Thinking About Thinking: Learning

Commentaries

Kathleen A. Falconer, EER Joseph L. Zawicki, ESSE

Daniel L. MacIsaac, Physics

AbstractLearning commentaries are useful meta-cognitive tools. Students write formal essays describing their learning and provide examples (evidence) generated during the lesson. Learning commentaries allow students to integrate new ideas into their current knowledge structure. Many students do not fully appreciate the extent of their learning, particularly in reformed physics classrooms; commentaries help students to appreciate their intellectual growth. Teaching fosters learning when students integrate new ideas into their current understandings; self-reflection facilitates the creation of new understandings and linkages between ideas (Donovan, Bransford & Pelligrino, Eds., 1999).

Subject/Problem

What understandings do students develop about their own learning using learning commentaries?

How do students view writing learning commentaries in physics classes?

Theoretical Background/

Literature reviewSelf-Reflection and Internal Dialogues• learning fostered when students integrate new

ideas into their current understandings– self-reflection facilitates the creation of new

understandings and linkages between ideas

• development of internal dialogues– not entirely intuitive process– the development of this expertise must be facilitated and

supported by the teacher– modeling by the instructor– students will be able to independently prompt themselves

and monitor their understanding (Donovan, Bransford & Pelligrino, Eds., 1999, p. 14).

Different Instructional Approaches to Foster Student Reflection– opinion polls– surveys– journal entries in various formats– diagnostic learning logs– email– group instructional feedback(Cross & Angelo, 1993)

Other authors have suggested the use of reflective writings in an attempt to understand student thinking.

• students reflecting while reading the textbook Taylor (1992)

• learning commentaries (Otero, 2003)

Learning Commentaries• unique in that they typically focus

the student on their own learning process within the context a particular idea or concept– what they learned– how they learned it– those moments of insight when the

“light bulb goes on” and new ideas fall into place

Design/Procedure• Population

– intact groups– approximately 120 undergraduate and

graduate students– participated in physics courses (PHY 107,

PHY 108, PHY 620, PHY622, etc.)– pre-service and in-service teachers– elementary and secondary teachers

Study• three learning commentaries per course

– formal essays describing, at length, the evolution of the student’s thoughts on the learning of one specific scientific concept

– support their thesis with specific data taken from classroom observations and activities within the course (or from their own classrooms)

• Examined for themes using grounded theory.

• The data analysis had five stages.– The first stage consisted of the original annotation of the writing

assignments. The assignments were re-annotated and we worked on analytic memos (Creswell, 1998).

– In the second stage, we reread the assignments and annotations. While doing this, we started to seek out patterns in the data.

– We looked for re-occurrences of ideas and start to make preliminary “counts.” Then we recursively started to integrate stage three and stage two. First we open coded the data from the assignments. We looked for ways to integrate categories, and then we looked for similarities and differences.

– In stage four, we axial coded the data. – Stage five was when we started writing on the themes and

process of teacher self-reflection. we recursively started to integrate stage four and stage five.

Preliminary Findings and Analysis

Graduate Student ResponseThe single scientific idea which evolved for me this week was the concept of the electric field. I had not thought about it deeply before, and the discussions, analogies and presentations of this week have caused me to re-evaluate the significance of the idea, and also caused me to realize me understanding was not as strong as I had thought.Previously, I had thought of the electric field mostly as a kind of map of the path that charges would take, and one that determined how much force a charge would feel at a given location. I would have told you that energy was stored in the field, and been able to successfully describe all of the standard analogies to the gravitational field. However, my mental picture of the electric field was really only strong for electrostatic situations. I never really thought about the electric field inside of a circuit. While I understood the electric fields of capacitors in isolated situations, I did not even know that electric fields existed across resistors, or in current-carrying wires. The topic was not one that I had ever come across or seen the need to study.

During the first week of class, we first attacked fields from the perspective of a person “riding a positive charge,” and examined how we would feel in the vicinity of various charge arrangements. This was familiar territory, and we moved on to activities ranging from placing students of varying masses on bleachers to using an EM fields computer simulation. The bleacher activity is fabulous for reaching students, and I tried it last year with my classes. The EM fields program was okay, but the parallel plates simulation needs a little fine-tuning. Still, the discussion of why the field gets stronger as more charges pile on the plates and the lines get closer together was very useful.

A useful pictoral representation of the distortion of the electron cloud surrounding an atom in a conductor was drawn and discussed, and emphasized in Chabay and Sherwood as well. Dan then showed us how a beaker of ions, placed between two parallel plates, creates its own external electric field in response to the externally imposed one of the plates, and may completely cancel or negate some of the external field. The charge residing on the edge of the beaker may reinforce the external electric field in the air between the beaker and the plates, and this modeled a conductor between two plates. This was a pretty painless way to understand dielectrics. We also looked at how plastic (an insulator) might work differently, and some questions were raised in my mind as to how that would affect the external field and thus the attraction between two plates or charges. I had never thought before that electric fields acted like gravitational fields in that they are never just “cancelled out” or turned off.

