Author: Marianna Ruggerio

Marianna is a nationally acclaimed and award-winning physics educator in Northern Illinois. She teaches AP and on-track physics, is a teacher-leader for the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools Partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a former APS STEPUP Advocate, and an active leader in the American Association of Physics Teachers. Marianna's interests lie in the intersection of the brain science (information processing theory) of learning and physics pedagogies.
ABCs of How We Learn… Y is for Yes I Can
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ABCs of How We Learn… Y is for Yes I Can

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

How many times have you heard a student claim “I’m not a math person.” Better yet, how many times have you heard a peer or colleuge say something to the same effect when you tell them you teach physics! It’s typically followed up with “you must be really smart” or “I’m not smart enough for ____”. Coaching our students through their low self-efficacy in physics is often one of the greatest initial challenges in our classrooms.

Albert Bandura writes, “Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbeleif assuredly spawns failure (1997). Bandura describes four factors that influence people’s self-efficacy: mastery experiences to build previous success, seeing others like you achieve similar goals, hearing that you can do this, and an awareness of the time and effort required to be successful. Of these four, three are also identified in the body of research around physics identities which are critical to persistence in physics classes. (We discussed some of this in the Belonging section). In addition to some of the activities listed there, engaging our students in the learning process is also important!

For 10 years the American Institute of Physics has put together a series of lesson plans that highlight a variety of underrepresented groups within the field (click here and scroll down) The lesson plans tie together physics content with the stories of various scientists that tell of their journey, struggles and success. Hearing these stuggles and seeing a variety of people represented are both critical features to supporting our students’ self-efficacy. It also provides a more-full picture of the history of our field. (Like my friend Elissa says, we are all teachers of history in our classrooms)

Another strategy that is helpful is when students can hear about success from a former student. For years I’ve had an alumni wall posted by my door to share their stories. A few years ago I was particularly concerned about the future of my AP Physics C enrollment. I specifically reached out to alumni who had taken AP Physics C and were in all walks of life to come and speak to my current students. It was one of the very few times I offered extra credit as a reward. On a personal level, I was not prepared for the joy that I experienced that day when a decade worth of former students showed up.

On a professional level I was so impressed by what happened next. I had students I hadn’t even considered might want to take AP Physics C eager to take the course! The panel was primarily focused on college and beyond, but I did let them know that course selection was on the horizon. After a 25 minute panel we broke out into small groups for engineering, healthcare and physics for students to have a more intimate conversation. This is an experience I’m particularly looking forward to bringing back next year at my new district. When I learned about the “Teach Yourself How to Learn” workshop from Aaron Titus, the power of student testimonials was also strongly iterated.

Lastly, I cannot undervalue the importance of each of us being that coach and support for our students. Finding any moment where our students are doing anything right and praising their efforts of working hard and finding a solution.

This is the last of the posts in this series about strategies for supporting student learning in physics as the final chapter in the original book is Z is for Zzzz The Importance of Sleep. Rhett Allain frequently shares that his primary reason for blogging is to remind himself of the things he’s done before. This project has been an opportunity for my own self-reflection on my practice. So often as educators we try and find things that work. At the same time we don’t always know the evidence behind it. When I attended institute day in April our EduInfluencer speaker said that his research showed educators could only name and describe three strategies. (Describe the actual science/evidence behind it). He said you won’t find this research anywhere because he doesn’t want to publish something that reflects back poorly on our profession. But this is something we need to be talking about in our professional circles! We need to have discussions grounded in evidence. We need to be ok with challenging each other when we are not working with the highest expectations of ourselves as professionals. We need to stop giving the public reason to believe we are replaceable by being able to knowledgeably talk about the art and craft of teaching as a rigorous field of science in the same way that we can talk about physics. If you’ve read 3, 5, 25 of this posts thanks for taking the ride with me this spring. I hope to connect with many of you at AAPT Pasadena!

ABCs of How We Learn… X is for eXcitement
Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… X is for eXcitement

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Engagement is one of those trendy buzz-words in education. From the Danielson Framework (domain 3) to SilverStrong to Marzano, engagement is a major focus of all of these evaluation tools and typically a “sell point” for curriculum packages and methods.

