The physics chain of pain

"Chain of Pain," Patrick M. Len
September 2, 2007

The key chart graphically relating instaneous, average, and difference kinematic variables.

The dudes of displacement

Delta Chi fraternity members
Frostburg State University
Frostburg, MD
http://involvement.frostburg.edu/pic_gallery/Delta_chi.jpg

Displacement vector lovers, represent!

Total lunar eclipse: August 28, 2007

070828lunareclipse.jpg
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Total lunar eclipse sequence, photographed through Cuesta College's Dobsonian-mounted 8" reflector using a point-and-shoot 4-megapixel digital camera (Pentax Optio S40).

Physics clicker question: what is not a vector?

Physics 5A, Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Cf. Giambattista/Richardson/Richardson, Physics, 1/e, Chapter 2.2

Students were asked the following clicker question (Classroom Performance System, einstruction.com) near the beginning of their learning cycle:

[0.3 participation points.] Consider the following list of quantities:
Position.
Displacement.
Distance traveled by an object.

How many of the above quantities are vectors? _____.

Correct answer: 2.

Student responses
Sections 0906, 0907
"1" : 16 students
"2" : 28 students
"3" : 2 students

Teachable moment! Students were then asked to identify the one quantity that was not a vector, eliciting various responses, most notably "position." Following discussion ensues:

• "Displacement" is a vector, pointing from the initial to the final location.
  
• "Distance traveled by an object" is not a vector but a scalar, and in one-dimensional travel may move back and forth along itself.
  
• "Position" is a vector, as it points from the origin to the location. Many students were thinking of a location as just a point, and thus not a vector. Or a few students had considered a special case that if an object starts from the origin, then its initial position is then a point and not a vector; but this brings up the special case of a null vector.

Erasing slate: shocked and awed?

"Untitled" by Anonymous
Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Latest scribbling on the lift-and-erase slate in the hallway, outside the office door.

Physic clicker question: one billion dinara note

Physics 5A, Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Cf. Giambattista/Richardson/Richardson, Physics, 1/e, Chapter 1.4

Inflacija, by Goranka Matic
As posted on boingboing.net
May 4, 2006

Students were asked the following clicker question (Classroom Performance System, einstruction.com) near the beginning of their learning cycle:

[0.3 points.] Consider an old Yugoslavian billion dinara banknote.
Enter the number of significant figures: _____.

When a number is written in non-scientific notation with empty zeros, the number of significant figures is ambiguous. The rule of thumb here is to follow the "min 2" rule, where this would be expressed in scientific notation as 1.0 x 10^9 dinara. However, assuming that dinara can be exchanged into 100 cents (the practicalities of inflation notwithstanding), then currency would be significant to the hundredths decimal place, so this would be 1.00000000000 x 10^9 dinara.

The point is that there are different rules in science and in finance, so unless it is clear that money is being discussed, the "min 2" rule will apply to ambiguous zeros.

Correct answer: 2, or 12.

Student responses
Sections 0906, 0907
"1" : 3 students
"2" : 23 students
"10": 1 student

Physics clicker question: significant figures

Physics 5A, Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Cf. Giambattista/Richardson/Richardson, Physics, 1/e, Chapter 1.4

Students were asked the following clicker question (Classroom Performance System, einstruction.com) near the beginning of their learning cycle:

[0.3 points.] Consider these five length measurements:

(A) 0.00409 m.
(B) 81.602 m.
(C) 1.970 × 10^3 cm.
(D) 80,000 km.
(E) 80,000.0 mm.

Which measurement has the most number of significant figures?

Student responses
Sections 0906, 0907
(A) : 5 students
(B) : 6 students
(C) : 3 students
(D) : 3 students
(E) : 10 students

This question was asked again after displaying the tallied results with the lack of consensus, with the following results. No comments were made by the instructor, as students were able to discuss and determine the correct answer among themselves.

[0.3 points.] Consider these five length measurements:

(A) 0.00409 m.
(B) 81.602 m.
(C) 1.970 × 10^3 cm.
(D) 80,000 km.
(E) 80,000.0 mm.

