Quality in university physics teaching: is it being achieved?

Abstract

This was the title of a Physics Discipline Workshop held at the University of Leeds on 10 and 11 September 1998. Organizer Ashley Clarke of the university's Physics and Astronomy Department collected together an interesting variety of speakers polygonically targeting the topic, although as workshops go the audience didn't have to do much work except listen. There were representatives from 27 university physics departments who must have gone away with a lot to think about and possibly some new academic year resolutions to keep. But as a non-university no-longer teacher of (school) physics I was impressed with the general commitment to the idea that if you get the right quality of learning the teaching must be OK. I also learned (but have since forgotten) a lot of new acronyms. The keynote talk was by Gillian Hayes, Associate Director of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). She explained the role and implementation of the Subject Reviews that QAA is making for all subjects in all institutions of higher education on a five- to seven-year cycle. Physics Education hopes to publish an article about all this from QAA shortly. In the meantime, suffice it to say that the review looks at six aspects of provision, essentially from the point of view of enhancing students' experiences and learning. No doubt all participants would agree with this (they'd better if they want to score well on the Review) but may have been more worried by the next QAA speaker, Norman Jackson, who drummed in the basic facts of life as HE moves from an elite provision system to a mass provision system. He had an interesting graph showing how in the last ten years or so more students were getting firsts and upper seconds and fewer getting thirds. It seems that all those A-level students getting better grades than they used to are carrying on their good luck to degree level. But they still can't do maths (allegedly) and I doubt whether Jon Ogborn (IoP Advancing Physics Project) satisfied the doubters with a tantalisingly brief description of how the new IoP-sponsored post-16 course intends to tackle this perennial problem. Perhaps mathematics worriers could learn from the efforts being made by several universities to tackle the problem of illiterate physics students. Chris Hall from Warwick described how the Physics Department shared in, developed and adapted a whole-university project - the Warwick Writing Programme - with clear instructions, models and assessment tasks which targeted clearly defined skills in context. And it worked. It sounded a lot like Nuffield A-Level's Research and Analysis to me, but we all know that the school-university interface is semi-permeable at best. This account of a fascinating two days could go on and on. So briefly: James Miller, as Head of Newcastle Royal Grammar School, an ancestral voice prophesying doom, foresaw the demise of university physics mainly because state schools didn't have good labs, enough physics teachers or good discipline, and even when they did they probably taught some kind of general science so that their pupils never even heard of physics. How things must have changed since I stopped teaching. David Baume (FDTL (don't ask)) of the Open University made us do some work in groups and think up what qualities a good physics teacher needs. There were few surprises here, but as a physics `drop-out' Dr Baume was keen on the idea that courses should be more openly structured so that students knew where they were and indeed where they were going. Dave Wonnacott (CTI, Surrey University) showed us some up-to-date teaching software, emphasizing that the current problem was not in finding good stuff but in integrating it into courses. Finally (more or less) we were shown how all these things should be done by Dr Dick Moyes of the chemists' Project Improve. This has been up and running for several years and has organized workshops, training sessions, secondments for producing `transportable ideas' for university chemistry teachers, publications, newsletters, conferences, etc, etc, all aimed at making their chemistry teaching `less boring' and more effective. Dr Moyes will tell us more about this in a future edition of Physics Education. The scheme was smart enough to get funding from the chemical industry. Pity that there's no physics industry. Ken Dobson