When Building Thinking Classrooms was gaining popularity, one of the frequent complaints from folks deeply embedded in the science of learning/explicit teaching was that the program looked like “engagement” but engagement doesn’t necessarily equal learning. While this statement in and of itself is certainly true, there are quite a few points to Building Thinking Classrooms that are right on point when it comes to the science of arousal and learning.

When we are aroused, engaged, excited our brains are primed for more learning. Researchers describe the relation between arousal and performance as the Yerkes-Dodson law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). While this law applies to known skills, it is transferrable to learning new ones as well. In short, when aroused we release cortisol which activates the fight or flight response but also impacts the way in which we process and store information. This process is ultimately why we have stronger memories tied to stronger emotional events. The science around emotions and learning is a bit murky, but we do know that when the mind is aroused there is, indeed, a measurable impact on learning.

Arousal can take many forms in the classroom, which might be anything as extreme as the teacher coming into class with a ridiculous costume or schtick that day, to an impressive demo or video, but it can also be less intense such as interacting with engaging questions, or incorporating kinesthetic movement into the lesson.

My one and only schtick of the year… the flying pig hat. I can actually make the wings flap!

From the lens of physics teaching, this brings us back to why an active learning environment is beneficial for our students and has been proven over and over again to be more effective than lecture alone. An active classroom takes advantage of arousal to our learner’s benefit.

Coming back to Building Thinking Classrooms let’s take a look at some of the micro-moves and paradigm shifts that leverage arousal:

  • A lesson typically starts with an engaging story or interesting problem. In the ABCs of How We Learn, Schwartz, Tsang and Blair explain that arousal helps us consolidate focal information, and pushes out nonfocal information. The bits of the story which are applicable to the problem itself are most likely to be retained.
  • In a BTC lesson students never sit down. You’ve probably heard of “brain breaks”. Since whiteboards are vertically mounted, student bodies are now in an active, rather than passive position. This requires the biophysical response int he body for action, which requires a certain level of arousal.
  • A BTC lesson involves not only working in pairs or triads, but the cross-pollination of ideas from other groups. Research has shown that people perform better in social situations. The design of a BTC leverages the social aspect, while the carefully crafted consolidation phase reduces any negative anxiety that would be present in a “typical” classroom where students are called upon to give their answers for their own work.

When I started this project the initial motivator was our EduInfluencer keynote speaker. He made the claim that in his research the average teacher could only accurately name and explain three strategies. Today marks the 24th post in which I’ve explained the science of learning and then matched each topic with one or more classroom strategies.

Very, very often when teachers select an idea, tool or strategy for the classroom the reason they share they love it is because “it gets the kids engaged and they have so much fun”. We need to recognize that in the ongoing battle for the respectability of our profession, that line of reasoning is weak and harmful to us as professionals. Tools we choose that are “so much fun” are effective because tools which excite and engage our students activate the arousal systems in the brain, which change the way the brain receive, processes and encodes new information and subsequently increases the strength of the neurological pathways and the amount of knowledge retained. Let’s continue to have conversations about our work that can only be adequately criticized if done with additional evidence.

ABCs of How We Learn… W is for Worked Examples
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ABCs of How We Learn… W is for Worked Examples

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Towards the begining of this series we talked about Deliberate Practice, which is practice that is effortful, focused, and with a goal of ironing out the parts that aren’t quite synced up yet. I’ve used mild, medium and spicy problems from building thinking classrooms to support this work as well as my most recent Skills Blitz. But what about those very initial stages of learning? At the begining, research shows that worked examples can be immensely helpful for student learning.

The goal of a worked example is to provide the learner with not only an example of the steps, but explainations of those steps and reasoning behind them. This is very much akin to what I ask students to produce on their lab theories.

The Stewart College Physics textbook does an excellent job of providing these worked examples for students:

Etkina likewise provides worked examples, and particularly exemplifies not only the rote mathematics, but the imperative visualizations and multiple representations for solving

Video tutorials can also be effective sources of worked examples. In fact, videos are often such good examples that its not uncommon for students to report that they will begin to learn a new skill by watching youtube videos.

Since learners do not need to worry about the massive cognitive load that comes with working a problem for the first time as a novice, they can focus on encoding the information which will, in turn, lead to better retention.

