Modeling Instruction in California

At an all-girls school in Palo Alto, California, I saw a wonderfully successful example of pure Modeling Instruction employed in the ninth grade. I also saw the long term result of this approach in AP Physics C Seniors that had taken the Modeling course as Freshmen, and the results were equally impressive.

Before I visited this school, I'd been eager to see a wider variety of the different facets of the Modeling Instruction approach. Most Modeling-based classes consist of a great deal of whiteboarding, and I'd seen a few different examples of this process in my previous visits. But data-collection and analysis are central to the Modeling experience, and I had yet to witness such an activity this first hand. Due to a slight scheduling difference between different sections of the class, I got to see a variety of different activities throughout the day, including a "paradigm lab" where students collected ticker-tape data on an object undergoing constant accelerated motion.

The teacher at this school has been using Modeling for 10 years. He was trained at a workshop held at ASU, where Modeling was developed, and has employed the method at two different schools since then. When he first came to this school in Palo Alto, he was able to tell the administration from the outset that he planned to teach a full year of inquiry-based instruction in the ninth grade, including both the Modeling mechanics curriculum and the CASTLE curriculum in electricity and magnetism. He is only physics teacher at the school, and this made for a smooth transition into Modeling.

Nearly every unit in modeling begins with a "paradigm lab," during which students design their own method of collecting data on the relationship between two variables. One paradigm lab that falls early in the year, for example, asks students to collect and graph data on the weights of various known masses, thereby illuminating the linear relationship between mass and weight. To begin the unit on accelerated motion, the girls I observed devised a method of using a ticker tape timer to measure the distance traveled by a cart on an inclined plane as time passed. The girls then graphed distance vs. time on a set of axes using simple graphing software. This activity in itself is by no means unique to Modeling, but the role of the teacher was less traditional. Throughout the experiment, the teacher gave no instruction as to how the data being collected might be interpreted. These were the first moments that the phenomenon of acceleration was being studied in the course, but the term acceleration was not a part of the discussion. Since the class begins the unit with this lab activity, any subsequent work done in the unit can refer back to the data collected by the students. Any understanding of the topic being studied is developed by the students themselves as the data they've collected and observations they've made are discussed in class. Nature is permitted to speak first, and to speak directly to the students, free from the filter of a teacher's explanations. The role of the teacher is to facilitate the relationship between the students and the data they've collected, rather than presenting "knowledge" outright. The students were quite at home carrying out this experiment, and some seemed to appreciate the immediate differences between these data and the data they had previously collected on constant velocity motion. More rigorous analysis of these data would take place throughout the rest of the unit.

In a different section of this course, I witnessed students working for the first time with a method of analyzing motion that had recently emerged from their class discussion: interpreting the area under a velocity - time graph. The idea that this information could be physically relevant was, of course, suggested by the teacher himself, but he left it up to the the students to confirm that this analysis was indeed fruitful. Some girls saw the implications immediately, but some were suspicious of or uncomfortable with the method, and made comments such as, "This is weird..." or (more interestingly) "I don't see why area is important. Is the thing traveling around within that area of the graph? I thought it was going straight." I took these statements as a sign of the students' expectation that in order to use this analytical tool in their physics class, they should understand why the tool is relevant to the phenomenon they have observed. In other words, students had to convince each other that the method was useful. The organic manner in which this tool was introduced pulled out into the open students' confusion about this complex tool very early on, rather than burying that confusion or relegating it to a simple and grossly inadequate, "Can you explain that again?"

