AAPT PERC papers

R. E. Scherr, H. G. Close, S. B. McKagan, and E. W. Close, “‘Energy Theater’: Using the body symbolically to understand energy,” submitted to C. Singh, M. Sabella, and S. Rebello (Eds.), AIP Conf. Proc. (2010 Physics Education Research Conference)

E. C. Kahle, R. E. Scherr, and H. G. Close, “An evolving model for seeing colored objects; A case study progression,” submitted to C. Singh, M. Sabella, and S. Rebello (Eds.), AIP Conf. Proc. (2010 Physics Education Research Conference)

H. G. Close, L. S. DeWater, E. W. Close, R. E. Scherr, and S. B. McKagan, “Using the Algebra Project method to regiment discourse in an energy course for teachers,” submitted to C. Singh, M. Sabella, and S. Rebello (Eds.), AIP Conf. Proc. (2010 Physics Education Research Conference)

E. W. Close, H. G. Close, S. B. McKagan, and R. E. Scherr, “Energy in action: The construction of ideas in multiple modes,” submitted to C. Singh, M. Sabella, and S. Rebello (Eds.), AIP Conf. Proc. (2010 Physics Education Research Conference)

"Parents Of Nasal Learners Demand Odor-Based Curriculum"

Sometimes teachers get excited about Energy Theater because they feel it addresses the needs of "kinesthetic learners."  The idea that teachers should provide instructional activities that serve a variety of learning styles is popular, but recent research (summarized nicely by sciencegeekgirl) indicates that your measured learning style mainly tells you whether you like a certain kind of activity more, not whether you learn more from it.  Embodied cognition suggests that we are probably all more "kinesthetic learners" than we have tended to admit.

The Onion spoof whose title I pillaged is savagely funny.

AAPT talks

SPU team members gave a suite of talks about the Energy Project, and Stephanie Chasteen (aka sciencegeekgirl.com) liveblogged them.  I also gave an invited talk in a session in which multiple researchers analyzed the same video episode, which also had to do with student thinking about energy, and you can read about that too.  I am impressed with her summaries!  

Conceptual Metaphor Meets Conceptual Change

I'm sure you are already aware of this paper by Tamer Amin. I wanted to post about it anyway. The thing is, I'm not even through with it, yet, but I felt this urge that I have to share my opinion about it. This paper just nails it! In my opinion, Amin does what Swackhamer tried but never really achieved... He presents a very nice review of physics education research on the concept of energy. Then he does a proper analysis of the naïve and scientific concepts of energy, grounded in conceptual metaphor research (by Lakoff and Johnson), and talks a little bit about conceptual change and pedagogical implications. I am tempted to call this paper THE paper on energy...

But judge for yourself: Here or if you can't download the article there, try this.

ABSTRACT:

This paper argues that the metaphorical representation of concepts and the appropriation of language-based construals can be hypothesized as additional sources of conceptual change alongside those previously proposed. Analyses of construals implicit in the lay and scientific use of the noun energy from the perspective of the theory of conceptual metaphor are summarized. The experientially grounded metaphorical construals identified in both uses help conceptualize the shift from the concrete, naïve to the abstract, scientific understanding of energy. The case of the concept of energy motivates the more general hypothesis that an important part of learning a highly abstract (even mathematical) concept is the appropriation of experientially grounded metaphorical construals implicit in scientific discourse. Pedagogical implications of this proposal are discussed.

Differences between this year and last year

I was completely blown away by what I saw in the Energy Project workshops last summer. They were truly revolutionary and ground-breaking, engaging the teachers in real inquiry and discovery, not just about scientific content, but about the scientific process and the learning process. These workshops were like nothing I had ever seen, and changed my whole perspective about what education is all about. Hunter and Eleanor were truly masterful in facilitating an open-ended inquiry process to help teachers build up their own ideas about not just content, but the processes of science, teaching, and learning. This process was incredibly empowering for the teachers. Rachel and I observed many instances of them thinking about science in rich and sophisticated ways, and reflecting on their own thinking and learning process as well as their empowerment.

Many of the people involved in this project, including me, have participated in the Summer Institute at the University of Washington, a PD program for teachers that uses a curriculum called Physics by Inquiry (PBI). PBI uses an inquiry-based process to help teachers develop their own understanding of physics content ideas. But it is not at all inquiry-based about process. There is a method, there are rules, and you must follow the rules. For example, you must build up everything from scratch, so you are not allowed to bring in prior knowledge, and it is explicitly forbidden to talk about things like electrons that you can’t directly observe, or to go look up things from external sources of authority. There are good reasons for these rules, and they really do help teachers develop a deeper understanding of both content and process. But it’s a little ironic that these rules are given by Direct Instruction.

Before last summer, I saw PBI as a model for inquiry-based instruction, and while I had nagging doubts about many aspects of it, I couldn’t really articulate what I thought would be better. Seeing the Energy Project in action completely changed all that. At the beginning, teachers drew on all sorts of prior knowledge, sources of authority, and methods of knowing. The instructors didn’t correct them, but carefully guided them through a process of building up their own knowledge of energy. And by the end, with nobody explicitly telling them to do so, these elementary teachers, with no background in science, were making sophisticated arguments about why we needed to use evidence in our explanations rather than taking things from authority. They were developing all the rules of PBI on their own, not as dogma, but as practical guidelines for deep learning.

