Northwestern Oklahoma State University
Physical Science for
Elementary Education Majors 1044
"I am just now beginning to discover the difficulty
of expressing one's ideas on paper. As long as it consists solely
of description it is pretty easy; but where reasoning comes into play,
to make a proper connection, a clearness & a moderate fluency, is to
me, as I have said, a difficulty of which I had no idea."
-- Charles Darwin in correspondence to his sisters.
Advising note: This course will only be offered in the spring
of odd numbered years.
Description:
Physical Science for Elementary Education Majors (Physics 1044) is
an introductory inquiry based course in physics with no prerequisites.
It is intended for non science or non technical majors with admission priority
given to elementary education majors. The Physics 1044 course
models the inquiry based learning method appropriate for classes with small
enrollment and includes content appropriate to the elementary school curriculum.
It is not a "teaching by telling" lecture course. By nature, inquiry
based courses do not include the same breadth of content that a typical
introductory lecture course does. However, this is not a "watered
down" course and will be intellectually challenging, as any college level
course should be.
Instruction:
The Physics 1044 course is inquiry based. The student will be
doing experiments to sort out and develop models of different physical
phenomena. The instructor will not lecture in this course, rather
the student will be guided by the Socratic method. Socrates was a
fifth century BCE philosopher and teacher who is credited with the method
of guiding students by asking questions. If the student expects "teaching
by telling" in this course, then quite possibly there will be some frustration,
until the student becomes accustomed to the Socratic method. However,
it is a method particularly suited to teaching smaller classes as well
as the development of science and scientific thinking.
Methodology:
The class will meet from 9:00 - 10:50 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday. The students will be working through the Properties of Matter
(POM), Astronomy by Sight (ABS), and portions of the Electric Circuits
(EC) sections of the text "Physics
by Inquiry" by Lillian McDermott and the Physics
Education Group at the University of Washington. There will be
enough equipment for students to work in pairs. However, a student pair may find it useful
to talk with students in other groups. Students will
follow the text as assigned and explore the physical phenomena presented,
keeping data and notes in a bound laboratory notebook. When encountering
a check mark in the text (a "check-out"), the student pair will call on
the instructor to "sign off." The instructor will ask the students to explain
and discuss what they have done and will ask questions (in a collegial
and non threatening way) to probe student thinking. The students
are not being judged on getting the "correct" answers nor being punished
for making mistakes. The purpose is to understand how the students
are interpreting what they have done and to guide further student inquiry.
The goal is the development of working models for the examined phenomena.
As the explorations continue, the developed models may change or be refined.
Making mistakes and subsequently refining models is the process of science.
Students are being judged more on willingness to offer (and search for)
explanations, willingness to be wrong, and willingness to self correct
thinking.
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