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Interactively engaging students can significantly help them understand key concepts [Hake 1998]. Additionally, students are most likely to recall the first five minutes of a presentation [Burns 1985]. Capitalizing on both of these, we altered the beginning of PHYS 272 (ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC INTERACTIONS) recitation to include a series of qualitative, “tiered,” iClicker questions that interactively engage students and socratically teach fundamental principals in electricity and magnetism.

The series begin with a question that most students comfortably and correctly answer. Successive questions increase in difficultly and the series stops with most students struggling to identify the correct answer. Along the way, the teaching assistant explains the validity of the correct answer and the shortcomings of the wrong answers. Thus tiered questions are valuable to a wider range of the different levels of conceptual understandings present in the students of each recitation [Keller 2007]. Students who struggle benefit at the beginning and experts at the end.

After the iClicker introduction, and now armed with a fuller qualitative understanding, the students work collaboratively in small groups on quantitative problems that employ the same principals. PHYS 272 is a foundational course with a typical yearly enrollment over 500. It’s our goal to demonstrate that qualitative, tiered introductions coupled with quantitative collaborative work positively impacts student’s overall learning gain measured by the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment. If successful, linking qualitative with quantitative instruction could benefit the thousands of students who take PHYS 272 in the years to come.

References:

Burns, R. A. (1985). Information Impact and Factors Affecting Re- call. Presented at Annual National Conference on Teaching Excel- lence and Conference of Administrators, Austin, TX, May 22–25, 1985. (ERIC Document No. ED 258 639)

Hake, R. R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods : A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66 (May 1996), 64–74.

Keller, C., Finkelstein, N., Perkins, K., Pollock, S., Turpen, C., Dubson, M., … McCullough, L. (2007). Research-based Practices For Effective Clicker Use. AIP Conference Proceedings, 128–131. doi:10.1063/1.2820913

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Qualitative, Tiered, iClicker Recitation Introductions

Interactively engaging students can significantly help them understand key concepts [Hake 1998]. Additionally, students are most likely to recall the first five minutes of a presentation [Burns 1985]. Capitalizing on both of these, we altered the beginning of PHYS 272 (ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC INTERACTIONS) recitation to include a series of qualitative, “tiered,” iClicker questions that interactively engage students and socratically teach fundamental principals in electricity and magnetism.

The series begin with a question that most students comfortably and correctly answer. Successive questions increase in difficultly and the series stops with most students struggling to identify the correct answer. Along the way, the teaching assistant explains the validity of the correct answer and the shortcomings of the wrong answers. Thus tiered questions are valuable to a wider range of the different levels of conceptual understandings present in the students of each recitation [Keller 2007]. Students who struggle benefit at the beginning and experts at the end.

After the iClicker introduction, and now armed with a fuller qualitative understanding, the students work collaboratively in small groups on quantitative problems that employ the same principals. PHYS 272 is a foundational course with a typical yearly enrollment over 500. It’s our goal to demonstrate that qualitative, tiered introductions coupled with quantitative collaborative work positively impacts student’s overall learning gain measured by the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment. If successful, linking qualitative with quantitative instruction could benefit the thousands of students who take PHYS 272 in the years to come.

References:

Burns, R. A. (1985). Information Impact and Factors Affecting Re- call. Presented at Annual National Conference on Teaching Excel- lence and Conference of Administrators, Austin, TX, May 22–25, 1985. (ERIC Document No. ED 258 639)

Hake, R. R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods : A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66 (May 1996), 64–74.

Keller, C., Finkelstein, N., Perkins, K., Pollock, S., Turpen, C., Dubson, M., … McCullough, L. (2007). Research-based Practices For Effective Clicker Use. AIP Conference Proceedings, 128–131. doi:10.1063/1.2820913