Which measurement has the most number of significant figures?

Correct answer: (E)

Student responses
Sections 0906, 0907
(A) : 2 students
(B) : 0 students
(C) : 1 student
(D) : 0 students
(E) : 24 students

Physics clicker question: significance of signficant figures

Physics 5A, Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Cf. Giambattista/Richardson/Richardson, Physics, 1/e, Chapter 1.4

Invisible Measuring Tape, by rm
icanhascheezburger.com
March 27, 2007

Students were asked the following clicker question (Classroom Performance System, einstruction.com) near the beginning of their learning cycle:

[0.3 points.] The number of significant figures measures:
(A) accuracy.
(B) precision.
(C) determinacy.
(D) significancy.

For many students "accuracy" and "precision" are synonymous, but there is an important distinction between them!

Correct answer: (B).

Student responses
Sections 0906, 0907
(A) : 11 students
(B) : 15 students
(C) : 0 students
(D) : 2 students

N.B. This was the very first clicker question of the semester!

Astronomy current events questions: August 28, 2007 event, and Mars e-mail hoax

Astronomy 10L, Fall Semester 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Students are assigned to read online articles on current astronomy events (skytonight.com, from Sky & Telescope magazine), and take a short current events quiz during the first 10 minutes of lab. (This motivates students to show up promptly to lab, as the time cut-off for the quiz is strictly enforced!)

A sample quiz is given to the students on the first lab meeting of the semester, and is not graded.

[0.2 points.] What special astronomical event will occur from 2:52 AM to 4:22 AM on August 28, 2007 for observers in San Luis Obispo, CA?
(A) A total lunar eclipse.
(B) A total solar eclipse.
(C) A discarded service module from the International Space Station will burn up as it enters the atmosphere.
(D) Daylight savings time will end.
(E) The Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak.

Correct answer: (A).

[0.2 points.] What recent e-mail hoax is circulating on the internet regarding Mars?
(A) Mars will appear as large as the full Moon, to the naked eye sometime this month.
(B) Mars is completely covered by a dust storm that shrouds the entire planet.
(C) A NASA space probe launched this month will land on Mars only nine months from now.
(D) The NASA already lost radio contact with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity over one year ago.
(E) The temperature of Mars proves that global warming is actually caused by sunspot activity.

Correct answer: (A).

Neverending cycle

"For Dan In Taiwan" by Jessica Hagy
indexed.blogspot.com, July 30, 2007

And so it begins, the start of another academic year at Cuesta College!

Scale movie: planets and stars

"Planets and Stars," posted by nectarian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WEL117xXpw

By no means the first such scale movie (and no, Pluto is no longer a planet!), but done nicely without having previous objects pull back into perspective behind foreground objects, which would distort the scale comparison.

Crying over spilt...Milky Way

"Milky" Way, by claramara
Worth1000.com
Alternate Explanations 3 contest

Several Greek myths discuss the origins of the Milky Way ("Galaxias," from "gala" or milk) as seen from Earth, with Hera unknowingly breastfeeding Heracles, or Rhea attempting to breastfeed a stone in swaddling clothes to dupe her husband Cronus.

Further discussion: Milky Way (mythology), from wikipedia.org.

Meteor shower movie

Leonids meteor storm (*.mov, 66 MB)
http://metaresearch.org/expeditions/past/storms/Leonids-fullscrn-download.wmv

From MetaResearch.org, an apparently pseudoscientific (but interesting) website:

H. John Wood acquired an excellent 2-hour video of the 19 November 2002 Leonids storm. The image tube was pointed toward the radiant, making most of the trails very short. Matthew Willson has extracted a 6-minute portion near the storm peak so that our web site visitors can get a sense of what this rare spectacle was like. The video is sped up by approximately a factor of three from real time. However, the field of view covers only about 10% of the sky. So the video extract shows only about 1/3 of the real-time meteor rates that an on-site observer might have seen under ideal viewing conditions.

