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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.

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!

ABCs of How We Learn… O is for Observation – Building STEM Identities in the Classroom
Activities · Classroom Issues

ABCs of How We Learn… O is for Observation – Building STEM Identities in the Classroom

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

In The ABCs of How We Learn, Schwartz, Tsang and Blair dedicate the O chapter to Observation. Specifically, they are addressing Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Social learning theory considers how both environmental and cognitive factors interact to influence human learning and behavior and at its core is the idea that humans will model after those who are similar, high-status, knowledgeable, rewarded, or nurturing figures in our lives.

The classic experiement that is referenced is the Bobo doll experiement, where children who observed an adult beating up the Bobo doll were more likely to mimic the same agressive behaviors

Learning through observation is certainly something we see with learning that involves kinesthetics. It is also the foundation of the Montessori Method. In our physics classrooms, however, it is not necessarily immediately relevant. The mere observing of the teacher engaging with a complex derivation is not going to translate to meaningful learning. Additionally, the original theory carries with it some challenges, specifically that there is a lack of clarity on the cognitive processes, a likely overemphasis on observation and a difficulty in predicting behaviors. Just because a child observes something doesn’t necessarily mean they will reproduce the behavior, or reproduce the intended behavior. Nevertheless, we do know that when modeled behaviors are also paired with verbal reasoning “I’m going to do this because…. so that… ” and so on the intended learning is more likely to translate.

So I am going to choose to diverge this post a bit from the original text.

The key idea behind social learning theory is that humans will model after those who are similar, high-status, knowledgeable, rewarded, or nurturing figures in our lives. For a student this translates to friends, popular peers, respected teachers and caring adults. Much could be said here regarding the norms chapter and the choices we make as educators to build those norms in our classroom. What I’d like to focus in on, however, is the idea of modeling after those who are similar and knowledgeable. Specifically, I’d like to take about the importance of representation in the physics classroom and the formation of STEM identity.

We discussed this a bit in the Belonging post, when we consider a person’s identity we know its composed of many different positionalities.

When we add the layer of a STEM identity, a huge piece of that web is, indeed belonging. Belonging can be threatened by imposter syndrome and sterotype threat, and it can be enhanced by being “seen” as a STEM person by one’s peers, faculty members and family. In short, a person’s STEM identity is highly dependant on the same people who they might choose to imitate under the theory of social learning.

One of the simplist and most powerful activities I have used in my classroom is the STEPUP Careers in Physics lesson. You can access it online. In the activity you begin by having students brainstorm careers a person might have with a bacholer’s in physics. Then, students engage in a short career match survey. After submitting, they are “matched” with people who are like themselves, but who happen to have a degree in physics in a variety of fields. Although the lesson is explicitly teaching, “you can do anything with a physics degree” due to the intentional selection of diverse representation in the available bios, the lesson is also implicitly showing “you can be anyone and have a physics degree”

In Gholdy Muhammed’s book Cultivating Genius, she outlines her Historically Responsive Literacy framework. In the framework one of the core ideas is that equity is not a one-off lesson or PD session, but rather something that is engrained at the center of our work. The framework identifies four areas: skill, what do we want students to be able to do, but also identity (who am I, who do I want to be) intellect (gaining new and authentic knowledge about the world) and criticality, which she defines as capacity and ability to read, write, think, and speak in ways to understand power and equity.

When I first learned about this framework I started incorporating what I dubbed Identity Encounters in my classroom where we took time to learn about different, current people in physics, who came from a variety of backgrounds. While we ultimately learned about their work in the field, we inevitably also got to hear about their challenges as well.

The underrepresentation curriculum project takes things a step further to explicitly talk about injustice and inequities in STEM. Research has shown that when we make these explicit in discussion with students we are able to mitigate the effects of imposter syndrome and stereotype threat. I’ve run these lessons as periodic lessons between physics content as well as a longer unit during which we also watched Hidden Figures while examining the themes we discussed in class.

Physics educators such as Elissa Levy have gone so far as to redesign their curriculum in such a way so as to include a more full history of the physics we are teaching, rather than just the classic, Western-European cannon.