Almost all units in the Modeling mechanics curriculum begin with a paradigm lab asking the question, "What is the relationship between ____ and ____ ?" There is great power in the consistency of this format, because students are always interpreting new ideas within the familiar structure of graph analysis. As this teacher put it to me, "The question is always the same, but the physics is always different." For students in this course, it's always relevant, when performing an experiment, to graph the data and attempt to interpret the graph. This experience forms their core understanding of what science is, rather than the experience of reading a textbook, listening to a lecture, or solving a good ol' physics problem. During the AP C class that I observed, students three years older were asked to design a method to determine the relationship between the impulse on a cart (calculated as the area under a force - time graph of the cart as it's accelerated by a spring-loaded plunger, metal bumper, or even a ball of clay) and the change in momentum of the cart (calculated using a change in velocity, measured using one or more photogates). The structure of this lab was exactly the same as so many of the labs the students had carried out three years earlier in their ninth grade Modeling course. Likewise, students were charged with a similar task of interpreting the relationship between two quantities on their own. (The Fnet ∆t = m∆v relationship happens to be one of my favorites, as there are so many unbelievably great slo-mo videos to watch as part of a discussion about the idea that "more time can mean less force": !!! !!! !!! (sorry for the advertisement on that last one...))

This emphasis on analyzing a new relationship directly is not the only thing about Modeling that I've found impressive, but it seeing it first-hand on this visit was a new experience for me. The possibilities for expanding this format outside the scope of modeling were immediately clear to me, particularly through the lens of IB Physics, which I taught for three years. IB science places special emphasis on student-designed experiments investigating the relationship between an independent and dependent variable chosen by the students (relationships that my students studied include: the breaking force of a pasta strand as a function of time soaked in water, the resistance of a play-doh cylinder as a function of the mass of iron-filings mixed in with the play-doh, the launching distance of a trebuchet projectile as a function of counterweight mass). These experiments often yield unpredictable results that would never be found in a textbook, and students often experience great difficulty with the seemingly simple task of analyzing this new information. Using data-collection to introduce the fairly simple relationships that are a part of a normal introductory mechanics course, as the Modeling curriculum does, would certainly have improved my students' capacity to make conclusions about the more complicated relationships they encountered in these experiments!

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Using Technology with Ninth Graders

Technology can be put to use in ninth grade classes to great positive effect, but the complexity of this technology can sometimes obscure the reality of physical processes.

In February, I visited a private school in the San Francisco, CA, where physics has been taught in ninth grade for a little more than five years. The school is small, about 300 students total, and has taken a progressive stance in educating students not only in the content of the subjects they study, but also in ethics-centered "precepts" that concern each student's identity as a lifelong learner and citizen of a community that is larger than themselves.

The ninth grade physics class is taught by two different teachers through two largely different curriculums. The teachers cover much the same material using very different teaching methods. One teacher, who's method I will focus on here, uses a piece of software to integrate students' notes, homework, lab work, and other class activities into one document. Every student at the school is given an identical laptop, and this laptop is used extensively in the class. During the classes I saw, students used this piece of software to record notes on new concepts, record corrections to a homework assignment done, and access instructions to lab on sound, which itself utilized data collection hardware integrated with software on the students' laptops. (On the day I visited, the other physics teacher did not seem to make extensive use of the students' laptops.)

Students in this teacher's class do not use a textbook, and they do not carry a class notebook. The class is completely "paperless," to the extent that even individual homework assignments are uploaded to a server to be checked for completion by the teacher on the web. Since instructions for the day's lab existed only as an electronic document, most lab groups had at least two computers open: one to follow the lab instructions and one to collect data. This teacher remarked to me that he had not yet been able to explore what he saw as the the true potential of the medium. He envisioned a future for the class that was entirely centered around interactive work, using the notes software to provide structure to this experience. Students would be free to work at their own pace, independent from the class as a whole.

I was impressed by the complexity of the document this teacher has written for his students. This was, in effect, a vision of a textbook for the digital age: seamlessly integrated with computer simulations or data-collection software; unified to include content from both teachers and students, but segregated enough to identify one from the other; easily updated and revised to reflect modifications in the curriculum or mistakes found in the document.

However, when taking notes on a laptop in physics class, students can run into great difficulties in formatting. Notes in a physics class often involve heavy use of diagrams and equations, and representing these in a standard text editor can be difficult or confusing. This teacher had tried to address these issues by including into his document pieces of particularly crucial diagrams. One feature of the program made it possible to embed regions designed especially for free-hand drawing. Though this feature made it easier for students to draw arrows and other simple shapes, the whole process seemed quite awkward. Perhaps, with the inevitable arrival of touch-screen tablet PCs, this limitation of electronic notetaking will be eliminated.

