Lillian C. McDermott
10
History
3/15/10
one of the gateway courses to a science, engineering, or medical career.
We would
continue to develop
PbI
, maintaining the intellectual rigor, while making it more
accessible to underprepared students and also more easily adaptable by teachers for use in
their classrooms.
When the proposal was funded in 1978, we instituted an EOP section of the course
that had been designed for preservice elementary school teachers.
Both sections were
taught by members of our group.
We were often assisted by visiting faculty, who thus had
an opportunity to gain experience in teaching by inquiry.
19
The content was the same in
both sections but the study habits of the EOP students were monitored throughout the
year-long course.
We telephoned them when they were absent, required them to attend
class, and organized study groups.
I remember telling the students that I expected them to
be in class every day because studying physics would help them more than anything else
they could do during that same time.
There were no dropouts from the course.
During the second year of the EOP course, the instructional staff included peer
instructors who had taken this course the previous year and who were then enrolled in
calculus-based physics.
I barely managed to wrangle some financial aid for them. I tried
to get support from local industry but the usual response was that the company had already
contributed to UW.
One way or another, I put together small stipends for the peer
instructors.
I enrolled them in a special second-year course, in which we prepared them
for their role as peer instructors and mentored them while they progressed through
introductory physics and other science courses.
We set as the goal for students who had
taken the EOP course a grade of B (3.0) or better in calculus-based physics, a higher
standard than most underprepared students had been previously able to meet.
Tracking
grade records was difficult, but we were able to demonstrate this level of achievement for
students whom we could track.
Peer instructors usually did better than others.
One earned
her physics Ph.D. with our group.
20
Another obtained his from the U. of Maine.
21
19
See II.b. in the Endnotes.
20
Luanna S. Gomez (now at Buffalo State College, SUNY) transferred to U. of New Mexico, where she
obtained a B.S. in physics.
She returned later to UW as a graduate student in our group.
21
Edward Prather had taken the EOP course as an older student who had avoided science and
mathematics.
See Refs. 131, 132, and Appendix E.
His advisor at U. of Maine was Rand Harrington,
who had earlier earned his physics doctorate with us.
Lillian C. McDermott
11
History
3/15/10
C.
Early Research and Curriculum Development
Mark Rosenquist examined student understanding in the EOP class in great depth.
He used his findings in the development of early versions of several modules in
Physics by
Inquiry,
especially
Properties of Matter
,
Kinematics
,
and
Heat and Temperature.
A
teaching sequence that Mark designed for the
Kinematics
module in
PbI
drew on Dave
Trowbridge’s work and illustrates how research can sometimes guide instruction in a very
direct way.
22
The insights gained from Mark’s investigation extended well beyond
academically disadvantaged students.
It was sometimes easier to identify conceptual and
reasoning difficulties among EOP students than among those with stronger verbal and
mathematical skills.
When we probed more deeply, however, we almost always found
similar difficulties.
Some of these, as well as strategies to address them, are described in
Mark Rosenquist’s dissertation (1982) and in two articles in
AJP.
23
My work in the EOP physics course
led to an invitation to the 1979
GIREP
Conference at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
24
Uri Ganiel (then Head of the
Department of Science Teaching) asked me (doubtless at Arnold’s suggestion) to give a
plenary lecture on teaching underprepared students.
It was my first invited talk and also
the first time that I had ventured beyond North America.
Since Athens was on the way
home, I suggested that the family meet me there.
The five of us spent two wonderful
weeks in Greece, a country that I had always hoped to visit.
25
Our group taught the course for academically disadvantaged students for about ten
years, during which I received the
1983
Affirmative Action Award
from the Seattle Urban
League.
Mark Rosenquist, Leonie, and I collaborated on
a set of
three articles in the
Journal of College Science Teaching
on helping underprepared students succeed in
science.
26
Upon receiving a large NSF grant for this purpose, the College of Engineering
22
See Section VI.A.
23
M.L. Rosenquist and L.C. McDermott, “A conceptual approach to teaching kinematics,”
Am. J. Phys.
55
(5), 407 (1987); L.C. McDermott, M.L. Rosenquist, and E.H. van Zee, “Student difficulties in
connecting graphs and physics: Examples from kinematics,”
ibid
.
55
(6)
,
503 (1987).
See Section VI.A.
24
GIREP
is the French acronym for
Groupe International de Recherche sur l’Enseignement de la Physque
or
International Research Group on the Teaching of Physics.
This was the first international event at
which I met physicists not from the U.S. who were conducting studies on conceptual understanding.
25
This experience set a precedent for some later post-conference trips.
See examples in Appendix B.
26
L.C. McDermott, L. Piternick, and M.L. Rosenquist, “Helping Minority Students Succeed in Science: I.
Development of a curriculum in physics and biology; II. Implementation of a curriculum in physics and
