In my previous post we discussed strategies for metacognition to help provide students a clear, objective judgement of learning in order to help students see their own improvement and laser-focus where they need to put in more time.

Today we are going to further explore practice and studying.

We have already discussed some of the following: that students tend to judge their own competence poorly, students mistake familiarity with competence, and student study habits, if existent, tend to rely on passive methods such as “looking over notes” and highlighting. This is part of the reason why active learning is so beneficial in the physics classroom; it creates a norm for how we approach any problem.

In the book The Science of Learning Physics, Mestre and Docktor discuss the work of cognitive scientists Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork of UCLA that suggests the implementation of “desirable difficulties”. Implementing these desirable difficulties is providing students with a challenge that is just out of their comfort or familiarity zone, but not so far removed that the student shuts down. Desirable difficulties can be produced by creating certain experiences for students that, in a way, de-contextualize the problem. These methods include varying the condition of practice, spacing and interleaving.

Spaced practice is commonly known: we don’t really learn much by cramming, but students will cram nevertheless. Knowing this reality we, as teachers, can incorporate spaced practice into our classroom as part of our warm-ups and retrieval exercises or focused activities. We can also incorporate these practices in order to help students built their own study guides (particularly when combined with metacognitive strategies) I really enjoy embedding spacing as a retrieval practice like the one below. You’ll notice I give students a single word to help jog their memory just a little, because remembering from a week or two ago can be really hard!

This practice also works excellently with interleaved practice, which is when students are asked to use multiple ideas at once or in random succession (the opposite is blocked practice such as items 1-10 are newton’s laws and 11-12 are energy). Physics truly lends itself beautifully to this process because, in truth, working through a semester of physics is really working through new and layered understandings and models for how and why things happen.

Last year I had my students do a retrieval exercise to get them to retrieve everything they could remember about reflection and refraction. After cycling through pairs and groups of fours I asked them to create a Venn diagram of the two concepts. This got students actively thinking about how refraction and the problem-solving tools connected to reflection and lead to some phenomenal conversations. It also produced a desirable difficulty: students had not thought about refraction in this way before and they were asked to interleave with reflection. Students got to walk around and look at the other boards and then come back to their board to shift or add anything they felt needed to move.

Goall-less problems are a really great way to incorporate these practices. In a goal-less problem you take off the last part of the sentence that says “find the velocity” and so on. Instead, students are asked to write down and solve everything they can about the problem. The benefit to this method is that it is the epitome of a low floor, high-ceiling activity. Even your poorest performing student should be able to draw a picture or write at least one thing down. It also removes the narrow student focus of trying to solve for the specific thing asked for, and rather makes students consider all of the possibilities. In my on-track physics classes I typically put a list of all of the representations and options they have available up on the board the first few times we do this. Goall-less problems also make for fantastic final review or assessment items.

One final note that is more personal experience than anything else. I really, really hate Webassign and other similar online homework platforms. I worked as a full time tutor in a school for two years and I was typically inundated with physics students wanting to get all of the green checks. No matter my goal, hope or intent, the majority of students generally did not care until I got them through all of the steps. In contrast, the couple of students I tutored from small, private schools without an online platform were far more interested in process. There is something about the green check and the correct numerical answer that strips away all of the process and metacognition that we work so hard to cultivate in our classrooms. I’m not sure what the answer is to this (other than this type of homework being worth close to nothing). But I am sure that when the focus in class is truly about helping students create their own knowledge that much of this type of homework becomes obsolete. I would much rather have students working out solutions on paper that they can then bring to class and have a conversation. In Webassign success is binary: you get a red X or a green check, but comprehension and learning are not binary processes, they are fluid and messy. Students need to work through the mess and celebrate the small wins along the way.

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

Metacognition.

I distinctively remember this being a topic in one of my teacher prep classes. I also remember several failed attempts at weaving metacognition into my assignments. I don’t know about you, but trying to get students “thinking about their own thinking” seems really challenging, clunky and too often inauthentic. Students are fantastic at sniffing out inauthenticity, and the moment they recognize something as garbage, they approach it in full B.S. mode.

The challenge with this, of course, is that metacognition is an incredibly powerful tool within the cognitive science toolkit, and is one of the marked differences between expert vs novice thinking.

Metacognition allows students to evaluate their learning and problem solving approach, and focus for studying. Unfortunately, students frequently misjudge their skills and abilities, often confusing familiarity with content for competence. Furthermore, students who struggle may lack enough familiarity to properly identify the edge of their learning. So how do we teach students to be authentic reflective learners?