The showerhead effect

Janet Leigh in Psycho
(Paramount/Universal Pictures, 1960)

The meteor tracks for the Perseid meteor shower appear to diverge from the constellation Perseus (which is the epynomous "radiant" for that meteor shower). Although these meteor tracks are essentially parallel, they appear to radiate outwards from that point in the sky due to "The Showerhead Effect."

Education research: age factor in collaborative clicker questions

An unsolicited observation from a Cuesta College Astronomy 10 (introductory astronomy) student regarding collaborative clicker questions during review sessions, as discussed in the previous post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (Cosmos in the Classroom 2007).

I am only 32 [years old] but my perspective on [collaboration clicker questions] are a bit different. I found out that if time was running out and there was no sure answer for the CPS question, I could blurt anything out and the majority of the class would follow suit like sheep. I probably should have kept track of the times I did that so you could compare data. The older students in the class are less interested in participation with others, and were more likely to answer on their own anyway. I realize that this data is subjective, but I am willing to bet that if you rejected 25+ [year-old students] you would see a statisticial difference in the results. You would probably see the difference in attitude also.
--S.S., Spring 2006

Kudos: awesome new world of astronomy

"Awesome New World of Astronomy" by Genesis N.
Astronomy 10
July 2007
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Heat death of the universe

Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North
www.qwantz.com
July 18, 2007 (excerpt)

Astronomy 10 learning goal Q12.3

Ryan North hits another one out of the park, astronomy-wise, in describing the heat death that will result from the expansion of the universe (exacerbated by the acceleration due to dark energy?), imagined here as a "Choose Your Adventure." But at least there is a happy ending in the last panel.

Previous post: comment on Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics discussion of the tidal slowing of Earth's rotation.

Presentation: "Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy" (research results)

Further discussion on the "Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy" workshop presented at the Astronomy Society of the Pacific Cosmos in the Classroom National Symposium on Teaching Astronomy for Non-Science Majors, August 5, 2007, 2:00-3:00 PM, Session H3 in Hahn 108, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

These slides discuss in more detail research supported by an @ONE Scholar Fellowship, and published in the Astronomy Education Review vol. 5, no. 2, p. 5, and are from an earlier presentation at the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Fall 2006 Meeting (October 12, 2006), Los Angeles, CA.

The presentation for this workshop is in a previous post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (Cosmos in the Classroom 2007).


For fall semester 2005, there were a total of 111 formative/summative clicker questions, and 100 collaborative clicker questions. "Clickthroughs" measure the average student response rate, which was essentially statistically identical for either type of question. "Success" measures the average student rate of correct responses, which was statistically significantly higher for the collaborative questions (82 +/- 17%) than for the formative/summative questions (45 +/- 7%).


Students were asked to categorize whether they answered clicker questions without listening to, or telling others how they would respond ("self-testers"), or if they listened, to, or told others how they would respond before clicking in ("collaborators"). For the formative/summative clicker questions, nearly a third of the class preferred to answer independently as self-testers, but a near-unanimity of the class became collaborators during the collaborative review sessions. Understandably the doubling success bonus for attaining a cumulative class score above 80% for a review session strongly motivated nearly all of the students to become collaborators. However, further research was done to try to determine the motivation students to collaborators or self-testers for the formative/summative questions.


Students in this study were administered the Survey of Attitudes Towards Astronomy (Zeilik and Morris, Astronomy Education Review, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 101). Of the four SATA subscales (affect, cognitive competence, difficulty, and value) of student attitudes, there were marked differences between self-testers and collaborators as measured by their cognitive competence. For both pre-test and post-test cognitive competence scores, self-testers scored higher than collaborators. A more striking result was that collaborators had a statistically significant downward shift in cognitive competence compared to the self-testers, whose scores remained essentially static.

A possible hypothesis for the negative shift in cognitive competence for collaborators is currently being investigated at Cuesta College. It is possible that students who prefer to collaborate when responding to clicker questions, even when there is no explicit incentive to do so are taking introductory astronomy as their first and only science course to satisfy their general education requirement, and thus have relatively unformed or negative preconceptions towards science that are self-fulfilling.

