Overview: Text delivery in introductory college and university physics classes are dominated by massive, encyclopedic textbooks that take immense individual efforts to create but which few students read with any care or with much impact on their learning. Physics education research suggests active learning is much more effective. How can a text be transformed to be more effective as a component of an active learning environment?

A collection of coordinate research-based active-learning materials, attempting to demote the text from dominant element to a peer among equals.

Graphs and figures in the text reflect the active-learningcomputer tools used by the student in lab, tutorial, or workshop.

Narrative / Text

InteractiveLectureDemonstrations

Computer-basedConceptual

Laboratories

Group-learningTutorialWorksheets

Full-labworkshopenvironment

“Thinking Problems”collection and resource materials

Teacher’sguide andphilosophy

the Physics Textbook

in an Learning Era?

WhitherWither

ActiveInteractive

Edward F. Redish, Department of Physics, University of Maryland

Overview: The web is changing how we deliver and interact with textual information. The way people interact with the web is different from the way they interact with books. The electronic and graphical structure of the web also opens many more possibilities for the delivery of information over the web. How does this effect the way we can and should deliver text information in the future?

Web interactivity offers many opportunities for text delivery that normal publishing does not.

Links to active and active-learning components like those shown at the left

videoclips calculational and graphing tools programs for modeling or data collection

New modes of text delivery organizing complex materials in non-linear ways

New modes of text development involving large teams in a development creating non-synchoronous, evolving materials

Wikipedia is an example of a web document that permits an entire communityto take part in developing text for a knowledge base.

We can imagine teams of developers that interact to create (perhaps non-synchronously) an on-line “text”. Current Wikis tend to be “encyclopedic” rather than “pedagogic.” This needs to change if Wikis are to replace textbooks in the near future.

The web permits delivery of non-linearly structured text. This may allow more effective organization of complex material or quickly lead students to become “lost in hyperspace.”

Shown here are some materials planned for online-delivery for a course on Intermediate Methodsin Mathematical Physics at the University of Maryland.

A focus on overview and relationships may be able to help students navigate a complex intellectual structure. Can explicit process and epistemological goals be combined with visualizations to solve the “lost in hyperspace” problem?

Students in Activity-Based Physicsactive-learning environments usecomputer tools to take high qualitydata quickly and easily in lab, tutorial, or workshop.

Figures in the text that represent data are not created by graphical artistsbut by the same tools the students use.

Students in Activity-Based Physicsactive-learning environments usevideo data together with tools for extracting and processing datafrom video such as Videopoint. Text figures are created to makethe connection to these studentactivities.

Some ways to make a text more intellectually interactive:

1. Take an epistemological orientation – Instead of simply stating results, a text can try to begin where the student is beginning and work through reasoning that takes one to the desired conclusion.

2. Provide well-chosen “stop and think” problems – Include frequent “reading exercises” that challenge well-known student preconceptions and are good starting points for a class discussion.

3. Remove the chapter summaries and help students learn to build their own --- This is one of the most effective tasks in learning to organize the knowledge one is developing. Giving such summaries discourages the student from carrying out this valuable exercise.

4. Model problem solutions but not algorithmically -- Teaching students that problems should be approached by rote without sense making is the wrong message. Model solutions should include thinking about problem structure and mechanism, use of basic principles, and evaluation of the plausibility of the result.

5. Offer a rich variety of problems – Too often physics texts offer problems that are either too simple (exercises) or too hard (complex problems requiring a high level of expertise). We include a wide variety, including

-- conceptual questions, -- essay questions, -- estimation problems (Fermi questions), -- representation translation problems, and -- context rich problems.