One of Mestre’s suggestions in The Science of Learning Physics is to provide students objective measures to judge their learning. Specifically, access to old exams and questions. While this is an excellent method, many high school and AP teachers may lack a deep pool of questions to make available to students. Additionally, this is limited to student studying outside of the classroom. What Dr. Agarwal suggests in her book Powerful Teaching is “engagement with feedback” in other words, whenever we have students working in our classroom, they should have the opportunity to receive meaningful feedback on their work in short order so they can reflect on their process while it is fresh, and course-correct as needed. How often do we ask a student to tell us their thought process and they respond, “I don’t even know anymore”

A method I’ve adapted to aid in this task weaves together retrieval practices with metacognition. Recall in the retrieval process students first write. down everything they can remember using only their brain. Then, if you so desire, students can pair and share (I typically do a pair and then have pairs get together into groups of four). Last, you permit students to dive into their notes. In each of these progressive phases, students should be adding the parts they received from. other sources to their papers. Adding the metacognitive level is as simple as a highlighter. Perhaps students highlight everything from their partner in yellow. Then, they highlight everything they added from their notes in green. This produces a very clear visual of what they know and what they do not know. It also produces a visual of how much they can reap from their friends and what topics or ideas were “really hard” for everyone because no one could remember it.

If. you’ve started to dig into retrieval ideas on twitter or on Dr. Agarwal’s. book or website, you’ve. seen that there are so many different ways to do retrieval, from lists to graphic organizers. Any and. all of these can utilize this highlighting method. Not only does this allow for metacognition. and accurate judgement of learning, over. time it demonstrates to students how much they have learned over a time-frame and how their own retrieval improves with practice.

Here is another brilliant idea by Jess Kirby. Not only does this incorporate metacognition and judgement of learning, it also requires students to organize the questions by the big idea (another “expert-level” concept).

For a more complex version of this process as it relates to problem solving I have had students combine retrieval with cornell notes.

In this example I had lectured students on how to solve this exact problem the previous day. I provided them with the following notes sheet

First, I asked students to solve this problem as best they could using only their brain and what they could remember from the previous day. I only asked them to focus on the left hand side where they solved the problem.

Next, I allowed students to pull out their notes and add, edit or correct any of the steps they had missed. I asked them to color code these edits and then write out the steps in words on the right hand side.

Finally, I told students to look over their paper. Anything that needed an edit or addition (especially if “I just forgot that..”) needed to go down in the “reminders to yourself” box.

These three ideas really only scratch the surface of what is possible! If you have picked up Powerful Teaching, head over to chapter 5 for more great ideas and then share what you’ve implemented in your own classroom!

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

I’m going to make an assumption that most readers of my blog do not need any convincing of the benefits of an active learning environment. Even still, in the name of these posts starting from a solid research foundation I will briefly discuss the value. However, I think the bigger challenge teachers face is persisting with the active learning environment in spite of feedback from students, parents and perhaps even colleagues along the way.

The active learning model is a natural consequence of constructivist learning. Active learning has been shown to be more effective than traditional lecture, as well as most effective at uprooting and replacing common student preconceptions.

In an active learning environment the teacher takes the role as coach, facilitator and guide. Not leaving students to their own devices, but rather carefully crafting the learning experience so as to set students upon a fruitful path. Mestre lays out in his text that active learning could consist of the following:

• Opportunities for students to share their ideas and reasoning individually or with their peers
• Encouraging qualitative reasoning based on physics concepts
• Encouraging construction and sense-making of physics knowledge; for example students are prompted to figure things out for themselves
• Providing opportunities for students to engage in the process of “doing science”
• Providing opportunities for students to apply their knowledge flexibly across multiple contexts (transfer to new contexts)
• Helping students organize content knowledge according to some hierarchy
• Teaching metacognitive strategies to students

For the first time this year, and thanks to an idea from a friend and college, Joe Milliano, I had this discussion of “where the learning happens” with my students at the start of the year, anticipating more push-back than usual due to the hybrid environment

Part of my intent in this was to point out how the “information getting” part of the class is really small compared to the student-centered and constructivism part of the class.

Mestre, likewise, encourages teachers to be completely upfront with students regarding the science of learning in order to provide them with the context for the journey we are about to embark on together. It’s important for students to know we’re not just doing this “to them” but rather we are doing this for them because it is truly the best model for their learning.

Unless your school or department is built on a Problem Based Learning model, or something comparable it is very likely that your students have not engaged in an active learning environment to this extent before, ever. Your students will likely cite that they learn best based on their learning style, they enjoy lectures and seeing examples and they study by going over their notes and re-reading the text. In fact, you can fully expect your students to think and feel like they are not learning, when they really truly are!

These common student responses are riddled with challenges for the teacher and their own learning. The best thing you can do as the instructor is to begin to have these conversations from the first day of school. Firstly, while learning preferences is certainly a thing, the truth is that difference courses require students to perform in different ways, and the way in which we ask them to perform may not match their learning style, this mismatch can then appear as incompetence if we teach to the learning style rather than the intended performance objective. Next, lectures, watching examples, going over notes and re-reading the text are all ways in which students can gain familiarity with content, but students confuse familiarity with competence. How often have you heard a student report “I get it when we do it in class, but then I forget everything on the test”.