The challenge, of course, is to ensure that students are, indeed, actively encoding the information, rather than passively listening/reading which might lead to increase familiarity, but not increased competence. (Which necessitates the active elaborative interrogation of reading texts)

A few solutions include the following:

  • Interleave worked examples with an opportunity for students to solve a similar problem immediately thereafter. (In AP I particularly like doing this with the FRQs that happen to have two forms)
  • Provide similar problems that are partially solved and progressively remove the scaffolding (Rhett Allain does a phenominal job with this in order to teach computational physics (programming) in his Python Mechanics course)

Other challenges include students assuming the specific set of steps from the worked example works under all conditions, and also students thinking that if they encounter challenge something. must be wrong because the problems like the worked examples did not feel challenging. These last two concerns highlight why it is important that students are engaged in not only this very explicit style of teaching but also opportunities to have experiences, collect evidence and productively struggle with problem solving as well (and YES you can tell them after they struggle!).

One strategy that I like to utilize is to provide students with worked examples that they can either use as an example or solution, depending on their individual confidence/competence. In this case students receive a set of problems for completion during class. The solutions for the problems are posted around the classroom, one problem at a time. In my solutions, I ensure to write them as worked examples, so each line of work has a corresponding statement of the what and why. Some students will use these exclusively as solutions to the work they are practicing. Others will take a look at a solution or two before attempting the problem on their own or moving on.

As is true for any of our strategies, worked examples are just one piece of the arsenal! In a course where problem-solving is ultimately at the core, worked examples should come hand in hand with Question Driven Learning, Deliberate Practice and meaningful Feedback.

ABCs of How We Learn… V is for Visualization
Activities · Classroom Issues · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… V is for Visualization

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

If there’s one thing I find myself iterating repeatedly to my students its the importance of writing things down. Students who are used to doing well in school, and especially in math, often find they are able to solve most problems without showing a great deal of work. In physics, however, that becomes nearly impossible. Aside from showing work for the strict mathmatical portion of a problem, what is almost always more important is that initial diagram.

One of the critical and beneficial features of drawing a picture is that it allows for cognitive offloading. By sketching a graph or a force diagram or even just a physical diagram, now there are details about the problem that no longer need to be held in the working memory, which clears space for the problem solving.

When we use whiteboards in class this also creates the additional benefit of having a shared focal point for the group, which enhances attention and focus on problem solving when working as a team.

The other benefit is that once we begin to create visualizations, we may begin to notice structures and patterns that were not initially obvious or intuitive.

In a 2011 paper, Drawing to Learn in Science, Ainsworth, Prain, and Tytler advocate bringing drawing into the science curriculum because visualization enhances student engagement, helps students learn how to represent information, helps students learn to reason in science, is a major way to communicate scientific data and models, and is a learning strategy.

Drawings also provide us, as educators, quick and descriptive insights to student understanding and possible misconceptions. What students may not be able to adaquately articulate in words may be articulated through a picture.

The initial construction of motion maps with students and a bowling ball is a great example of this. First we run several experiments: letting the ball roll freely, constantly pushing the ball in the direction of motion, pushing the ball opposite motion. As this is happening we drop a mark behind the ball at equal time intervals. This creates a physical visual on the floor which students are then asked to translate to their white boards.

Once students have completed this pattern, they are instructed to craft the arrows to indicate the direction of travel of the ball.

After this we can discuss the meaning of and how to obtain the direction of the change in velocity.

These steps are generally well-received by most students. The misconception that most students initially bring to us is that “negative acceleration means slowing down”. In this case, as we continue to provide additional cases (such as an object moving to the left while speeding up) he visualizations serve as a tool to help students undo this particular misconception. They can see for themselves that when the direction of Δv and v match, the object is speeding up, when when Δv and v are opposite the object is slowing dow.

Force diagrams and energy bar charts are additional examples of visualizations that end up being imperative for problem solving.

What frequently seems to be the challenge is that students will generally not choose to complete these vizualizations. I cannot count the number of times I’ll have a very bright student come to me in frustration and the first comment I need to make is “where is your force diagram” “where is your bar chart”. It is for this reason I believe that its critical that the vizualizations become a no-excuses requirement in the work at all times.

