New Relevancies for Reforms in Physics Education
by John L. Roeder
On 14 October 1994, at the Fifth Annual Northeast Regional Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), then President-Elect Karen Johnston took note of what we have learned about how students learn science (page 15, Winter 1995 issue). This has been the basis underlying both the National Science Education Standards and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy, and Johnston called for similar reform in teaching sciences in our colleges and universities as well.
Less than two years later the national summer meeting of AAPT was fairly blooming with seemingly countless examples of reforms in physics education, at both secondary and college level, taking into account new developments in our understanding of student learning. There was much reference to "interactive" lectures, and the cognitive development work of Lillian McDermott and the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington has given rise to "tutorial" lectures. McDermott herself has authored a two-volume Physics by Inquiry, published by Wiley.
Specific programs have taken on such titles as the Modeling Method and Activity Based Physics (being developed by a consortium of colleges). In receiving the Millikan Medal Priscilla Laws (of Dickinson College) described her Workshop Physics as a way of implementing (Robert A.) Millikan's own philosophy to replace lectures in introductory physics with laboratory and tutorials. And Thomas A. Moore (of Pomona College) told how he has implemented the "less is more" philosophy in his Six Ideas That Shaped Physics as one of the four selected model curricula of the Introductory University Physics Project. (Another of Moore's goals, which would surely please Sheila Tobias (pp. 28, 34, Spring 1992 issue), has been to establish a "storyline" in his course.)
New approaches to physics education are also seeking to be more relevant to everyday life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the thematic approach of the Active Physics program for high school physics (being developed by AAPT itself), as described on the front page of our Spring 1994 issue. Another thematic high school approach is that of the SCAMPI program, which uses the Physics in Context model and also develops a storyline. At the college level, the University of Delaware has initiated Problem-Based Learning, and Bloomfield's How Things Work: the Physics of Everyday Life (hot off the press from Wiley) has developed a traditionally-organized physics course around everyday occurrences ranging from bouncing balls to photocopy machines.
John Rigden of the American Institute of Physics, who previously sought to reform the introductory course in physics (see first page of our Winter 1989 issue), now sees a relevant role for reforming the entire bachelor's program in physics. Observing that America hasn't always been preeminent in science and reminding us that it may not always be so, Rigden saw in a set of 14 trends (he calls them "vectors") that the Pacific rim nations may challenge US scientific supremacy as US-trained Asian students return home to establish their own science departments (as European-educated Americans like Oppenheimer and Rabi once did in the US). This would also mean a decrease in the number of foreign graduate students and hence a significant decrease in the number of graduate students in physics in the US.
At the same time that the demand for graduate education in physics may dwindle, Rigden saw increasing importance for undergraduate training in physics. The impact of technology in the workplace requires higher skills of blue collar workers, he observed. For example, Ford's number of salaried employees has remained the same, but the percentage with engineering degrees increased from 1 in 6 (in 1985) to 1 in 3 (in 1995). Even now 40% of students earning the physics baccalaureate go directly into employment -- into diverse careers -- while only a third go on to graduate study (in physics). "We need to broaden the concept of what a physicist is and what a physicist does," counseled Rigden, given that "the needs of the workplace increasingly match the skills of the physics baccalaureate." The skills which he felt should be preeminent in a reformulated physics baccalaureate are 1) the human-made world, 2) decision making, 3) optimization, 4) modeling, 5) systems, and 6) feedback.
Interestingly, the August 1996 issue of Physics Today describes the physics department at Bryn Mawr College as succeeding in stressing the value of an undergraduate education in physics, just as Rigden suggests.
Home Fall 96 Full Screen
Fall 96 - Articles: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17The TEACHERS CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY EDUCATION