The presentation for this workshop is in the previous post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (Cosmos in the Classroom 2007).

Overheard: Cosmos in the Classroom 2007

Overheard from workshop coordinators, presenters, and participants at the Astronomy Society of the Pacific Cosmos in the Classroom National Symposium on Teaching Astronomy for Non-Science Majors, August 3-5, 2007, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

IMGP0035.JPG
http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/1032066380/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

"We just discovered a third [large Kuiper Belt Object], but I'm not supposed to tell you that."

--Dr. Michael Brown, California Institute of Technology, co-discoverer (along with Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University) of the new dwarf planet Eris, during his plenary talk "How I Demoted Pluto and Why It Had It Coming."

IMGP0030.JPG
http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/1030577115/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

"Telling is not teaching, and the plural of anecdote is not data."

--Dr. Edward E. Prather, University of Arizona, title of his plenary talk, reflecting on the current state of education reform and the research that must go into supporting future changes to teaching introductory astronomy. (Dr. Pamela Gay, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, discusses Prather's talk on her blog, starstryder.com.)

"My solar system has only four planets."

--Dr. Douglas Duncan, University of Colorado-Boulder, on concentrating on geolgical/atmospheric differences between the three terrestrial planets Venus, Earth, and Mars, and on the jovian planet exemplar Jupiter in his introductory astronomy course.

"d(student)/dt = 20 x d(faculty)/dt; they get younger every year."

--Dr. Christopher Impey, University of Arizona, in his plenary talk "Teaching Astronomy with Electrons and Waves," comparing the rapid changes occuring to the societal mores, communication modes, and pop culture of the student body, relative to the glacial changes in attitudes and expectations of faculty.

Presentation: "Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy" (Q & A)

Questions from workshop participants at the "Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy" workshop presented at the Astronomy Society of the Pacific Cosmos in the Classroom National Symposium on Teaching Astronomy for Non-Science Majors, August 5, 2007, 2:00-3:00 PM, Session H3 in Hahn 108, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

How much are clicker questions worth?
There are a total of 600.0 course points for Astronomy 10 at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, CA, of which 75.0 points are for using clickers. There are approximately 100-120 formative/summative clicker questions @ 0.3 points each = 30.0-36.0 points. There are exactly 100 collaborative (review) clicker questions @ 0.3-0.6 points each (depending on doubling if a cumulative review session score > 80%) = 30.0-60.0 points. Thus students who respond to every clicker question can get a maximum of 60.0-96.0 points, depending on how often the doubling bonus is attained. The average cumulative review session score is 82% +/- 17%, and a class typically reaches the doubling bonus threshold perhaps two-thirds of the time. If there are more than 75.0 clicker points awarded, those are considered extra-credit (and can only be awarded in a class that reaches the doubling bonus for collaborative (review) questions nearly every session, and to a student that has perfect attendance and responds to every clicker question).

Are clicker questions posted for students?
Clicker questions are posted online after each class, so students can download them from the course website instead of having to write down the questions in class. The posted questions do not have the correct choices indicated; these students can record for themselves in their class notes. These questions are taken down a short while afterwards, and some responses are scrambled for the subsequent semester.

Are clicker questions posted for other instructors?
Clicker questions (and exam multiple-choice questions and short-answer essay questions) for introductory astronomy are regularly posted on weekdays during the school year, and can be accessed by clicking on the links at right. For each posting, the context is given, and student responses are tabulated.

Can other education researchers use the tabulated student responses for these questions?
According to the Human Subject Regulations Decision Charts from the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tabulation of student responses as research is exempt under 45 CHR 46.101(b)(1) from all 45 CFR part 46 requirements, and exempt under 45 CFR 46.101(b)(2) exemption from 45 CHR part 46 requirements. However, these results should not be used by other education researchers in their own research, unless prior permission is sought.