One common downside of an increased emphasis on technology in a physics classroom is that the technology can obscure the physics. During this lab on sound, for example, students were using a computer microphone to automatically draw graphs of pressure versus time of the air around a vibrating tuning fork. At one point, students were instructed to change a time value in the settings for the program to allow them to see how the amplitude of the sound wave decreased as time passed. Depending on how students interpreted the instructions, they ended up with graphs that looked like one or the other of the following two graphs, both displayed over a time period of 4 seconds:

Slow Sampling Rate:
Fast Sampling Rate:

Though these graphs both show correct measurements of the same phenomenon, the graph on top was made using a "sample rate" of 0.03 seconds per sample, much too slow to represent the rapidly changing pressure of a sound wave. This misleading graph would lead one to believe that the tuning fork the made the sound was vibrating an an unreasonable 6 Hz. The graph on the bottom was made with a sample rate of 0.0005 seconds per sample, and correctly shows the uncountably high number of oscillations that take place over four full seconds.

As they took data, students looked around the room and compared their graphs to the graphs of the other students. Students whose graphs looked like the latter graph shown invariably concluded that they had made a mistake, since the graph didn't look like the "sine-shaped" sound wave graphs they'd previously seen. Because of confusion stemming from a simple error in setting up the software, student misconceptions about the connection between sound waves and the "sine-shaped" representations of these waves were unwittingly reinforced.

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Conversation with a NYC Public School Teacher

In December, I had a phone conversation with a New York City public school teacher about his experience with Physics First. This teacher had worked at the same school for seven years, and had seen the Physics First program there progress through a few different incarnations, the most recent being a promising course rooted in Modeling Instruction. This Modeling-based curriculum, however, existed for only a single year before the school switched their sequence of science classes away from Physics First back to teaching biology in the ninth grade. This decision, as well as a lack of administrative support for physics within the school, brought this teacher and a few others in his department to a decision to leave to school at the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

As he described it, the school's decision to reverse the sequence of science courses back to "biology first" was centered around administrative concerns over students' scores on the New York State Regents exam in biology. The "Biology/The Living Environment" Regents is a requirement for graduation designed to be taken by students at a ninth grade reading level. A school's performance on this specific test is scrutinized particularly closely by the state as evidence of a successful science program. In an effort to increase scores on this test, the school implemented a biology course in ninth grade as well as a tenth grade course, called "Biochemistry," directed toward preparing students to take the Living Environment Regents Exam at the end of the tenth grade. The Earth Science Regents class, most commonly taught in the tenth grade, is now taught to Juniors. In essence, the school restructured their science curriculum, and scrapped a successful Physics First program, in order to delay the taking of these two tests one full year so that students might do better on the tests.

I was able to find the Regents Exam results of this school online. In 2008, when Physics First was still in place, the percentage of students who passed the Living Environment test was indeed lower than the average for the state of New York (68% compared to 75%). The results for the "Physics/The Physical Setting" Regents, a test designed for eleventh graders and administered to ninth graders at this school, are quite low (42% passing, compared to a state average of 77%). Since the aforementioned curriculum changes were made just this year, no new test scores are available for comparison, but would an increase in biology scores mean that the science program is more successful? What about an increase in physics scores, for that matter?