For example, here is the hand-out I provide my students as part of their force notes. Their homework takes an identical three-column format

While the physicsclassroom.com interactives and conceptu builders are fantastic drill practice, the fact that they are on a screen reduces student uptake on physically creating the necessary representations. This is why I’ve created paper companions for most of the assignments I assign students. (Example below)

Like our students, we should actively shift our thoughts around diagrams from something we just happen to do in physics, to a critical learning tool that is backed by research and allows our students more engagement and depth thanks to cognitive offloading, emergent structure (finding patterns), and reorganization of material to get a new perspective.

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing
Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

“A bullet is dropped at the exact same time that one is shot horizontally from a gun. The bullets start from the same height. Which lands first?”

We know how this question goes when posed to students. Aside from the fact that we’ve primed them to answer one of the bullets, knowing full well the answer is “neither” we are leaning into student misconceptions, or rather an incomplete conception.

Students know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is initially travelling faster than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is always moving with a faster speed than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that faster objects will travel the same distance in a shorter time than a slower moving object. All of these notions are true, and because students know these to be true, they will typically answer that the shot one lands first.

Well… except for those students who think about it a little more. See, those students reason that because the shot bullet is travelling faster and because it was shot horizontally, it is going to travel more distance, so perhaps the dropped one lands first due to its shorter distance.

Then there’s the one kid who of course has to say “air resistance!” in some way because fast things experience air resistance. Also not wrong.

Every bit of this reasoning is true until you get to the conclusion.

The issue here has to do with the fact that the reasoning and concept are incomplete. Students are not taking into account that the vertical properties of the two bullets are all identical, and since gravity, a vertical force, is responsible for accelerating the bullets towards the ground with the same vertical acceleration, they will land at the same time.

In a course where students are already coming in with preconcieved notions about who can do physics, the last thing we should be doing is blatantly demonstrating everything wrong with their thinking. Instead, we should leverage and aknowledge the good, while also giving them the tools to make a complete judgement.

Physics students come to us with a lot of incomplete conceptions, they want the ball to roll out in a curved path…

They want the force on the bug to be more than the force on the bus

They want acceleration at the peak of a projectile’s flight to be equal to zero, an object that flies out the window is moving backwards, waves should push matter, and more resistors to always mean more resistance.

Physics misconceptions are frustration for student and teacher alike because they are very much grounded in elements of truth and lived experience, but they are always incomplete.

Making these notions complete and providing many opportunities to encounter the complete notion is imperative to unlearning the previous notion. In order to do this we must:

  1. Increase student precision of thought; so they can reconize the difference between arguing with evidence vs intuition.
  2. Provide students with an alternative conception. This is where our representations such as force diagrams, motion maps etc. come in.
  3. TIME – students need time and exposure for the new conceptions to take hold.

This is a critical component built into the Investigative Science Learning Environment framework, and it is immensely effective at completing these conceptions. What I particularly like about ISLE is that when we are providing the alternative conception, especially for the first time, we are not leaving it up to students to just make the representation. Instead, that representation is carefully drawn through observational evidence.

Coming back to the original question of the two bullets, let’s discuss how the ISLE cycle approaches this particular conception.

In my class, I use the “three views of a ball” in pivot interactives for their observational experiement.

First, I ask students to construct the motion map for each of the three views. Even here students will sometimes rely on their incomplete conceptions over their observations. I will gently remind students to construct the maps based on the evidence in the video. (This is why we use an experiment!) How is the distance changing (or not) as the ball travels accross the screen? Be sure to represent it appropriately!

After students have done this, we discuss how the side-view actually works (Just in Time Telling!). It’s a composite of the top and front views. That is, the top (horizontal motion) is totally constant. This makes sense because there are no horizontal forces (I do projectiles after forces). The front view looks like an object experiencing gravity.

When students get the question with the classic ball drop demo (now a testing experiment rather than a demonstration) instead of just asking the question about landing, I ask them to first carefully construct the motion map for each ball based on what we’ve just learned and discussed then make their prediction. They should then be able to explain the reasoning for their prediction based on their motion maps.

Students all come to the agreement they should land at the same time.

In this manner of approaching the misconception, we have equipped students with tools to support their thinking, and forced them to slow down that thinking so they can achieve success at reaching a final answer.

