Abstract:

While lecture demonstrations remain one of the very few (sometimes the only one) vehicles to bring a real-world connection to a large-enrollment introductory science courses, experienced educators know that merely showing the demonstrations during the traditional lectures has very little, if any, effect on students’ learning of the concepts involved. In order to make a significant impact, the demonstration needs to be embedded into students’ activities and to be reinforced repeatedly. Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs)[1] method that was developed by Sokoloff and Thornton for teaching physics has proven to be very effective in combating students misconceptions. This approach emphasizes active learning and employs elicit/confront/resolve cycle where the students are required to make written predictions before they see a demonstration, then observe the demonstration, and have to reconcile their ideas with the results of the experiment after the experiment is completed. However, a common complain about using ILDs in large classes is that the written predictions need to be marked or at least recorded for credits. Our approach combines Peer Instruction (PI) pedagogy with ILDs protocol, where the clicker questions are designed to probe students’ understanding of the underlying concepts and to collect the predictions about the experiment to be performed, as well as the result of the follow-up questions after the experiment and the discussion that follows. Although the research show that clicker-based ILDs are not as effective as the traditional ILDs with written predictions, we find that asking clickers questions related to the demonstration is an acceptable alternative to the standard ILD procedure, in particular, for large-enrollment classes. We will provide several examples of lecture demonstrations and follow-up activities for introductory physics topics involving (but not limited to) the use of probes/sensors for real-time data acquisition as well as motion video analysis.

References:
[1] D.R. Sokoloff, R.K.Thornton (2006). Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, Active Learning in Introductory Physics, Wiley.

Keywords:

Active Learning, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, Clickers, Video Analysis.