We'd be right to be skeptical of any increase in test scores that come about as a result of curriculum changes like those instituted at this school. When test scores are being used to gauge the success of a course or a program, the program can certainly be modified to increase those scores, but do these changes really reflect our priorities as teachers? I was told by this teacher that he expects about 60 students a year to take physics at this particular school in this new sequence, down from 300 when the Physics First program was in place. Of course, one would expect this return to the classic paradigm of physics as a course for only the science-minded to result in higher scores on the Physics Regents at the school. But any increase in scores would simply show that fewer students were being exposed to physics, and that the students taking the class were two years older! (The teacher also mentioned that, at the beginning of that school year, his school had received boxes of equipment from two nearby high schools, which had closed their physics programs completely, in part as a result of the movemenet to dismantle large, failing schools and rebuild them as multiple smaller schools - more on this in a later post…)

In any discipline, emphasizing the results of a particular standardized test will skew the focus of the class toward this test, for better or for worse. In physics specifically, an increased emphasis on testing can encourage schools to abandon their physics class completely or relegate it to a course taken only by the top academic performers, simply because the physics test is perceived as more challenging. For Physics First, the lack of a standardized curriculum, let alone a standardized test, may make it difficult for passionate teachers to defend the quality of their program, but the solution to this isn't necessarily to develop a standardized physics test designed to be taken by Freshmen.

At a large public school I visited in New Jersey, the school demonstrates the effectiveness of their Physics First program using the FCI and the Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning. The state accepts this because the head of the science department at the school, along with other administrators, are committed to giving Physics First a chance as part of a school-wide sequential development of scientific thinking. As the teacher I spoke with in New York City put it to me, "If you don't have an administrator that believes in that, there's really not much you can do."

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CPO Physics First in Baltimore

In December, I drove down to Baltimore to observe a few Physics First classes in the Baltimore City Public Schools. There are about a dozen schools in Baltimore that made the switch to Physics First two years ago, and I visited two of them. It's taken me until now to process my visit thoroughly enough to say something concise and substantial about what I witnessed. Public schools in Baltimore are struggling, and teachers and administrators in the system are faced with great challenges every day. All the individuals I spoke with or wrote to are working hard to find creative solutions, and the implementation of Physics First should be seen through this lens.

As I understand it, in 2008 the central administration of the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) announced to individual high schools an opportunity to be a part of an experimental phase of Physics First implementation. The reasons for this push seem to be in a large part due to a need to prepare students for the Maryland State "High School Assessments" (HSA) in algebra and biology. It was thought that since physics provides good opportunities for application of algebra techniques, teaching physics earlier would better prepare students for this algebra test. The students' math skills are indeed one of the challenges faced by Baltimore's teachers. While watching students doing a lab on the reflection of a light ray off a plane mirror, I noticed that some students were experiencing significant difficulty measuring angles with a protractor. It was clear that activity was exposing them to real-world applications of math. Though I didn't notice any questions concerning angles on the sample HSA I looked through, I have no doubt that students' algebra skills are developed in the physics course. However, one teacher mentioned that she takes a full week away from her physics curriculum in January to do algebra test preparations, and hearing this made me a little uneasy. Physics class should be about learning physics, not about doing algebra.

The physics classes use Hsu's CPO Physics: A First Course, and its accompanying lab manual and equipment. Teachers at each school are expected to cover four of six possible units in the course. The CPO equipment is well-designed and very sturdy, but expensive, and each classroom had only enough equipment for four lab stations. Teachers seemed fairly satisfied with both the text and the lab book, but one felt that the text was far above the reading level of her students. My main criticism of the CPO course was that it reflects none of the insight that PER has gained into how students learn physics. The content of the course places emphasis on memorizing terms and methods, and the labs encourage students to simply follow the directions that have been laid out for them. On some level this exposure to physics concepts is certainly valuable, but Physics First offers a chance to do much more.

The two teachers I saw had very different approaches to classroom management. One teacher began each class with a "Do Now" activity, and rewarded students who were working on this problem with a stamp on an index card that could later be redeemed for small prizes. With the use of a projector (which she had purchased with her own money for use in her classroom!), she gave a short lesson, then demonstrated the procedure of the day's lab. With ten minutes of patient, attentive instruction, she was able to get the entire class working on a lab activity, and by the end of the class period every group had completed the lab. Though this activity was roughly one third of what CPO guidelines suggest could be completed in one class period, this teacher was familiar with the pace of her class and willing to work patiently to accomplish a realistic goal. The other teacher felt she could not allow students to work independently with the lab materials because the students would try to break the equipment. She has had problems with this in the past. Instead, students spent most of the class period copying lab instructions out of the lab book into a spiral-bound notebook, a trick she employs "to keep the class settled." She walked around the room with one set of lab materials and supervised closely while students carried out discrete steps of the procedure for few minutes at a time.