This summer, I saw some of this, but I saw a lot more telling the teachers the answers to content questions, whether they had asked or not, and a lot less letting them grapple with things on their own. They did still grapple, and they certainly still had a perception that they had figured out a lot on their own, but from my perspective, in which I was comparing it to last year, it didn’t seem like enough. On the last day of this summer’s workshop, particularly in the poster session, I did see them questioning authority quite a bit, but I also saw them deferring to authority and expecting the instructors to give them the answers rather than trying to figure them out on their own. Overall, this summer seemed much more structured and top-down than last year.

On the other hand, the Energy Theater was way better this year. Last year, particularly in the elementary teachers’ course, the instructors were still figuring out the details of Energy Theater (back then it was called Energy Dance), and it never really moved past being a fun kinesthetic activity into what it is now: a disciplined workspace for solving physics problems. Last year teachers had fun with Energy Theater, but it wasn’t clear that they learned much from it. This year, thanks to a refinement of the rules and Hunter’s “Action to Writing” worksheet that forces them to come up with a written representation of what they just did, Energy Theater was a much more disciplined activity for the teachers.

But it still needs to go further. I think the teachers learned a lot from Energy Theater this week, but I don’t think their students will. They learned content, but they didn’t learn enough about the process of what makes Energy Theater work and why. When they talked about doing it with their students, they turned it back into a fun kinesthetic activity, taking out many parts that are critical for learning and adding many confusing elements. I think there are two main reasons for this: 1. They don’t know what the critical aspects of ET are that make it work. 2. They don’t have enough confidence in their students’ ability to engage in a sophisticated scientific learning process. The next step in the development of Energy Theater as a pedagogical model will be to address these two issues.

Maybe Swackhamer was right after all...

Here is an episode in which a teacher struggles to understand what exactly is meant by “electromagnetic energy.” What I observe in this episode is that this teacher has learned a lot of names of “forms” of energy, but doesn’t really have a physical picture of what these forms mean. He is trying to build that physical picture, but is really struggling.

I think this is exactly the kind of thing Swackhamer is complaining about when he says that the idea of “form” is meaningless. I argued in this post that the idea of form is useful as a shorthand for the description of what is physically happening in the system. But if form is just a label and there is no physical picture behind it, it is indeed meaningless. This is yet another example of people mistaking the representation for the thing it represents, like manipulating equations without realizing that they are just representations.

I was discussing this with Eleanor at lunch yesterday and she pointed me to the following national standards for what students should learn about energy:

• Energy appears in different forms and can be transformed within a system. Motion energy is associated with the speed of an object. Thermal energy is associated with the temperature of an object. Gravitational energy is associated with the height of an object above a reference point. Elastic energy is associated with the stretching or compressing of an elastic object. Chemical energy is associated with the composition of a substance. Electrical energy is associated with an electric current in a circuit. Light energy is associated with the frequency of electromagnetic waves. 4E/M4*
• Chemical energy is associated with the configuration of atoms in molecules that make up a substance. Some changes of configuration require a net input of energy whereas others cause a net release. 4E/H4*

I’m glad there are standards addressing the physical meaning of different forms of energy, but I don’t think the phrase “is associated with” is specific enough. I think these sentences ought to read more like, “Motion energy means that an object has speed. Thermal energy means that the molecules of an object are moving (and more motion means higher temperature). Gravitational energy means that object is separated from the Earth.” Etc.

Maybe we need to add something to the Energy Theater worksheet that explicitly addresses this. Something like: “Describe what physical thing is represented by each of the types of energy in your scenario.”

I’m sure that somehow I could write a paper about this issue.

Final Presentations

The teachers spent a considerable amount of time over the last few days planning concrete ways in which they would use the material from this workshop in their classes next year. At the end of the workshop, they all gave presentations to the whole class about their plans. I was very curious to hear what they would say in these presentations, since I have seen them planning some questionable activities in their small groups. (This post gives a pretty typical example.)

In the end, the presentations were deeply unsatisfying. After watching them all, I really had no idea what any of them were really going to do in their classrooms. Most of the groups came up with lessons for different topics that were roughly modeled on what had happened in the workshop. They said things like: We're going do something like the Algebra Project, where we go on a field trip, and then talk about people talk and feature talk, and then we're going to do Energy Theater. But they didn't say what they meant by "something like the Algebra Project" or "do Energy Theater." What I had seen in their small groups was that when they talked about doing Energy Theater with their classes, they often thought that what we consider critical aspects, like letting students develop their own representations, were too hard for their students, and they were really dumbing it down to make it easier for their students. There were two groups whose presentations including actually acting out the "Energy Theater" that they would do with their students, and both groups had people representing both energy and objects. When Lane asked the director for one of them whether she was going to talk to her students about the distinction between energy and objects, she said, "Absolutely!" but didn't explain how.