Lillian C. McDermott
37
History
3/15/10
Lezlie DeWater (in the early days) and Donna Messina (later) played pivotal roles
in our teacher education program.
Since joining the group full-time in 1999, Donna has
been a leader in the Summer Institutes and Continuation Courses.
She is an assistant
instructor in our preservice courses and manages our national and local workshops.
We
all have been assisted in many ways over the years by our Program Coordinators:
Joan
Valles, Karen Wosilait, and Nina Tosti.
From about the mid-1990s onward, Paula, Peter, Stamatis, and I shared supervision
of our Ph.D. students.
At first I was the official advisor for all of them.
While I have
continued to be on all of the Supervisory Committees, Paula and Peter have become the
primary advisors of our more recent students.
Our group also supervises research by
students in the M.S. program in Applied Physics and by students in the Department’s REU
(Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program.
83,84
Over the years, the UW Physics Education Group developed a strong sense of
identity. Mark and I enjoyed hosting many parties to honor special accomplishments (
e.g.
,
success on a qualifying exam or defense of a dissertation) and to celebrate other occasions.
VI.
Building a Research Base for Curriculum Development:
Examples
Following are two examples of investigations from different periods in our group’s
history.
The first informed the development of
PbI
.
Both contributed to the research base
for the tutorials.
These examples and those in Section VII involve more technical details
than the rest of the monograph.
It is possible to proceed directly to Section VIII without
loss of continuity.
Student understanding of kinematics in one dimension was selected as an example
because of the importance of position, velocity, and acceleration as a foundation for the
study of all of mechanics.
The impulse-momentum and work-energy theorems were
chosen as the second example to provide a context for illustrating the importance of
examining not only the answers that students give but also the reasoning that they have
used.
In addition to specific conceptual and reasoning difficulties, both examples – one
82
See V.c. in the Endnotes for other post-docs who later became faculty at other institutions.
83
See V.d. in the Endnotes for the Applied Physics M.S. students who later became college faculty.
84
See V.e. in the Endnotes for the REU students whose research projects we supervised.
Lillian C. McDermott
38
History
3/15/10
from kinematics and the other from dynamics – demonstrated the inability of many
students to relate basic concepts in mechanics to motions that they observe.
A.
Kinematics:
Confusion of Position, Velocity, and Acceleration
85
David Trowbridge asked students to observe and compare the motions of two
identical steel balls as they rolled on adjacent tracks.
A strobe photograph shows the
positions of the balls at instants separated by equal time intervals.
(See the diagram.)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Speed Comparison Tasks 1 and 2.
In Speed Comparison Task 1, Ball A travels with uniform motion from left to right
while Ball B travels in the same direction, starting from rest at a point ahead of Ball A.
Ball A first passes Ball B but is later passed by Ball B.
The students are asked if the two
balls ever have the same speed.
(The students are not shown the strobe photos or graphs.)
In Speed Comparison Task 2, Ball A starts with a larger initial speed and moves up
the incline.
It never overtakes Ball B, which accelerates down the incline.
When asked
85
See Refs. 18 and 23.
