Lillian C. McDermott
53
History
3/15/10
well as Honors students.
125
At Chicago State, Mel Sabella’s classroom observations and
pretest/post-test results suggested that underprepared students benefit.
126
Assessing
various tutorial environments at U. of Cincinnati, Bob Endorf showed that learning was
enhanced when TAs posed questions to help students find their own answers.
127
TIPERS: Electricity and Magnetism Tasks Inspired by Physics Education Research
is a curriculum that has been influenced by our research
.
Many of the tasks on electric
circuits and electrostatics are drawn from research by Steve Kanim (our former graduate
student).
128
Our tutorials have inspired other faculty to create their own.
129
C.
Influence on Other Disciplines
The Physics Education Group actively supports discipline-based education
research among university students in other sciences by participating in conferences,
conducting workshops, and consulting on the development of instructional materials.
In
2005 I organized a Symposium on discipline-based education research for the AAAS
(American Association for the Advancement of Science).
Paula, Peter, and I have given
talks at other AAAS Symposia, the Biennial Conferences on Chemical Education (BCCE),
and meetings in the life sciences.
Paula Heron and David Meltzer co-organized a pair of
symposia in the summer of 2006, in which physicists spoke on PER at the BCCE
conference and chemists discussed chemistry education research at the AAPT meeting.
Our group has conducted several workshops for chemistry and biology faculty.
Peter worked with Rose McKenney (Pacific Lutheran U.) on geology curriculum.
Chris
Kautz
(Technical U. of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany) drew on his experience when he
125
H.V. Mauk and D. Hingley, “Student understanding of induced current: Using tutorials in
introductory physics to teach electricity and magnetism,”
Am. J. Phys.
73
(12), 1164 (2005).
126
M.S. Sabella, “Implementing
Tutorials in Introductory Physics
at an inner-city university in
Chicago
,”
in
Proceedings of the 2002 Physics Education Research Conference
, edited by S.
Franklin, K.Cummings, and J. Marx (PERC Publishing, NY, 2002), pp. 79-82.
127
K.M. Koenig, R.J. Endorf, and G.A. Braun, “Effectiveness of different tutorial recitation teaching
methods and its implications for TA training,”
Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res.
3,
010104 (2007).
128
C.J. Hieggelke, S.E. Kanim, D.P. Maloney, and T.L. O’Kuma, “
TIPERs: ELECTRICITY AND
MAGNETISM TASKS Inspired by Physics Education Research,”
Pearson Prentice Hall (Upper
Saddle River, NJ, 2006).
129
See, for example, M.C. Wittmann, R.N. Steinberg, and E.F. Redish,
Activity-Based Tutorials:
Introductory Physics, The Physics Suite, Volume I
(John Wiley, New York, 2004); B.S. Ambrose
and M.C. Wittmann,
Intermediate Mechanics Tutorials
http://perlnet.umaine.edu/imt/index.hml
.
Lillian C. McDermott
54
History
3/15/10
was a Ph.D. student with us to produce tutorials for engineering students.”
130
Probably
our greatest impact, however, has been in astronomy education through Ed Prather (U. of
Arizona), who had been a student in our
PbI
course and a TA in the tutorials while he was
at UW.
Ed has developed research-based lecture tutorials in introductory astronomy.
131,132
X.
Building a PER Community
The worldwide visibility of our group has helped generate interest in physics
education research at the university level.
133
When Roger Stuewer, the Editor of
AAPT
Resource Letters
, invited me to write a
Resource Letter
, I asked E.F. (Joe) Redish to
collaborate.
PER-1: Physics Education Research
was published in
AJP
in 1999.
134
The
Resource Letter
demonstrated the breadth of the field.
A.
National PER Community
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a lack of refereed journals in the U.S. that
welcomed papers on physics education research.
Although ours were accepted by
AJP,
we were concerned about the high rejection rate and worked with others to improve the
situation.
135
In 1999 a
Physics Education Research Supplement
with Joe as Editor was
added to
AJP
.
The current Editor, Jan Tobochnik, converted the supplement into a regular
130
C.H.
Kautz , “Tutorien zur Electrotechnik,” (Pearson Studium, Munich, 2009).
131
See Ref. 21 and Appendix E, in which Ed describes our group’s influence on his scientific career.
His Ph.D. advisor at U. of Maine was Rand Harrington, who had earned his Ph.D. with our group.
132
E.E. Prather, T.F. Slater, J.P. Adams, G. Brissenden, and the Conceptual Astronomy and Physics
Education Research (CAPER) Team,
Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy,
2
nd
ed. (Addison-
Wesley, San Francisco, 2007).
For validation studies, see E.E. Prather, T.F. Slater, J.P. Adams, J.M.
Bailey, L.V. Jones, and J.A. Dostal, “Research on a Lecture-Tutorial Approach to Teaching
Introductory Astronomy for Non-Science Majors,”
Astr. Ed. Rev
.
3
(2), 122 (2004).
133
For a brief history of physics education research that includes other groups, see R.J. Beichner, “An
Introduction to Physics Education Research,” in
Getting Started in PER
edited by C. Henderson
and K.A. Harper (AAPT, College Park, MD, 2009);
[
Reviews in PER
2
]
<
http://www.per-central.org/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=8806
>.
134
L.C. McDermott and E.F. Redish, “Resource Letter: PER-1: Physics Education Research,”
Am. J. Phys.
67
(9), 755 (1999).
135
By 2008 our group had published more than 50 papers in refereed journals, mostly in
AJP
.