We know that teaching physics is an uphill battle where some students decide they aren’t fit for the course from day one because they already have a deeply embedded identity of not being a math person. I firmly believe that when we can demonstrate that science is done in community over isolation, that failure is much more common than strokes of genius, and that there exist many different paths and identities to studying physics, our students can begin to learn and identify that they, too, can become a physics person.

Former students with guest speaker, NASA Scientist Renee Horton. In this group 5 students are physics majors and all of them are STEM majors

EQUITY Share air time equitably. Know yourself, balance your listening and talking. DIFFERENCES Value differences. Remember that your perspective is not the only one, and that we all face different challenges. EVIDENCE Argue using evidence. Back what you have to say with data. SAFETY Make sure everyone feels safe. Safe is not the same as comfortable. Ensure that there are ways to report problematic behavior. DISCOMFORT Discomfort is okay. Identify your learning edge and push it. OWNERSHIP Own your impact. Your intentions may not be the same as your impact. COMMUNITY Create a sense of community. Acknowledge others and do not isolate anyone. ABCs of How We Learn… N is for Norms
Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… N is for Norms

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

Today was the last day of school for seniors. I have my students fill out an exit survey in which I ask them what they were most proud of, what surprised them and what was the most important thing they learned this year. I was really excited to read some of my student responses. More on that in a moment.

Norms are the rules of the game. They are what dictate conduct in social settings. In society they are often the unwritten rules, very often defined by cultural norms. I remember when I went to France for my honeymoon. A lot of Americans go to France assuming the French are rude. The reality, as my Aunt and Uncle explained to us, is that Americans go to France assuming they can act like Americans, rather than learning the cultural norms, and this becomes off-putting. In the US we expect our waiter to check in when we sit down and when we are done with our food. In France, the restaurant expects you to enjoy the experience for as long as you need or would like. You call the waiter over when you are ready to order and when you’re ready for the check. No one is going to rush you out of the restaurant with a check, you can sit and talk as long as you like!

I bring up this example for two reasons. One, it is an example where the norms dictate the expectations and behaviors, but secondly, the conflict in expectations due to cultural differences is what can lead to one or both parties either being upset or in active conflict.

Conflict very often arises when the unwritten norms of one person/group do not match the other. This is why it is especially important in the classroom setting to make these norms very much written and visible.

One set of particularly important norms are the ones we use regarding our content. The previous post mentioned the scientific practices from NGSS. These are excellent norms to have as part of learning, discovering and justifying. We must ask ourselves, what is the norm for engaging in learning activities? Is the norm that the teacher is the keeper of knowledge and the students are passive receptacles? Or are the students active participants? Are they expected to continue asking themselves “how do I know this”? Are they expected to give answers based on intuition or based on evidence? The norms we set for how we engage with science in our classroom are the norms we are teaching our students are part of the scientific community.

This is part of what I really enjoy about Building Thinking Classrooms. Many of the strategies turn what students know as the norms of school on its head. Specifically defronting the classroom, the consolidation process and note-making.

Since Listening and Sharing is also a critical feature of education, norms for discourse are particularly important in the classroom.

STEP UP has a great poster of norms for the classroom:

EQUITY Share air time equitably. Know yourself, balance your listening and talking. DIFFERENCES Value differences. Remember that your perspective is not the only one, and that we all face different challenges. EVIDENCE Argue using evidence. Back what you have to say with data. SAFETY Make sure everyone feels safe. Safe is not the same as comfortable. Ensure that there are ways to report problematic behavior. DISCOMFORT Discomfort is okay. Identify your learning edge and push it. OWNERSHIP Own your impact. Your intentions may not be the same as your impact. COMMUNITY Create a sense of community. Acknowledge others and do not isolate anyone.

This school year I found that students were very uncomfortable having conversations or working in groups with students who were not their besties coming in. Sometimes holding the norm looked like actively telling students we weren’t going to comment on “good” or “bad” groups. Other times this meant actively coaching students on engaging in discourse with one another. It felt like an uphill battle all year.

But then the end of year comments came in:

“I feel like I talked to more people in the class than I usually would, I actually met people and worked well with them”

“Proud of surviving this course. but more specifically, being able to step outside my comfort zone and discuss with peers. At the beginning, I was too timid.”

