Sustaining educational reforms in introductory physics

While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are less well understood. We present a study of the hand-off of Tutorials in Introductory Physics [McDermott and Schaffer (Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002)] from initial adopters to other instructors at the University of Colorado, including traditional faculty not involved in physics educational research. The study examines the impact of implementation of tutorials on student conceptual learning across ten first-semester, and seven second-semester courses, for 15 faculty members over 13 semesters, and includes roughly 5000 students. It is possible to demonstrate consistently high, and statistically indistinguishable, student learning gains for different faculty members; however, such results are not the norm and appear to rely on a variety of factors. Student performance varies by faculty background—faculty involved in, or informed by physics education research, consistently post higher student learning gains than less-informed faculty. Student performance in these courses also varies by curricula used—all semesters in which the research-based Tutorials and learning assistants are used have higher student learning gains than those semesters that rely on nonresearch-based materials and do not employ learning assistants.

Figure 1

Post-test results on four published (Ref. 13) conceptual questions asked on midterm exams. Results from UW and CU are shown. “No-Tutorial” scores are shown for courses at UW only. Following UW reporting practices, our results are rounded to the nearest 5%.

Figure 2

BEMA results pre-(left) and post-(right), shown as % correct. The data show two semesters of results in different shades. The term-to-term reproducibility of these histograms is striking. The two semesters were taught by different faculty, both PER researchers.

Figure 3

Plot of normalized learning gains. Data from Hake (Ref. 9) show FCI gains (background bars.) Data for CU are FMCE gains, showing the span of CU interactive engagement (IE) lectures using tutorials (right arrow) and IE lectures with traditional recitations (left arrow).

Figure 4

(Color) Pre- (on the left) and post- (right) BEMA scores for second semester into physics. The bars (shown lightly, in background) are coarsely binned data taken from Fig. 2, representing student performance in classes taught by PER faculty. The line plots are predata (solid) and postdata (dashed) for instructor I4 during two different implementations. The lighter lines are the first implementation: the darker lines are his second time teaching this course.