From here, students need additional opportunities to represent and reason, so I will use problems like the ones from TIPERS

Teachers that have learned about ISLE for the first time often feel overwhelmed by the idea of “changing everything” but in truth, it’s really more about shifting the overarching perspective and intention, and then you can continue to do a lot of the same activities you’ve done before! Consider any of the other misconceptions presented here, or that you can think of. What might be a way to develop an observational and testing experiement to support the undoing of their misconceptions?

Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… T is for Teaching

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

In the previous post on self-explanation I mentioned how one of the strategies I provide to students is to create their version of “teacher notes” to reference and use.

When we engaged in our “How to Score Better on the Test” workshop (aka, how to learn) students were presented with the following question:

Which case would you work harder?

A) Study the material to get an A on the test
B) Learn the material so you can teach it to the class?

As you would expect, students overwhelmingly chose “B”

A 2013 study furthermore found that when students do, in fact, teach the information they learn more than if they only prepare to teach the content.

The idea of teaching content to another person to enhance one’s own learning is the reason why the jigsaw approach works so effectively in the classroom.

Students sharing problems in a jigsaw activity

In my physics courses this has looked like a number of activities, but most frequently looks like this:

  1. Students have a selection of homework problems they were required to solve in class or the previous night. All students were expected to complete all problems. This works best with 3 problems.
  2. Students are divided into visibly random groups of 2-3 students and are assigned one of the problems. The team discusses the problem, comes to consensus and provides their final solution on their board.
  3. Teams with the same problem come together to discuss their approaches to the problem. The team needs to come to a final consensus. Both teams must have the agreed upon solution on their respective boards.
  4. Teams then move into new groups where one team for each problem. Each team is presents the solution to the problem to the rest of the group.

Why this works:

  1. Students are individually responsible for making an attempt at the homework. I’m not a huge fan of doing this with problems they’ve never seen before unless I’m selecting a very, very specific skill.
  2. Students are able to discuss the problem in a non-threatening setting.
  3. Students get to confirm the answer, which increases confidence in the work BUT..
  4. Students are still accountable in small groups to do the teaching. That means that the group can’t rely one the one “really smart kid” out of the group of 6.

I think another great example of leveraging the idea of teaching as a non-threatening classroom activity is Kelly OShea’s Mistake Game.

Playing the “mistake game” at a Chicago Section AAPT meeting in 2017

The premise is simple: solve the problem, but leave one intentional mistake in the work…something a student would do. The group then presents the problem and its the class’s responsibility to help the presenters “find” their “mistake” by asking questions.

Why This Works

From the cognitive science lens, students are still required to solve a problem with the goal of presenting/teaching it to the class. Additionally, they have been specifically asked to build in a challenge (because often in teaching students will throw us for a loop!) and work that logic through to its completion. In order to do this, students need to be able to meaningfully connect ideas through elaboration, which, in turn, increases their retention and neural connections.

What’s great about this method is that the mistake is inevetable: it was part of the assignment! But this does something else so important for developing STEM identities: if the group made a valid mistake, no one needs to know which mistake was “intentional” and which was an unintentional mistake actually made by the team.

What this is NOT

I was talking about writing this post with my 10-year-old son and he groaned that he does this in math all the time and it’s not helpful. In order to use teaching and be effective it’s critical that students have time ti actually prepare what they are teaching. Too often teachers will group the “smart” and the “struggling” student together, expecting the smart student to “teach” the struggling one. And too often this leads to nothing but frustration. Both students know their respective “role” in the pairing, and the “smart” student is expected to effectively communicate without any prior preparation. Recognizing that students are not the teacher-expert in the room, it’s our responsibility to craft experiences where that preparation can happen and we can facilitate effective communication of the process while students are preparing their problems.

Unlocking the Key to Ownership in Learning: S is for Self-Explanation
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Unlocking the Key to Ownership in Learning: S is for Self-Explanation

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

At a parenting workshop the keynote speaker used the metaphor of renting an apartment vs owning a house as an analogy to a child’s developing identity. That in the high school years, our children go from being “renters” of our family morals/values/beliefs to “owners”. This was a really powerful metaphor for me. As children (novices) we accept certain things to be true and mimic our parents because we assume that’s what we’re supposed to do. As we enter adolescence we begin to question everything, “is this what I believe to be true? Why do I believe it?” For students in my classroom, I would like to see the same shifts in their attitudes towards science. That what we learn is true not because I told them so, but because they have enough understanding and evidence to know what is true.