Previously, I had thought that electric fields were prevented from spreading when you placed, say, plastic or glass around a charge. The image I had was not unlike that of a blanket’s” insulating” something warm by preventing heat from flowing. I thought that insulators somehow prevented electric fields from flowing. From class activities and discussion, and particularly from reading Chabay Ch. 14, as well, I came to understand that an electric field interacts with the atoms of a material so as to promote a rearrangement of charges, causing an internal electric field which is superimposed upon the original field, and that the field continues to exist, even beyond the material.

In order to more fully develop my understanding of field, I need to read a bit more. Chabay pointed out that the models we learned should not be overly generalized to all situations, and that in a circuit, the battery prevents equilibrium from occurring, and that this is why electric fields in a circuit’s wires are not “neutralized” by superposition. I need to get a copy of the next chapter of Chabay so that my understanding of the fields in a circuit may deepen.

Preliminary Findings and Analysis

Undergraduate Student ResponseAs the semester progressed and the discussion began to focus on different kinds of

forces, I found that things were not quite what I had originally believed. During cycle one, we ran activities that had us predicting what would happen when there was a friction pad attached to the cart. Although we weren’t concerned with forces at that point, the term did come up in class discussions of why the cart slowed down. As we began to talk about the role that friction played in mechanical reactions, I (and I believe many others as well) had the notion that friction was a force that acted in an upward motion on the cart. It made sense to me that if friction is the result of two surfaces rubbing up against each other – in this case the friction pad and the track – then the forces involved were gravity (which was pushing the pad/cart down toward the track) and friction (which would have to be pushing up against the force of gravity). This seemed to be a logical way to think about friction in relation to the experiments we were doing with the cart/pad and track.As we progressed further into cycle two, we began to focus on labeling diagrams with force and speed arrows. Based on my original thinking about what happens between the cart/pad and track, I initially drew a force arrow for friction upwards towards the bottom of the cart. Other force arrows, such as when you give your friend on a skateboard a push, were easy to understand – they went in the direction of the push. For some reason, the correct place to put a force arrow due to friction eluded me until we worked through activity five. This was the activity where we used a rubber band launcher to push a block over three different degrees of sandpaper and then a row of sticky notes.

Preliminary Findings and Analysis

Undergraduate Student ResponseAt first, when we were pushing the block over the sandpaper, my mind still

firmly held onto the concept that friction was an upward force. Gravity was pushing the block down into the surface of the sandpaper which was, in turn, pushing back up against the sandpaper. When we pushed the block over the sticky notes, that notion started to become a little hazy. It no longer made as much sense to describe it in the same way. There was a summarizing question for activity five that asked us to use the row of sticky notes as an analogy for how friction works to slow an object down. This was a difficult question to answer because it challenged the notion of how I thought friction in this type of interaction behaved. The more our group talked about it, we started to see that the sticky notes essentially acted as little roadblocks to the blocks forward progress and that each time the block hit a sticky note it caused the block to slow down. In fact, it was like each sticky note was a hand that was giving the block a little nudge in the opposite direction. If this was true then the force arrow had to be drawn, not upwards against the force of gravity as I originally thought, but in the opposite direction of the motion of the block. Honestly, I’m still a little baffled as to why I was so conflicted as to where to draw a force arrow that was due to friction. I knew that friction was a force that opposed the motion of an object. I had no problems drawing other types of force arrows and now it makes perfect sense to me that if friction is what is making an object slow down, then it

must be acting on the object in the opposite direction of the motion of that object.

Preliminary Conclusions• Learning commentaries are useful meta-

cognitive tools.• Learning commentaries allow students to

integrate new ideas into their current knowledge structure.

• Many students do not fully appreciate the extent of their learning, particularly in reformed physics classrooms

• Commentaries help students to appreciate their intellectual growth.

ReferencesAngelo, Thomas A., & Cross, K. Patricia (1993). Classroom assessment

techniques: A handbook for faculty. San Franciso, CA: Jossey-Bass. Donovan, M. S., Bransford, J. D., & Pelligrino, J. W., Eds. (1999) How people

learn: Briding research and practice. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press

Gosling, Chris, MacIsaac, D. (2007). Regents physics Iinteractive collaborative electronic learning logs. Winter AAPT Meeting, Seattle, WA

Gearhardt, Brad (2007). Personal communication.Johnson, Steven. (2006). Using learning commentaries in Regents physics.

Unpublished Masters project, State University of New York, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York.

MacIsaac, Dan (2007). Course grading and procedure policy: PHY622. State University of New York, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York.

Otero, V. K. (2003) Cognitive processes and the learning of physics part I: The evolution of knowledge from a Vygotskian perspective. Proceedings of the International School of Physics “Enrico Fermi”, Vicentini, M., & Redish, E.F. (Eds). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Stewart, James. (2007). Final Learning Commentary. Available at: http://newton.physics.wwu.edu/jstewart/scied390/learningcommentary.html. Last accessed August 23, 2007.

Taylor, E. F. (1992). Guest comment: Only the student knows. American Journal of Physics 60: 201-202.