Abstract
We report on the adaptation of the small enrollment, lab and discussion based physical science course, Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (PSET), for a large-enrollment, lecture-style setting. Like PSET, the new Learning Physical Science (LEPS) curriculum was designed around specific principles based on research on learning to meet the needs of nonscience students, especially prospective and practicing elementary and middle school teachers. We describe the structure of the two curricula and the adaptation process, including a detailed comparison of similar activities from the two curricula and a case study of a LEPS classroom implementation. In LEPS, short instructor-guided lessons replace lengthier small group activities, and movies, rather than hands-on investigations, provide the evidence used to support and test ideas. LEPS promotes student peer interaction as an important part of sense making via ``clicker'' questions, rather than small group and whole class discussions typical of PSET. Examples of student dialog indicate that this format is capable of generating substantive student discussion and successfully enacting the design principles. Field-test data show similar student content learning gains with the two curricula. Nevertheless, because of classroom constraints, some important practices of science that were an integral part of PSET were not included in LEPS.
Highlights
During the past 25 years a number of inquiry-based physics and physical science curricula have been developed for nonscience majors, especially prospective and practicing elementary and middle school teachers
Design principle no. 5: Learning is facilitated through establishment of certain specific behavioral practices and expectations.—In the research literature these classroom behaviors and expectations are known as norms [27], and in Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (PSET) and Learning Physical Science (LEPS) the norms are intended to model the normal practices of a scientific community
There seems to be no statistically significant difference between performance in LEPS and PSET classes with respect to gains in content knowledge as captured on the multiple-choice PSQ assessment. Both LEPS and PSET were based on a common set of design principles, and both curricula provide students with opportunities to develop an understanding of physical science concepts through discussions with peers based on scientific evidence
Summary
During the past 25 years a number of inquiry-based physics and physical science curricula have been developed for nonscience majors, especially prospective and practicing elementary and middle school teachers Such curricula include Physics by Inquiry [1], Powerful Ideas in Physical Science [2], Activity-based Physical Science [3], Operation Primary Physical Science [4], Physics and Everyday Thinking (PET) [5], Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (PSET) [6], and Physical Science for Future Elementary Teachers [7]. An inquiry-based curriculum that focuses on the fundamental concepts of physical science, includes an explicit focus on the nature of science and the nature of learning, and is designed to be taught in a typical large-enrollment lecturestyle setting (with fixed seats).
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