And, and so there's you and each of them has 4050 questions in it. And you've, you're perfectly welcome to use any of those questions or to use them as the basis for your own questions. The vast majority those had been research validated. So it was not an easy thing to make to make up multiple choice questions. It takes lot of time, so I recommend, and as I said, there's many, there's also many conceptual evaluations by other people. I commend you to go and look at those and use them. And you're free to use them. So that would be, that would be a place to start. Because as I said, it's not easy to design them as I'm sure you're aware as actually that was your question. Yeah, It's not easy to design them. So maybe I was asking how the sausage is made, how they're made. And that's fine. Yeah, that's I don't know that I can give you clues on how I mean the one thing that the two, the one thing that is essential for all the tests that we've made is that you know, what answers the students might give. So and, and the thing, The great advantage to our lives is that when we started doing this, there were many PER groups already who were doing open-ended questioning his students. They were interviewing students and they were publishing. And so for example, tho, those questions on the image formation, I could've made up those questions in 191985, I think by then the research had been published. Is it Fred Goldberg who's, who's now at San Diego State? He did that research. And it was quite obvious from the research what questions you would ask and what answers you would give. Cuz you want to make sure that whatever answer the students think is, is right is a choice. That's why sometimes we have eight or nine choices on a question. Because you want to make sure they don't look at it and say, Oh, no, it's none of those. You want to make sure they look at it and they pick one and they say, Yeah, that's exactly what's right because yeah, that's what I think and it's right. Even though in a very high percentage of the cases it's not right. So that's very important that it represents not that the, the, what do you call the distractors? The distractors are not distractors. They're not things that are obviously wrong. There things that would be right if you had a different model. Namely the, namely the model that doesn't really describe the physics. So that's a very important aspect. And then of course it, the other one is that again, I'll say they have to be research validated because you learn an awful lot once you start having students answer them. Can I get quick, quick, quick, quick. Yeah. Did you think that multiple choice questions are still the best tool for this because you know, you don't get mastering astronomy and astrophysics now. Now let me be sorting and ranking tasks. We'd like graphs and subsidy thing, that multiple choice, there's still no way to go. Okay. I I don't I guess I I don't have a knowledgeable answer to that because I haven't worked. I know I know the other things but I haven't really worked with them. I wouldn't I would want to see and I've never read anything justifying whether one is better than another. I know. I tented. I mean, it, you know, for ranking tasks I think may tend to get at some slightly different things than, than a multiple choice question would. So I don't I don't have a good answer to your question. I would look up I would go to phis port and see if there are any articles that are that are written to give justifications for that. Thank you. By the way, and of course, open-ended quite as far as as far as research, it has to be true that open-ended questions are the gold standard because you get so much more information from asking a student to question and having them describes and as we all know, just from sitting in office hours by the way, I mean, that's that's the only way that I ever knew that my students didn't understand the physics because sitting in my office and asking an, a student, Y, did you, why did you, what does Newton's second law say? Scene? They had no idea what Newton's Second Law said. I mean, that's so, but if you have large groups of students and you actually have to evaluate what they know. Multiple choice questions save you a lot of effort on that, so okay. I think you had a question days also on this topic. Yes. Yes. Thin thin copy. These to ask and maybe we can go to next. So sorry. Let me just show you had a question. Yeah. Hi. I had a quick question just because I've done this kind of idea, the same thing but I use it with clickers at but I yeah, what caught me about what she said is you take a day out and do your interactive lab demos and the lecture demos. And then the other two or one lecture week, you do traditional lecturing. I've always interspersed it is clickers but not these prediction sheets. I'm wondering what you think you get more out of the prediction sheets and why you do it one day a week. And let me explain why set it up, Why I did, which was I use the The apparatus and say, Hey, what's going to happen here? Make a prediction during your clicker question. Then I'll do the demo and then launch into a problem on the board and solve it and then follow up with it with another clicker or locker. So what, what