Though the methods used by the first teacher seemed more successful when compared to those of the second teacher, I don't think the CPO curriculum made it easy for either teacher to encourage students to feel ownership of the topics they were studying. In my view, this aspect of a student's experience is essential to true learning, and needs to be at the center of any physics class. It was obvious to me that both were extremely passionate, hardworking, teachers committed to passing on a love of science to their students. But in an environment where students are expected to memorize terms and follow abstract steps in a procedure without any internal motivation for doing so, it's up to the teacher to synthesize that motivation. Good teaching can certainly encourage motivation in students, and I'm not suggesting that a more student-centered curriculum would eliminate the need for effective classroom management. Students' lack of motivation (even active, very vocal resistance to the work being done...) was a challenge common to both these classes, and every teacher in every classroom employs their own methods for addressing this challenge. My experience teaching at a small New York private school was worlds away from what these Baltimore teachers face every day, but I believe that the idea that students must own their knowledge is common to all classrooms. Any Physics First curriculum that is to be truly successful on a wide scale must encourage students to actually experience a personal, intellectual connection to the material they're studying.

This is one thing that has continued to impress me about Modeling Instruction. Not only does Modeling employ a student-centered approach throughout every unit, but any teacher who is expected to teach a course using Modeling methods must undergo training to learn how to use this approach. Teachers of the CPO curriculum in Baltimore, in contrast, get one professional development day every year to learn how to use the lab equipment. (The first teacher I mentioned above had received more extensive training in science education from a school in Washington DC.) A lot of education reform these days seems to be centered around identifying good and bad teachers, but it seems to me that the effectiveness of a good teacher lies mostly in providing a framework of motivation for the students in their class. If the curriculum itself is able to engage students in a way that unleashes their own internal motivation, then training of teachers should be specifically designed to facilitate this process.

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Glossary

AAPT - American Association of Physics Teachers
AP Physics - a standardized curriculum of high school physic managed by the College Board, offered in three categories: A, B, and C
BCP - Biology, Chemistry, Physics - referring to the most traditional and common sequence of high school science classes where biology is taught in ninth grade (see PCB)
CASTLE - Capacitor-Aided System for Teaching and Learning Electricity - an approach to teaching Electricity and Magnetism, written by Melvin S. Steinberg and Camille Wainwright
ComPADRE - an online physics and astronomy education community
FCI - Force Concept Inventory - a diagnostic test used to gauge student understanding of Newtonian concepts of force and motion, originally developed by D. Hestenes, I Halloun, and D. Wells
IB Physics - a physics curriculum standardized for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
inquiry - an instructional method based in open learning, where students are led to discover concepts or phenomena by exploration and experiment, rather than being told an expected outcome explicitly
Lawson's Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning - a test developed by Anton Lawson to assess scientific reasoning skills, such as proportional reasoning and how to properly control variables
Modeling Instruction - a notably successful method of physics instruction categorized by inquiry-based labs and classroom discussions based around whiteboarding.  Originally developed at Arizona State University, Modeling is gaining in popularity and Modeling workshops are offered every summer in dozens of locations across the country.
MBT - mechanics baseline test - a diagnostic instrument designed to cover a wider range of applications than the FCI
operational definition - a definition of a term given in terms of a procedure that can be followed to determine its quantity or quality (ex: weight can be defined operationally as the value that is read on a spring scale when the object is hung from the scale in the absence of forces other than gravity and the force of the scale itself.)
paradigm lab - in Modeling Instruction, a lab designed to introduce a relationship between measurable variables, by investigating this relationship directly without explaining it or giving it a name
PCB - Physics, Chemistry, Biology - referring to a sequence of high school science classes where physics is taught in ninth grade (see BCP)
PER - Physics Education Research - "an area of pedagogical research that seeks to improve methods used to teach physics" (Wikipedia)
PhET - a marvelous collection of web-based interactive simulations used in science and math education
Physics First - a philosophy of science education based in the belief that physics should be taught in ninth grade, before chemistry and biology.
whiteboarding - a pedagogical technique in which large (2' x 3') whiteboards and dry erase markers are used by students to record a solution to a physics problem or results from a lab investigation
Physics Regents - a NY state-standardized test in high school physics
SDI Labs - Socratic Dialogue-Inducing labs are labs designed to encourage students to think like scientists and engage students creatively in constructing their own understanding of physics concepts
TPT - The Physics Teacher magazine, a monthly journal devoted to teaching physics at all levels

