Teaching Physics to Teachers Using Inquiry Methods

While at Ohio State University I worked with Ken Wilson's Physics Education Group.  This was a group of physicists and graduate students who investigated how students learned physics.  The Physics Education Group focused on research using inquiry methods of teaching and used Lillian McDermott's, Physics by Inquiry books and other inquiry exercises.    

While at Ohio State, I worked with the physics education group to pilot test the materials and edit the content and the writing as we progressed through the pilot test.  We taught the physics course for elementary teachers by using McDermott's inquiry exercises.  Teachers worked in small groups to discover basic physics concepts for themselves.  The groups worked at tables first completing experiments and then constructing their own understanding of the concept by working as a group.  The instructor and teaching aids, walked around to each group to help the groups construct their thoughts.  

In the summer I worked with The Ohio Mathematics/Science Project Discovery, an NSF funded project for systemic change in how math and science were taught in the public high schools.  At a four week workshop we trained Master Teachers throughout the state of Ohio.  These teachers were charged with taking what they had learned about physics and inquiry methods and returning to their school districts and conducting workshops.

During this time, my fellow graduate students in the college of education and I conducted additional research projects on the common hands-on science activities that teachers  found in books and other sources.  Because physics activities are the easiest to do in a classroom setting, we found physics activities were the most common hands on activities teachers used.  In addition, during that time hands on science become popular quicker than exemplary materials could be produced.  Hence, teachers were using that were indeed fun, however they often did not teach the correct science principals.

Our results found that teachers were less likely to take physics in college than any other science.  Most teachers, including high school science teachers had only a freshman or sophomore level science courses and they were most likely to be large, core courses for non-science majors.  Our findings suggested that teachers' education to teach physics had to include: how to research and evaluate experiments for validity and content, how to use inquiry methods to teach students how to create their own knowledge and to coordinate what is taught with the state science standards to assure students would progress at a steady pace throughout their schooling.