am I doing? That could be improved method to how you're doing it? No, I don't I don't necessarily think I said that before. I don't I I think perhaps it's true that we're you're doing is better than what I'm doing. And I'll just say to you, say that because, because really integrating everything together is, is, I think is a better idea. My choice was dictated by the logistics. More. I mean, you have to balance everything and even with clickers. So by the way, we, we did do these with clickers. There's, there's a couple of sets of them. We added another NSF project to, to develop clicker ILDs. And we did it for the optics ones, that image formation ones, and for some of the mechanics ones. And had very, very good results, very comparable results without the prediction sheets. So, so instead of using the prediction sheets, we use the clickers to get the answers. Worked very, very well. I did it in the same format with lectures, doing it once a week. And again, it was a logistical thing because I wasn't doing, I wasn't typically doing clicker questions in my class. I was only doing them for the ILDs. So again, logistically, it was much easier to do them all in one day because and by the way, we didn't have them bite clickers. We, we gave them the clickers. They came in each day to lecture and pulled the clickers out of a box and put them back in again. So logistically, it made sense to do it all in one day. So what I've always thought and in every workshop I've ever given, I've made that remark, that problem that you might think it's more effective to disperse them into your, into your lectures. And I think it probably is if, if you do it appropriately and it sounds like you do so that's great. And I but if you're going to, but if you were going to do it with the prediction sheets, which is how we started. It's easier to do them all in one day and it's not so bad to do that because even though you've done them all on Monday, let's say you can still tie in what you do later in the week to what they saw on Monday. It's not like they haven't seen it. It's not like you can assume they've seen it, which by the way, is a big thing because at my university the lab is not required and therefore the for the intro course, and therefore half the students in my lecture class have not gone into lab. So I can't on any given lecture day, say you remember what you saw in lab on Tuesday. Now we're going to talk about that. That's actually one reason why I did ILDs because half the class was not having any kind of hands-on thing and I thought they really needed to have that. But anyway, No, I think probably what you're doing is is great and I have no objection to it. I just want to throw in there one quick thing about COVID stuff that I've had a problem with. Yeah, which is, I love asking those clicker questions and I say Go discuss amongst yourselves and stuff in the classroom. Yeah, How do you do that online through Zoom. I think that doesn't work because they all can't talk together. I even said, hey, can create some back channels amongst yourselves, but there's no way I can see that T2, you have a way that you could encourage that peer-to-peer. It is a way of setting of chat rooms. I have to I have to say I don't know how to do that. I've never done it. And that may actually be part of the reason why back in March, I made the decision that I wasn't going to automatically include that in my ILDs because I didn't, at that juncture, I didn't want to learn how to use Zoom. I wanted to to put the ILDs online and I thought that's what I should devote my time too. So i i now I could I suppose I could go back and do that, but, but people tell me you consider chat rooms and I didn't. So you should look into that. Yeah. The problem was just so many people. I was just for you Still bunch of little groups. And I'm not sure. I thought maybe I'd seen that, but no, no, no, I'm sorry. Our key potent, but thank you. This has been great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Um, along this topic manager who also is the person that suggested you as a speaker. So thank you so much. I didn't jury and re-added so much for the recommendation for this great speaker. He is also suggesting breakout rooms and Google Docs and chat. I personally use breakout rooms and his lack. Which is a chat app like this course. And I think they're quite effective, but I didn't have the kind of the same question which is if there is any evidence that doing it on line in breakout rooms has a different effect than person. Will look, are there, there are many people in p or who claim that students have to have an opportunity to talk about what's in their heads In order to learn. And, you know, I, I have not done research on that. In our in our ILD strategy. There is an opportunity for that to happen. We've seen amazing conceptual learning gains in almost every area that we've tried, ILDs, we know that certain percentages this students do not participate in group chat. So I, it, it, it's really gives them an opportunity to say something about what they believe, but we know that everybody doesn't do that. So I, I'm skeptical about how totally essential that is when you when you have all these other things going on as they