“I am proud of the improvements I was able to make throughout the year, especially when it came to checking my wrong answers. I also am happy with my collaboration skills.”

Particularly as an AP teacher, it can be easy to get caught up in the exam, the scores, the grades. After all, its one of our primary measures of success. But honestly, for myself, success also looks like these student reflections. It looks like students telling me that tests are feedback, and that they learned it’s ok to fail sometimes. Because those lessons? Those are the ones that last a lifetime.

ABCs of How We Learn… M is for Making
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ABCs of How We Learn… M is for Making

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment
Different types of oscillators featured as scientist peg people (and one physics teacher) for FermiLab’s Family Open House, Feb 2018

Remember when we were all stuck in our houses in the spring in 2020? With few places to go and a lot of time at home all of a sudden everyone was making their own bread and even taking a crack at artisan soughdough.

When we have a chance to truly create something, we find joy and satisfaction in seeing the fruit of our labor. We can then invite others into our joy by sharing what we’ve created, and in the process we find new challenges to tackle and overcome.

We tend to most often connect making in an education setting to informal educational settings: camps, museum programs, clubs etc. More recently we’ve seen the explosion of maker space centers not only at institutions of learning, but also in libraries and museums.

The roll-out of NGSS included Science and Engineering Practices, all of which clearly have their place in “making”

Why is Making Important for the Classroom?

Practical Knowledge – Making, especially when tied to a relevant, real problem, gives students the chance to see the application of their content to their real life. It also has a great side effect of teaching students some knowledge and skills that they might find useful later. The electric house project gets students stripping wires and wiring them together. I personally will never forget the “hosehold wiring” unit in my own AP class where our final project was to build a lamp. Years later when the plug on my vaccuum broke, I felt fully confident in myself in buying what I needed to replace the plug.

Interest & Identity – We know from the research that if a student can see themselves as a science person, they are more likely to persevere in science and choose a STEM major. Having the opportunity to create something that works and is grounded in scientific principals which is shared with the community provides ample oportunity to find strengths in a variety of scientific competencies and receive that recognition from others which is a critical compoenent to identity formation

Dispositions Towards Failure – We know that failure is at the foundation of growth and success, but too often in school many of our brightest students find themselves fleeing failure at all costs. This can result in a fear to take risks and speak up, which ultimately stunts their own growth. In order to solve a problem and design a solution students will inevitably go through a process in which failure is inevitable. When students can see that this is part of the process, even in a science classroom, their concept on what failure means can shift in that academic setting.

What Can Making Look Like?

In much of our classroom settings making often looks like projects, and these projects (as well as our labs) allow students to engage in skill-building beyond just the content.

There are some amazing teachers out there who are incredible at problem-based learning and projects, my personal toolbox is somewhat limited. I love my AP Physics “Physics Of” projects for the end of the year as well as the AP Physics C Mastery projects to provide APPC students who previously took APP1 the chance to demonstrate their competence from the previous year. There’s also the classic egg drop activity, mousetrap cars and most recently, I’ve assigned students electric houses. Beyond the Egg Drop is a book that was recommended to me a few years ago, available from NSTA. The projects in the book have been designed in such a way to align with the engineering practices.

I believe that we start with some of the core ideas: providing student agency, opportunities for creativity, and a backdrop grounded in supporting student planning, execution, evaluation and presentation. The key is to find opportunities to let this happen.

ABCs of How We Learn: F is for Feedback
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: F is for Feedback

Marianna Ruggerio3 Comments

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”

I’ve seen these words by Samuel Beckett on posters and in classrooms. The intention is to support the idea of the classroom as a safe space to try and fail. But failure without actional feedback is just failure. The classroom environment that has high expectations and high support is also an environment with ample opportunities for feedback.

Feedback can come in a lot of degrees, from a minimal “correct/incorrect” to highly detailed narrative regarding the student choices. For most of our students, the feedback they require should fall somewhere between specific discrepancy and elaborative.

Unfortunately many students are used to only getting feedback after a summative assessment, and without retakes any feedback is usually worthless. (Consider the student who crumples the test and throws it away immediately).