Eugina Etkina has a wonderful, non-physics exercise to discuss the importance of students “doing the doing” as I call it. She calls it the expert game. You ask students to go around and share their “thing” that they are really interested in or really good at. Then, you group the students based on similar interests. Students are asked to come up with a flow-chart or visual on how you go from being a novice to an expert in that craft. Inevitably the results consists of things like “watch an expert” “practice” “get feedback”. This conversation then comes back around to the work in the physics class. I can watch Michael Phelps all day long, but I’m never going to be able to even swim unless I jump in the pool. Same goes for the work of physics!

Students begin to get on board with the idea of active learning when they see they are reaping the benefits. Unfortunately, physics tests do not always reflect this for our students. Enter the retake. I do retakes in a very special manner in my classroom. It’s something of an adjustment from an idea I read in an old Physics Teacher journal. I have not let students do this until the energy unit exam, only because I want students to get through that “adjustment period” I’ve mentioned previously.

Students complete the energy exam and I tell them the following day that they have a retake opportunity. Here is how it works.

I will be upfront with scoring. Students will take the exact same test over again. They must score 100% in order to get the bump.

Students do NOT get to see their original exam. They do not know their score, they do not know what they missed. This is really important.

I arrange a designated day and time in which students can come to my room to collaborate. They will receive a blank copy of the same exact test they originally took. They can use any print resource. They may not ask me questions.

One week after the collaboration students come in at a designated time to take the retake.

Scoring is easy because I’m looking for perfect papers. The bump works on a square root curve, so if the original score was a 64, the bump will be 10*sqrt(64) = 80. I really like this way of adjusting since the student who had a 96 to begin with only goes up to a 98, which makes sense since they had small errors, but the student who had a 64 and pulled of a 100 gets up to a respectable 80.

The design is where and how the magic happens. They know that 100 is possible because they are ALL together. The teamwork and camaraderie is palpable and the energy in the room is invigorating! Students also realize that they are all in this together: there’s no geniuses here, and working alone is not the best use of time. Because they need 100, students argue their point to the finish. Because they need 100 a week after they get to talk, students are making sure they fully understand how to answer the questions.

I was really nervous the first time I did this with my students, but I knew I did the right thing at the end of the first session when my top student walked out of the room and said, “I thought I knew what I was doing on that test, but there was a lot I needed to learn” This student had an 87 on the first round!

I have found that one of the most critical components of an effective active learning model is creating the classroom culture where students not only feel safe to take risks, but feel safe to work together with every single student in the room. This takes a great deal of time and effort on the part of the teacher to properly construct. (Head over to Kelly OShea’s blog to learn about board meetings and speed dating, two of my favorites for building classroom culture!) Our current situation with the pandemic has made it much worse and I’m not sure how I can roll out my most favorite teaching tool under all of the current constraints (if you have ideas, drop them in the comments!)

To that end, if you are a new or novice teacher, or are looking to begin using active learning in your classroom, I would strongly encourage you to seek out teachers who also use active-learning in their classrooms. Create your own Professional Learning Network (PLC) of incredible teachers from across the country, sign up for the workshops at AAPT, or an AMTA modeling workshop so you can not only network, but have a place to have conversations about what is working and not working. Just as I tell my students, we are better together.

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

I also turned this into a talk for AAPT which you can access here

One of my favorite discoveries in my cognitive science journey is the expert vs novice thinker conversation, particularly as it relates to physics. Daniel Willingham discusses this in his book Why Students Don’t Like School, “experts don’t think in terms of surface features, as novices do; they think in terms of functions, or deep structure.”  In Dr. Jose Mestre’s book he talks about an experiment where students were asked to sort physics problems. The experiment showed that novice students tend to sort problems by surface features  whereas the “experts” sorted the problems by the big idea, specifically the major physics concept used to approach the problem. 

Part of what makes physics, as a course, so difficult for all students is the necessity to move towards an expert type of thinking in  order to approach problems. It is an experiment I would love to run formally, but in my experience there is a marked difference between the first 2 weeks of physics and week 10. By week 10 it’s like a switch has flipped for all of the students and the impossible is suddenly possible. Of course, there is no magic switch, rather students have begun to adapt more “expert” ways of approaching problems. 

A really great example of exposing novice vs expert thinking is card sorts. Brian Frank has created an abundance of these sorts and they are amazing to work with. I particularly like the way Kelly O’Shea runs her kinematics exercise with students. First students are given just the graphs and asked to organize the cards in any meaningful way. Every time I do this assignment students decide to organize the graphs based on their shape OR they put all of the position graphs together, velocity graphs and so on. They make little to no connections between graphs (such as a parabolic position graph goes with a linear velocity graph etc). When students are satisfied the teacher realizes she forgot to pass out some cards” and drops label cards. These cards begin to get students to reorganize the cards in order to make the cross-connections. This also gives students a “second pass” with the material.

