Minds-On Physics: learning by involvement
Learning by doing is fine, but it's limited if your mind isn't involved as well. That's the premise of Minds-On Physics, a National Science Foundation-supported high school physics curriculum finishing its third year of development by William Leonard, William Gerace, Robert Dufresne, and Jose Mestre of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Based on the synthesis of cognitive research results, Minds-On Physics focuses on preconceptions and the progression that is necessary to make the transition from novice to expert. It begins by asking students to explore their existing conceptions, encouraging them to use their own words, collaborating with others. Students are then asked to hone, link, and cluster their concepts -- by using many representations and exploring different contexts with the same concept. They then proceed to use the concepts to analyze and reason, with open-ended questions -- several of them on the same concept. By organizing, prioritizing, and interrelating, students then structure their knowledge. Finally, students develop problem solving skills by explaining how to solve problems and doing it in different ways.
What this boils down to is involving the student integrally, at every step of the way, in the learning process. "From a constructivist perspective, real learning can occur only when the learner is actively engaged in operating on, or mentally processing, the incoming stimuli," Gerace has said. Minds-On Physics seeks to involve students in their learning via eleven instructional modes, many of them cited in the stages of conceptual development in the preceding paragraph: 1) Using multiple representations, 2) Making forward and backward references, 3) Exploring extended contexts, 4) Comparing and contrasting, 5) Classifying and categorizing, 6) Predicting, 7) Explaining, 8) Generating multiple solutions, 9) Planning, justifying, and strategizing, 10) Reflecting, and 11) Metacommunicating.
Perhaps the most unique and important of all these instructional modes is the last, which the developers of Minds-On Physics define as "the process of communicating about communication, about learning, about teaching, about problem solving, about the whole educational endeavor." "Students should be told the purpose behind an activity they continue. "Create categories; tell students you're creating categories; discuss why categories are useful." Above all, the developers of Minds-On Physics emphasize that "to learn physics (or any complex subject) students must become self-invested and self-motivated. Metacommunication gives them a sense of why they are studying physics and where the subject is going. They must be exposed to other people's models of how to approach the subject. They must be informed of common pitfalls and misinterpretations. They must be told that they should restructure their knowledge. Metacommunication is the mode by which these issues are addressed in the classroom."
A hundred Minds-On Physics activities have now been developed in mechanics. They involve minimal reading (only one page each). These activities plus a teacher guide (containing 7 pages per activity) are scheduled for publication by Kendall/Hunt in January 1998. More information about the Minds-On Physics project is available from Bill Leonard, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Lederle Graduate Research Tower, University of Massachusetts, Box 34525, Amherst, MA 01003-4525, (413)-545-0442 or 3774, FAX: (413)-545-4884, e-mail wjleonard@phast.umass.edu
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