In order for feedback to be effective, it needs to be specific, timely, understandable, nonthreatening and revisable. (For the Hattie/Visible Learning enthusiasts, the weighted mean effect size is 0.92)

Teacher Led Peer Evaluations

A few years ago I started requiring homework submissions as scans to google classroom by the start of the school day. This allows me to do a quick skim through student work and make decisions for class prior to seeing students. Below is a sequence of student work I wanted to review and discuss with students.

Responses are left anonymous, but I use them as a way to provide feedback via whole group discussion. In this sequence you can see the work going from pretty disorganized to much more logical and detailed. I can lead this discussion, or I can ask for student observations about the work.

Student Self-Evaluations

I’ve written before about using self-evaluations for student problem solving process. I haven’t crafted these rubrics for every unit, but I’ve found that for some students this helps them focus on the problem solving routine, rather than just the answer.

Google Form Check Ups

The check up is a follow up I use when students are engaging in practice that is not scored, checked or graded by me the teacher. You can see the full blog post on this process here. During the last 10-15 minutes of class I have students engage in several activities in the google form. The first is a self-evaluation of the learning objectives. Sometimes I will ask them to rate their work from the problem set using a rubric I provide. Last, I will put 1-2 items from the day’s practice and ask students to explain the answer. An example from this past week is below:

After students submit their answer and click next, the following pops up. It provides them with the answer and an explanation behind it.

For what it’s worth, I was VERY impressed by the number of students who got a similar problem to this one correct on their exams this past week! Students are reporting that circuits has been the easiest unit yet, but the reality is that there is a great deal of conceptual heavy lifting!

One of the most important features of all of these feedback forms is that they are happening during the learning process. This means that students can very quickly adjust their course of action in order to move towards the desired results.

ABCs of How We Learn: C is for Contrasting Cases
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ABCs of How We Learn: C is for Contrasting Cases

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

Contrasting cases is about noticing the difference between two or more examples that seem the same at a glance.

That core learning mechanic should absolutely scream physics problems to you!

Acceleration is a FANTASTIC example of the benefit of contrasting cases. Students frequently come to us believing the following to be true:

  • “Acceleration” describes speeding up only
  • “Positive acceleration” describes speeding up while “negative acceleration” describes slowing down
  • “If an object’s velocity is zero, its acceleration must be zero because it has stopped”

How do we help unlodge these incomplete conceptions in our physics students? If we could “just tell them” then it wouldn’t be a problem. However, these ideas are engrained deeply in students, and they need another way to approach the idea.

In the Investigative Science Learning Curriculum students conduct several observational experiments using a bowling ball. We drop a mark (bean bag for example) at equal time intervals as the ball rolls. Students copy the resulting pattern and then construct motion maps. This is how we begin to make sense of velocity change, acceleration and force.

The contrasting cases, in this instance, are the diagrams themselves.

Through a simple series of activities, we can build the ideas that constant velocity is not the absence of force, but the absence of an unbalanced force. Accelerations happen due to unbalanced forces and the direction of the acceleration is the direction of the unbalanced force.

We do a similar task shortly thereafter with an object that is accelerated vertically. When I review the material, I specifically grab the set of activities shown below. In the top two cases, the bob is experiencing upward motion. However, we see the change in velocity is different due to the difference in accelerations.

Next, I have students compare the top and bottom experiement (4 and 6). In both of these instances the delta v (acceleration) is directed upwards, however these both describe two very different motions, up and speeding up, and down while slowing down).

Again, while I could certainly just tell them, there is a lot more power to students constructing the diagrams based on their observations and then we can look for patterns and we can look at the fine details in contrasting cases. We can then use these details in the contrasting cases to more deeply understand the concept. We are also doing something incredibly critical for our students in the science classroom. We are teaching them to argue with evidence. That their answers and assumptions about how the world works need to be grounded in evidence over feeling and intuition. I would argue that fact is far more important than any piece of content they remember 10 years from now.

I recently heard an eduinfluencer make the claim that teachers can only name and describe 3 evidence based strategies they use in their classroom. Challenge accepted. Each day I’m working through the book The ABCs of How We Learn and pairing a strategy with physics content/activities in my classroom.