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Newton's 2nd Law Survey

I got myself into some trouble yesterday while out to breakfast with a few friends. Our conversation was perfectly civil until I brought up an idea for an informal research project I'd been curious about taking on to reveal common misconceptions about Newton's 2nd law. I'd been imagining walking the streets of New York City with a microphone and performing an informal survey of how people answer a question such as, "Why does an egg break against the floor when you drop it?"

My friends and I first discussed the logistics of such an operation: whether a person on the street is more or less likely to walk hastily away if the interviewer is wearing a lab coat and bow tie... or maybe even just holding a clipboard. We agreed that it would be important to record the audio, so I could go back and listen carefully to the wording of the answers.

I then gave my friends an opportunity to respond to the question in their own words, and this is where the trouble/fun began. I got a variety of answers, such as "the force of gravity collides with the force of the floor and the egg gets caught in the middle." I expanded the question to include an egg breaking when thrown against a horizontal wall, and these answers included "the egg is too brittle withstand the force of your throw when that force encounters the resistance of wall." I, unfortunately, did not record the audio, so I can't give you the precise responses, but the most relevant point here is that I felt that their answers reflected some common misconceptions about Newton's 2nd law.

However, when I revealed to my friends that they'd answered the question incorrectly, they all got very defensive. They felt that a) I had tried to trap them into giving incorrect answers by asking an unclear question, b) I had tempted them with incorrect reasoning by paraphrasing answers I knew were incorrect ("It sounds like you're saying..."), and c) I was nitpicking about the precise definitions of words like "force" and "inertia," rather than focusing on the conceptual validity of a response.

Their first two criticisms were certainly valid. My friends said afterward that they had been focusing on what aspects of the structure of the egg shell cause it to break, in contrast to "a steel egg." They felt that my clarifying questions interfered with their reasoning process unfairly, and that my facial expressions and tone of voice helped to convince them that these incorrect explanations were in fact correct. When they finally learned that this explanation was incorrect, they felt betrayed and angry. One friend remarked that treating a person on the street in this way might get me punched in the face.

The third criticism, however, is much more complicated. When I ask this question, I am most interested in whether the conceptual framework of the answer is correct: whether the individual is invoking the spirit of Newton's laws in their answer. However, I believe strongly that some mistakes in terminology do reflect actual flaws in understanding. If someone doesn't use the word "force" at all (the word push is equally valid in this context), I would certainly be satisfied with answer that was conceptually correct: The table had to push against the egg really hard to stop it quickly, and eggs break when they get pushed that hard. But is it possible for a conceptually valid answer to misuse the word "force" to mean inertia? I would say no, that if someone is using that same word "force" to describe the interaction between the floor and the egg, then this reflects true misunderstanding of the force concept.

If I'm actually going to go out on the street and ask people this question, I might need to change a few things:

• The question needs revision. For starters, an egg doesn't break when you drop it, it breaks with it hits the floor! Perhaps this prompt would be better: Imagine you drop a fragile object on the floor and it breaks. Describe the interactions between any objects involved that result in the breaking of the object.

• I'd need to shut my mouth and let people explain to their own satisfaction with no interference on my part. I imagine this is common practice for researchers collecting data in this way.