In order for this to happen, students must move from passive receivers of knowledge to active aquirers of it. This is where self-explaination comes in. Self-explanation is about making meaning of content and trying to undersand the what is being presented by the text/author/video/diagram. In other words, self-explanation is about metagognition.

In the Elaboration post we discussed the strategy of elaborative interrogation of a text. Essentially, we ask students to read their textbook while having a conversation with themselves: does this make sense? Why is this true? How does this connect to the previous example or what we did in class? By actively asking and looking for the answers to these questions as we read, we are engaging with the text in a far more active manner than simply reading it.

The slide below summarizes the main points of interrogation

Another name for active reading is the SQ3R Reading method which reiterates most of the bullets in the slide above.

Regardless of what you call the method, the goal is active reading of the text.

At some point well before my own entrance into education, many high school educators decided to forego the traditional textbook. I imagine there are a great many reasons for this, however after a decade of teaching the same way I was taught, I now firmly believe that we are doing our students a disservice by not using and instructing them on how to actively engage with a textbook.

I believe this even more strongly for our content as science educators where the content in the book itself requires a different kind of interrogation than it might if it were a history text. In a history text we are seeking for connections between persons and events, but in a science text we are looking to make connections between ideas, concepts, representations and mathematics. I distinctively remember as a student skipping the example problems because I assumed “we covered this in class” or not knowing how to use the example problem to my advantage.

What makes for a good self-explainer? Clearly a good self-explainer is a really smart student, and that isn’t going to be effective for everyone.

This actually isn’t true. As it turns out, a good self-explainer will find their base comprehension being comparable to a peer with poor self-explaining skills however the good self-explainer is nine-times more effective at identifying their comprehension failures, which allows them to find a path to act on that failure. This is what we want from our students!

I’m thinking a lot this year about how to make these processes more explicit for students and how to get them to better engage in these processes. One piece to this puzzle, I believe, is the incorporation of the reflective component into each aspect of learning. After every lesson or activity students need to be able to answer the question “What did you learn today? How did you learn it?”

I’m working on a template for this, the rough draft for observational experiments is below:

When I’ve had students struggling to perform on exams, I would share with them that one of my personal strategies was to make “teacher notes”. Essentially I would create two-column notes where the left hand side had the steps to the problem and the right hand side was my verbal explanation of the steps. Students who have taken me up on this have found it to be immensely help. This idea is also the foundation of why I require detailed lab theories written prior to students engaging with a lab.

The most critical outcome of self-explaination is the construction of the mental models. These mental models allow people people can draw inferences about new, relevant problems and to learn subsequent, related information more effectively. If our goal as educators is move students from passive receivers of knowledge to active producers of knowledge, then supporting student ownership and independent mental-model building is critical.

ABCs of How We Learn… R is for Reward
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… R is for Reward

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

A friend recently shared with me a strategy her son’s teacher implements in class. Each day the teacher secretly draws three names of students she is going to observe carefully for their behavior. If the students are well behaved, they are announced and they get a reward. If the students are not well behaved the teacher announces that, the students keep their anonymity and they get to start again tomorrow.

On the surface level this looks like the antithesis of behavior charts where the record of bad behavior is available for all to see. There also seems to be an extra layer of genius in that the teacher gets to reward 2-3 students pulled at random that day, but no one knows who those kids are until the end of the day. This motivates everyone to do well and eliminates and shaming for missing the mark.

On a cognitive science level, this is an excellent example of reward. A famous study in 1973 demonstrated that although rewards will increase desired behaviors, they also decrease people’s enjoyment in engaging with those same behaviors. There was, however, a caveat: if the reward was not guaranteed, the enjoyment did not decrease.

We reward students in many ways in the classroom:

  • Candy for right answers/participation
  • Points for homework
  • Extra credit for a particularly boring or challenging, but necessary task

My math teacher used to give out candy if she was corrected by a student. Even then I thought this was an amazing type of reward: she was rewarding speaking up and not assuming the teacher is always right. It wasn’t a class norm until the first time it happened, and it didn’t happen so often that students were looking to challenge her, but its something that stuck with me. She taught us that we all make mistakes, and that’s okay.

