Abstract
Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members' ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and astronomy. The results of this work illustrate that, for many topics, there is a lack of variety in the representations featured, intellectual tasks posed, and levels of complexity fostered by the questions faculty develop. These efforts motivated and informed the development of two frameworks: (1) a curriculum characterization framework that allows us to systematically code active learning strategies in terms of the discipline representations, intellectual tasks, and reasoning complexity that an activity offers the learner; and (2) a curriculum development framework that guides the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners' discipline fluency. We analyze the faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions with our curriculum characterization framework, then apply our curriculum development framework to generate (1) Fluency-Inspiring Questions, a more pedagogically powerful extension of a well-established instructional strategy, and (2) Student Representation Tasks, a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that shifts the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of Fluency-Inspiring Questions and Student Representation Tasks, detailing their usage of Pedagogical Discipline Representations coupled with novel question and activity formats.
Highlights
In this article we describe how an investigation into faculty-produced curricular materials provides unique insights into the choices instructors make when designing their own active learning strategies
As we endeavor to bring more advanced topics and recent discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics into the classroom, we frequently find ourselves needing a new generation of representations, ones that emphasize information in ways not typically employed in the discipline
Not explicitly called for, we find that a majority of student groups choose to make drawings of the physical scenario described in the second part—a sign that they find the representation valuable in, and possibly necessary to, facilitating their unpacking and discernment of this phenomenon
Summary
In this article we describe how an investigation into faculty-produced curricular materials provides unique insights into the choices instructors make when designing their own active learning strategies. The results of this investigation expand the theoretical underpinnings that inform our current curriculum development efforts. In the final sections of this paper we provide and explicitly unpack example fluency-inspiring questions and Student Representation Tasks, highlighting how we as instructors can shift our thinking towards designing more pedagogically powerful materials and learning experiences that can foster learners’ development of discipline fluency. We offer some background on our prior curriculum development efforts and theoretical perspectives
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