• I could ask for an explanation that did not use some words (force, acceleration, mass), so as to prevent confusions arising from confusions with these terms.

• I could ask a series of smaller, simpler questions to hone in more closely on where the misconceptions lay. This is the approach of a multiple choice diagnostic like the FCI, but this approach runs a risk of categorizing people's misconceptions too early in the process.

If I was able to collect adequate data, I could examine the relevance of each of these factors. Since I often use this question as an example of the validity of a conceptual approach to physics education, this would be worth pursuing. I'll keep you posted on my progress!

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Differentiated Instruction in Physics

Physics First provides opportunities for an interesting type of differentiated instruction, where students might arrive at a complex understanding of fundamental concepts through their exposure to a variety of experiences.

I just got back from a trip to Baltimore to observe Physics First classes. I had a chance to visit two of the fifteen Baltimore public schools now teaching CPO Physics First, but the details of this visit will have to wait until I have a chance to wrap my head around it somewhat!

In the meantime, though, I wanted to describe my experience at a monthly workshop for Baltimore physics teachers, called "Physics Works." Physics Works is a monthly gathering of physics teachers in the Baltimore public school system, and my trip happened to coincide with this month's meeting. The day's 2-hour workshop was based on planning differentiated instruction geared toward students' varied intelligences. (This idea was first suggested by Howard Gardner in 1983: humans exhibit multiple different types of intelligences: bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, musical, etc. An effective teacher can give students opportunities to participate in activities geared toward their personal strengths.) After discussing the varied strengths of the people in the room, we worked in small groups to complete the following task: develop a plan to teach Newton's laws that considers the multiple intelligences of students in a class.

Most groups in the room interpreted this task to mean providing students with a variety of assessments to choose from. These assessments could range from writing a physics rap to drafting a letter to Isaac Newton to analyzing of video footage from a football game. This is what the teacher running the workshop intended for us all to do, and she provided us with a handout on suggestions for creating a "menu" of options for students to choose from.

It took our group a while to notice this "menu" handout, and as a result our group interpreted the task to mean something very different. Instead of giving students a choice between assessment styles that might suit their strengths, we asked ourselves how we could exploit these intelligences to engage the students through different perspectives. We designed an activity on Newton's third law that began with students pushing each other outward in rolling chairs, to engage them through their bodies. We then imagined students breaking into smaller lab groups to discuss fictional students' interpretations of the results*, to engage them through words and conversation. Student might then work to design an experiment to collect quantitative data on mass and change in velocity with spring-loaded carts, to engage them through manipulating objects in space. This brought up a discussion of the link between logical-mathematical intelligence and spatial intelligence in data analysis using graphs and pictures, and so on.

What was exciting to me about this activity was that the concept of Newton's third law exists somewhere at the intersection of all these related activities. Students aren't just given the freedom to choose which types of activities they identify with more than others. Instead, they are expected to engage with the physics through each of the various activities, through areas of intelligence that they both excel at and struggle with. This seems similar to the multiple representations which lie at the heart of Modeling Instruction, discussed in the 11/17 post below.

When taken one-by-one, the "multiple intelligences" seem like a simplistic interpretation of human strengths and weaknesses, and indeed there is much to criticize in Gardner's theory. But perhaps the interaction between these intelligences is something to devote more attention to?



*These fictionalized discussions are used in Lillian McDermott and Peter Shaffer's Physics by Inquiry and Tutorials in Introductory Physics. These programs were developed by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, and they are both excellent. The format might look something like this for the activity discussed above:

Consider the following statements:

Student 1: A smaller student is always going to move faster because the larger student pushes them harder. Larger people are usually stronger than smaller people, so they have more pushing power.

Student 2: The recoil effect makes the person who did the pushing move backward, but this recoil never makes that person move faster than the person they pushed because their push is directed forward, not backward.

Student 3: Whenever two people interact, they push against each other exactly the same amount. A smaller person moves away from the interaction faster because they have less inertia, it’s easier for that same push to make them move.

Do you agree with any of these students? Explain.

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