College of Education
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1647
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Rethinking the division of labor between tutorial writers and instructors with respect to fostering equitable team dynamics(American Physical Society, 2020-12-04) Sabo, Hannah C.; Elby, Andrew[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper proposes the rethinking of the division of labor between physics education research curriculum developers and classroom instructors. Historically, both curriculum developers and instructors have taken responsibility for fostering students’ conceptual development, epistemological development, and other learning goals related to physics content knowledge and practices or process skills. By contrast, responsibility for fostering productive group dynamics has been taken up almost entirely by instructors. Tutorial and lab developers structure their materials to be used in small groups, but have not generally designed, tested, and refined their materials to minimize problematic group dynamics. In this paper, we argue that the written tutorial can and should do more to prevent negative group dynamics from arising. To make this claim plausible, we describe an example from our own experience. While revising a tutorial, we noticed some problematic dynamics emerging; one of the students was unfairly blamed for a simulation-setting mistake and was later left out of a conversation. We came up with hypotheses about factors that might have contributed to those dynamics. A few of those factors, we argue, could be addressed in part through tutorial revision. While acknowledging that instructors will always have more capacity and hence more responsibility than curriculum writers to foster productive group dynamics, we call for tutorial writers, during the testing and revision of their materials, to monitor how the tutorial impacts team dynamics and to be transparent (in publications and presentations) about how they modified the tutorial to address problematic dynamics they observed.Item Rethinking the relationship between instructors and physics education researchers(American Physical Society, 2020-12-04) Elby, Andrew; Yerdelen-Damar, Sevda[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In the “standard” physics education research curriculum-development model, researchers are cast primarily as producers of curricula and instructors are cast primarily consumers, i.e., adopters and adapters. We illustrate a complementary model in which researchers’ curricular modules, and also their “pure” research unattached to curriculum development, can serve as instructionally generative fodder that inspires and loosely guides instructors in creating their own curricular materials. Drawing on experiences from our graduate student days, we show how particular curricula and research papers influenced our curriculum development and instruction in particular ways. We then argue that the physics education ecosystem could benefit if researchers were more intentional about creating potential instructionally generative fodder, and we suggest ways to do so. Although not intended to replace the standard curriculum-development model, which has a history of producing effective tutorials and other curricular modules, our alternative model casts the researcher and instructor as co-equal contributors to the research-based yet creative process of curriculum generation.