What’s made some more recent headway is the idea of gamification in the classroom. Whether its Kahoot, Blooket Quizziz or GimKit, all of these platforms take advantage of the motivation that comes with gamification to support student learning. An interesting metastudy from 2023 found that not only did gamification support student learning, but it was most effective in science classrooms compared to other content areas (although many of the studies examined were online courses).

What I personally struggle with (this is my opinion!) is that none of the typical methods of gamification are particularly well-suited for physics beyond super-surface level content. Physics problems, even some of the easier ones, or multiple choice, still require deep thinking. I personally take issue with the concept of introducing speed as a valued quality when students are learning physics. For this reason I tend to choose when I want to engage in these activities explicitly for review, rather than earlier learning. It is my belief that in order to get the kind of learning we need in a physics classroom, true gamification requires a great deal of thought, time and effort in not only crafting the content of the activity, but also all of the rules that go along with it.

A particularly excellent example of gamification that allows for deep thinking in the context of a group-worthy task which increases participation and engagement are Joe Cosette’s escape rooms and mystery tasks. Not only are these activities fun and engaging, but they work because of the different areas of cognitive theories that we’ve discussed over the last few weeks: self-determination, listening and sharing, participation and now reward with gamification.

ABCs of How We Learn… Q is for Question Driven
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… Q is for Question Driven

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

When I first started teaching I had students to objectively had already decided they were not science people. The school I was working at had a deeply flawed version of “conceptual physics”. The “true” iteration of the course was that conceptual physics would be for 9th graders who had poor reading scores because “there’s not as much reading in physics as biology” (don’t get me started on the importance of literacy). The 9th grade conceptual physics classes were then typically classes where 67% of students had some sort of IEP or 504 plan and 33% did not. (no, that’s not legal. The school got around it because on paper there was a self-contained class of 20 with a SPED teacher and a class of 11 with me, and both classes just happened to meet in the same room at the same time… talk about trial by fire my first year!). As horrendously flawed as that model was, it got worse. Junior students who were deemed unfit for the regular physics class after their chemistry experience got put in conceptual, and so a junior section of this class emerged. My first year teaching as a 22 year old woman I had 3 students aged 19, and one who was turning 21 soon and whose IEP involved violent angry outbursts. Can you imagine?

So my 22-year-old shiny-eyed self decided I would convince these students that they were, in fact, science people. My youngest brother was only 7 at the time, so his development was still fresh in my mind. I asked them what a baby does when you put a toy in their hand. They stick it in their mouth, they shake it, and then they chuck it to the ground. What are they doing? An experiement of course! And what are they learning? Gravity! Being a science person, I argued, was part of being human, because being human is being curious.

Question driven learning is as old as our humanity, whether you look at it from a lens of child-development, or from the socratic method.

Another personal example, the first piece of writing I produced in high school was a response to Sydney Harris’s 1994 essay, “What True Education Should Do” in which he argues that most people think of students as sausage casings in which to stuff information. “The job of teaching” he argues, “is not to stuff them and thenseal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within”

In the assignment, we were asked to answer the question of whether we agreed with the sausage or oyster perspective of a student and why. This past school year I have found myself reflecting on this assignment frequently. Not only the fact that I firmly stand by the “oyster” metaphor, but the fact that in having us read and write this essay as high school freshman, our teachers were setting the stage for what would be the next four years of our educational formation. That this was a school where we were expected to cultivate our talents, grow and go out into the world with something new.

Our natual curiosity will drive us to spend time and energy to get answers to questions we care about. It’s one of the reasons click-bait titles work “You’ll never believe what students said when their teacher made this one small shift!”

In NGSS we call this an “anchoring phenomena” in ISLE we call it the “need to know”. OpenSciEd and Patterns Physics both ground their curriculum under driving questions. There is a reason why this works, when done well. It taps into that curiosity. It moves students away from “why do I have to learn this” to “I want to know more about this”

Selecting an anchoring phenomina or need to know is really important in order for it to be useful. This is not pure discovery based or inquiry learning. There is a highly cited article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clarke and a rebuttal by Silver, Duncan and Chinn at Rutgers that are both worth reading around constructivist, active learning environments. As discussed in the Knowledge post, we are not leaving students to truly discover anything on their own. We have crafted very specific and scaffholded experiences for students to engage so when we arrive at the time for telling (aka lecture) students have an experience and a memory to connect the new knowledge to, which ultimately creates stronger neurological pathways.