Ok, so it’s easy to see students acting like students, but how to we get them to think like physicists?

Strategies for Training Students

I love this puck problem below. The premise is beautifully simple. Same force, one puck has more mass, compare the change in momentum.

The novice student thinking looks like this:

• Change in momentum is mΔv.
• M is bigger on A, so A has the bigger momentum change.
• FULL STOP. OR……
• M is bigger on A and now I need to calculate v (lots of calculations later and fumble around with force).

The expert thinking looks like this:

1. Impulse is equal to change in momentum.
2. The force on both is the same.
3. The mass on A is bigger, so it will take longer to get it to the finish line.
4. Therefore Ft for A is bigger, so mΔv must be bigger.

Students are in shock by how simple and elegant the expert solution is. But it really just comes from ONE critical shift, pulling out the big idea rather than pointing to where change in momentum is explicitly stated.

AP provides another sweet opportunity to practice this skill and it is embedded in the paragraph-length response. Too often students see the format and just start to free-write. I discuss with them that they need to draft their response, much like a typical essay, but in a physics-friendly manner. They should (1) determine the big idea (2) set up the problem as if they were to solve it (3) Any step along the way becomes a sentence or bullet point towards the answer.

I work with students directly on this skill during classwork. I have a series of energy problems that I love to do this with. I have them whiteboard answers for speed and accuracy and I provide some very specific directions (1) Write your conservation statement (2) Write your proportionality statement (3) write your answer.

AP Physics 1 Multiple Choice: The Exemplar of Expert Thinking Processes

Every year I have a few AP students who are so close to an A but can’t seem to push over the edge. Additionally, I often have a handful of students who, if you were to talk to them, clearly have a solid grasp of the content but they absolutely tank the AP Physics 1 multiple choice items. The beauty…and poison of  AP Physics 1 multiple choice items is their requirement to think like an expert. The questions and responses are immensely loquacious and even though AP provides students with nearly two minutes per item students tend to fall into two traps: first, they are so used to multiple choice being factual items that you either know or don’t know and move and, and second, they try to be so careful that they lose sight of the forest for the trees. After the exam students frequently get mad that the questions were so “easy” or “obvious” “when you explain it” often placing the blame on me for not providing enough worked examples. Instead, we need to shift the narrative and turn the ownership back to the student. We cannot shame them, instead we need to train them on how to better approach any problem, not the 10 on Tuesday’s test.

I have found that having small group conversations with students about this to be highly effective. Willingham further describes in his chapter about novice vs expert thinking that experts have conversations with themselves which allows them to dissect the problem, focus on the important information and test ideas. Novices, on the other hand, rarely do this due to the cognitive load required of them. Having these conversations with my students helps train them in this type of procedure in order to make them more readily do the process on their own. 

We go through the multiple choice items together and I ask them a lot of questions. I ask them to identify the big idea, then I probe them to tell me about components of that big idea that relate to the problem. Only then do we begin to look at the answer options. When you probe about the big idea first, several options quickly show themselves as incorrect. A wonderful example are the multiple choice items that you might label “Newton’s third law”. As soon as a student sees the phrasing how does the force of A on B compare to the force of B on A, the rest of the problem should be irrelevant, whether there are numbers, masses and so on. So if I were working this problem with a student I would ask them to identify it as a force problem, then I would ask them what our class definition of forces is (an interaction between objects) and since a force is defined as such, we can cut through the distractors and identify the correct answer. 

Another strategy I use in my classes is I will literally hand them the exam a week prior to test day. However, I have made one very important adjustment: I take the question and all of the letter options off. Instead, students are presented with a scenario and they have the freedom to discuss with their peers the possibilities for the exam. I do this as an in-class activity, so students are not leaving the room with exam questions. Some students have reported back that this process makes them more anxious for the exam because they come up with exceedingly challenging possibilities, however in the end what it does is it allows students to perform on assessment day at the level they deserve. What happens here is, once again, students are engaged in conversations. They can transform these conversations into self-talk when they take the test. The idea that they have the actual exam in their hand means they know a 100% is possible if they talk to everyone, so they do not waste time working alone.

My tagline on this blog is “infecting students with passion” I definitely try to infiltrate their brains in several ways, and moving them towards expert thinking is one of them. As I tell them often, it’s my goal to get them to have conversations with me in their head when they sit an take the exam so it can feel as easy as a real-life conversation and they can knock it out of the park.

So tell me…

1. What does expert vs novice thinking look like in your classroom?
2. How have you tried to model or scaffold expert thinking and practices for your own students?
3. What are you ready to commit to doing differently when we return in January?