have in ILDs. But I, you know, I ate it it does give that opportunity. I don't I don't believe that just doing that is going to be effective because they have to have some way. Actually, of course, peer to peer learning, peer instruction. Which would seem to say that yes, all students need to do is to discuss things among themselves. Member peer instruction has no experiment. There's no observation that they necessarily make. They just discuss things. And they claim very, very large learning gains. In our case. They have something to talk about. They, they have the result of a demonstration. They stay have something on a computer screen or something that was done in front of them to discuss. That's so they are really learning from the physical their physical world. So I don't know. I can't I can't really answer from experience sorry. Ad that I saw. Yup. Thanks day for a great talk hours. You might not remember, but I was that a week-long workshop for you and you had a veneer and Oregon yearly back What year was that? In? Two years ago. Okay. Yeah. So a bourgeois and boy, do I miss those? Thank you for reminding me. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. We haven't done anything like that, but great. Welcome ions to talk. No, You're welcome. If I may, I have one other quick question which is do you use do you know or at least you have an opinion about whether seeing a physical simulation is less effective than seeing a video. I understand why I can, I can intuit why we less effective than seeing an experiment live. But I don't really understand whether I should expect it to be less effective than watching a video of a car moving. Yeah. You know, I guess I have to say that that having having always that the three of us, Ron, Priscilla, and I have always agreed from the beginning that if we could do something, have students do a real experiment in an effective way that we would shy away from simulations. There, there are places where you have to do simulations because it's too hard to do the experiment. But there are places where the experiments are really very simple. So in our minds it was always finding a simple way to do an experiment that illustrates what we want to illustrate. Rather than finding a way to illustrate something that was so, that was too complex to do that way. In my mind, I've always said. So none of the things up until these up until these home ILDs where basically I was faced with. Okay, either I'm going to incorporate simulations into them or this is not going to be anything because I don't have any, I don't have a mechanism to produce materials or to have students do experiments at home. So this is the only choice I have. So this was the first time that I really actively look through all the simulate, the, the, the famous simulations that were out there. And I have to say some of them, I didn't like it all and some of them I thought, Yeah, you know, they kind of do what I want to do. But I don't have the answer to your question because it, I've always thought maybe students don't trust simulations as much because they know it's not a real thing. And then really it's true a simulation could do anything you wanted to do. But I don't know that and I don't know that there have been publications I would look for. And I've always looked for the research that says we did this. Process, we did conceptual testing against students show these learning gains. That's what we always did from the very beginning with anything that we developed. And I haven't seen that it may exist now with simulations as well, but I haven't seen it, but I think that has to be done. So thank you. Anybody else? One. Perhaps we have we can wait until Thursday past the hour, so we have four minutes. John Chapin, Hello, I guess. Yeah, barring a great talk to you guys following alphabets question. So like the effectiveness or like utility of simulations, like be slightly increased if you had simulations that were more interactive or more tunable. So like if you knew the dominating variables of some concepts and give students an opportunity to kind of make a hypothesis of conjecture of what should happen if they like are looking at I don't know the concept of energy. So it does speed change if I adjust the height or if I had chains like or should it change at all? If I change the mass or something like that, where I like you give them an opportunity or give them some sense of control over what they're doing. I, I, I, I, no. So, so that the, the, the idea that you're suggesting is used in the development of the ones that we develop is just that we chose what changes domain. So almost I think the majority of ILDs are structured in that way. Now what happens if you do this? Now what happens if you do that? Dislike the image formation ones were whether it makes a difference that the students are actually choosing to, to change that quantity? I don't if that's the question you're asking me, I don't know the answer to that. I can I can only say that that we have demonstrably significant learning gains for the ones that we've developed that are not where the students basically do not choose the experiments, but interact with the experiments. So whether it's essential that they choose