• Open Access

From a systematic investigation of faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions to frameworks for characterizing and developing fluency-inspiring activities

Rica Sirbaugh French and Edward E. Prather
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 16, 020138 – Published 4 December 2020
An article within the collection: Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

Abstract

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members’ ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and astronomy. The results of this work illustrate that, for many topics, there is a lack of variety in the representations featured, intellectual tasks posed, and levels of complexity fostered by the questions faculty develop. These efforts motivated and informed the development of two frameworks: (i) a curriculum characterization framework that allows us to systematically code active learning strategies in terms of the discipline representations, intellectual tasks, and reasoning complexity that an activity offers the learner, and (ii) a curriculum development framework that guides the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners’ discipline fluency. We analyze the faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions with our curriculum characterization framework, then apply our curriculum development framework to generate (i) fluency-inspiring questions, a more pedagogically powerful extension of a well-established instructional strategy, and (ii) Student Representation Tasks, a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that shifts the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of fluency-inspiring questions and Student Representation Tasks, detailing their usage of pedagogical discipline representations coupled with novel question and activity formats.

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  • Received 10 July 2019
  • Accepted 16 January 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020138

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Physics Education Research

Collections

This article appears in the following collection:

Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

A special collection on theory and design of curriculum.

Authors & Affiliations

Rica Sirbaugh French*

  • Department of Physical Sciences, MiraCosta College, 1 Barnard Drive, Oceanside, California 92056, USA and Department of Astronomy, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA

Edward E. Prather

  • Department of Astronomy, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 16, Iss. 2 — July - December 2020

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