As a result of decades of work in the physics education research (PER),
the physics community has successfully demonstrated programs that
ignificantly improve student understanding. At the same time there is
less of an understanding of what it means to replicate and sustain these
reforms. Are we bound to the same limited success as reforms developed
earlier in the 20th Century? This talk will discuss a variety of
effective classroom practices and surrounding educational structures, and
begin to examine why these do (and do not) work. The talk then examines
what it means to replicate proven reforms and to develop models for
sustainable implementation of educational reform in physics. As part of
the Colorado Physics Teacher Education Coalition and an NSF CCLI grant,
our research group has implemented a number of PER-based reforms in our
introductory sequence[1].
I introduce some of these programs, present
empirical data on the success and fidelity of implementation of the
reforms, and develop theoretical frames for analyzing these data. A key
factor in the program success is Colorado's Learning Assistant
program[2]
which enables these course transformations, while simultaneously
increasing the pool of talented physics teachers and explicitly valuing
teaching and education within physics.
[1] N.D. Finkelstein and S.J. Pollock, (2005). Replicating and Understanding Successful Innovations: Implementing Tutorials in Introductory Physics" Physical Review, ST:PER, 1,1, 010101.
[2] V. Otero, N.D. Finkelstein, S.J. Pollock and R. McCray, (2006). Who is Responsible for Preparing Science Teachers, Science, 313, 445.