Here are a few fun need to knows:

Can Damien Walters run a human vertical loop? How fast does he need to go?

If you are in free-fall, how high up do you need to be to break the sound barrier? Felix Baumgartner did this in 2023!

Why Do Tic-Tacs Sometimes Bounce Higher on the Second Bounce? (this is a great energy question)

This is another fun one where there’s basically a “duet” using a pipeline to create the echo (partner). How long is the pipe? What tempo works best for this to work?

Here’s the best part. You don’t have to have the need to know somehow anchored and tied to every moment of the entire unit. The need to know sparks the curiosity and the questions to motivate students to engage in the upcoming lessons. When the unit is complete, we can come back and answer the questions we had at the beginning which gives us an opportunity to see just how much we have learned as a result!

The researched summarized in the ABC book discusses how in a variety of studies students who learned under a problem-based learning or anchored phenomina were able to better transfer knowledge to new and complex situations, seeing the value of the content outside of the classroom, and having positive attitudes towards the material.

A strategy of teaching that increases value, transfer and identity? I’ll say yes to that all day!

ABCs of How We Learn… P is for Participation – You have to DO physics to get better at DOING physics!
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… P is for Participation – You have to DO physics to get better at DOING physics!

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

After the first exam, I have students participate in a lesson called “The Expert Game”. The activity begins by prompting students “what do you consider yourself an expert in?” Because I know how this will land with a lot of students, I actually ask this question in three ways: What is something you consider yourself pretty good at, what are some of your hobbies, and name one thing you really enjoy doing. Students submit via google form and I get a list like this:

Next, I group students based on similar interests. Then, students are asked to create a cycle of learning for how you go from a novice to an expert in that particular area

Interestingly, these cycles end up being remarkably similar! That’s because learning how to do anything inevitably includes a concrete experience, a chance to try, opportunities for feedback, and trying again. This is ultimately the learning cycle we discussed in the Knowledge Post

Because this activity comes fresh after an exam, one of the key aspects that I lean into at this moment in time is the part where you have to do physics in order to get better at doing physics. In other words, you need to be an active participant in your learning.

In The ABCs of How We Learn, Schwartz, Tsang and Blair define participation as “engaging in an existing cultural activity.” There are two really critical features of this. First, is that participation is going to require that active engagement, but second, that it is an engagement in existing culture. As teachers, we have a responsibility to define the culture in our classrooms. A great deal of this comes from the norms that we put in place, in addition to our own modeling. This is challenging when the culture we know we need in our rooms is very different from the one in our building or community. (Can you tell I’m itching to write a different post?).

Vygotsky’s theory of learning defines the zone of proximal development. The main idea is that when we provide carefully selected and scaffholded work for our students, work that is just out of reach alone, but attainable with help, this is the sweet spot of learning

Selecting group-worthy tasks is a great way to access the ZPD, as are carefully created activities with rich feedback loops. The other benefit of hitting the ZPD just right is that the small wins and gains in knowledge ultimately incite motivation to move to the next challenge. The feedback loop of learning becomes its own motivator! (There was an interesting op-ed on this idea published this week)

It’s also important to note that participation can, and should take many different forms. With up to half of the population identifying as introverts, its our responsibility to recognize that participation does not have to equal the loudest voices in the room that are offering all of the information. The goal is that, ultimately, our classroom is an active learning environment where students learn science by engaging with science in the way that scientists do science.

As I close out my own school year, I’m thinking a lot about my students’ experience in my classroom. I’m actually really pleased how many of them are commenting on the active learning environment and their collaboration as being something that they are proud of or were suprised by in the class. Moving into next school year I’m thinking a lot about the culture of my classroom vs the culture that students are familiar with in school. The big question I’m asking this summer is, “how can you scaffhold and support the reflective thinking capacity of your students?” I ask this because if I can get students reflecting critically and deeply, then we can make serious movement on the other aspects of the classroom! I’ve asked my students to reflect on their work for several years now, but I’ve not really considered how to support students in actually increasing that skill. Another post for another day, but if this is a conversation that interests you, by all means share your thoughts!