them and direct them themselves, I can't answer out as a perfect environment just about because I don't like a lot of concepts and astronomy and astrophysics all taught more like either simulations controlled by the instructor. And I used to be like a nice ensemble or set of simulations online, I guess back before they fans out fashion other ohms. That's right. Yeah. That was a bad time to phase out facts. I guess I never really silly thing. I would say one thing that may be relevant to what you asked, and that is, if you want to set the students free to make choices as to what values they are going to give to two quantities in a simulation. I would start out by being prescriptive before I set them free. Because the one thing that that I'm pretty sure of and and that, that we have thought right from the very beginning, way back in, in 86, 87 when we started working on these things, is that it's not a bad thing to set students free and have them work on their own. But they need guidance to start with. And so it's a better idea to give them some guidance first. And then if you have the time, if, if they have the time, let them work freely. The problem with, with the structure of university classes is that the time is constrained. If you, if you have two hours to be in a laboratory, the chances are that a completely open-ended laboratory is not going to get students to where you want them to be. That's why we have not written completely open-ended laboratories. If we get any criticism or laboratories, it's that people say there are two prescriptive. But our answer to that is okay, they are prescriptive. We, we never tell the students what the result is. We never did the students learn from the results that they observe. But if they never observe those results, would they have learned anything in the answer is no. So I think you have to give them some structure first for sure. That I yeah. That's based on experience but not not research. Thank you. I think we kept you quite long enough. Hadn't really great. Inaugural colloquium. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Yeah. You're quite welcome. And did my I think I put in the chat right at the beginning is the first entry, the link to my web page. I don't see because the chat one show things that appear before I join or in this case, rejoin me. I'm letting the abstract right? It was a moment. They'll get the spherical, everybody got your abstract and the links that you put in then within invitation to the colloquium? Yes. And they will get it again when I share the link with the record for the recording, I will also add those links again. I just sent it again. Brilliant. Thank you. So lines. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, everybody for some very, very good questions too. Thank you. Keep and keep in touch. Bye, Bye. Bye. Thanks everybody. Chao, Tyler. And suddenly the photo. I will. All right, buh-bye, bye bye.
Adapting Research-Validated Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs) and RealTime Physics (RTP) for Active Distance Learning | David Sokoloff UOregon 2021/2/24
From Federica Bianco September 14, 2021
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Adapting Research-Validated Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs) and RealTime Physics (RTP) for Active Distance Learning
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With the need for distance learning materials thrust upon us alarmingly and suddenly, it is not unreasonable that many have fallen back on passive presentation of lectures and black/whiteboard notes using some mode of video conferencing. But is it possible to maintain some element of active learning for our introductory physics students? My colleagues and I have attempted to adapt both the research-validated Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs) and RealTime Physics (RTP) for use in distance learning. We've used the wealth of multimedia materials currently available (videos, simulations, photos, computer-based laboratory graphs, etc.) to adapt ILDs (1), (2), (3) to a form that can be used by students at home (4). While recognizing that small-group discussions--and sharing in any way--may be difficult for most faculty to implement, these Home Adapted ILDs retain predictions as an essential element in engaging students in the learning process. For introductory lab activities, we have adapted RTP Mechanics (5) for use at home with the IOLab--an inexpensive, computer-based laboratory device (6).
This talk will review the design features and research-validation of ILDs and RTP and present some examples from both.
(1) David R. Sokoloff and Ronald K. Thornton, “Using Interactive Lecture Demonstrations to Create an Active Learning Environment,” Phys. Teach. 35: 6, 340 (1997).
(2) David R. Sokoloff and Ronald K. Thornton, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley and Sons, 2004).
(3) David R. Sokoloff, “Active Learning of Introductory Light and Optics,” Phys. Teach. 54: 1, 18 (2016).
(5) David R. Sokoloff, Ronald K. Thornton and Priscilla W. Laws, “RealTime Physics: Active Learning Labs Transforming the Introductory Laboratory,” Eur. J. of Phys., 28 (2007), S83-S94.
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