The presentation for this workshop is in the previous post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (Cosmos in the Classroom 2007).

Presentation: "Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy" (Cosmos in the Classroom 2007)

Workshop presented at the Astronomy Society of the Pacific Cosmos in the Classroom National Symposium on Teaching Astronomy for Non-Science Majors, August 5, 2007, 2:00-3:00 PM, Session H3 in Hahn 108, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.


Experience using electronic response pads ("clickers") in a classroom setting as students would, and also see first-hand how different reward structures stimulate collaborative interaction between students.

Tips and tricks for successful collaborative review sessions will be discussed, along with preliminary education research results, and a question/answer session.

By the way, hopefully the student depicted above is not a common occurrence in your classroom; but student inattentiveness and disengagement are exactly what clickers can address.


The Classroom Performance System (CPS) radio frequency (RF) pads used in this workshop have been provided by eInstruction.com. Each clicker has a unique number. By selecting your response and pressing enter, you should see your clicker number light up on the response grid projected onscreen. You can always change your response as time allows. The CPS Chalkboard is a wireless trackpad and pen that is optional.


Formative questions come at the start of a learning cycle, and get students engaged with (new) material. Students are rewarded for clicking in, regardless if whether their response is correct or incorrect; obviously, they cannot receive credit if they are inattentive or absent.

Example questions:

F1. Why are you interested in this clicker workshop (H3)?

1. Never used clickers before; would like to learn about them.
   
2. Already use clickers; would like to learn more.
   
3. Every other workshop at this time is too crowded.
   
4. Selected this workshop at random.
   

F2. Which one of the following choices best describes the glowing colors of light emitted by a "blackbody" (such as a charcoal briquette glowing in the dark), as it is gradually heated up from a warm temperature to a very hot temperature?

1. Dark gray, medium gray, light gray, white.
   
2. Red, blue, yellow, white, violet.
   
3. Red, orange, yellow, white, blue.
   
4. Blue, green, yellow, orange, red.
   

F3. Consider a 1.0 M_Sun giant and a 4.0 M_Sun main sequence star in a close pair ("mass-exchanging") binary star system. Which star is older?

1. The 1.0 M_Sun giant.
   
2. The 4.0 M_Sun main sequence star.
   
3. Both stars have the same age.
   
4. (The ages of these stars cannot be determined, without knowing how much mass has been exchanged between them.)

These questions are meant to survey student opinions, preconceptions, pre-reading comprehension, or bridge new material with previously discussed concepts.


In contrast, summative questions come in the middle or near the end of a learning cycle, and assess student understanding on their consolidation of the material. Students are still rewarded for clicking in, regardless if whether their response is correct or incorrect. A summative question can be asked again to form a "think-pair-share," after students see their initial responses, and attempt to discuss amongst themselves to reach a (correct) consensus.

Example question (results from this question as a "think-pair-share" are discussed in the previous post: Astronomy clicker question: the Stefan-Boltzmann law):

S1. Why is a white dwarf star known to be smaller than a main-sequence star that has the same white-hot color?

1. It is less luminous than the main-sequence star.
   
2. It is more luminous than the main-sequence star.
   
3. It is cooler than the main-sequence star.
   
4. It is hotter than the main-sequence star.

Collaborative questions are asked as a set in a "review session" at the end of the class just before an quiz or a midterm. In contrast to student-student interactions that may occur during formative and summative clicker questions, collaborative questions are designed such that the entire class must interact and reach a consensus, due to the drastically different reward structure. Students are still rewarded for responding as before, regardless if their response is correct or not, but if the cumulative class score for the entire review session is 80% or higher, then all participation points are doubled for that review session.

Example questions, for a sample review session:

C1. Which one of following statements best explains why white dwarfs are known to be smaller in size than red dwarfs?

1. They have the same temperature as, but are more luminous than red dwarfs.
   
2. They have the same temperature as, but are less luminous than red dwarfs.
   
3. They have the same luminosity as, but are hotter than red dwarfs.
   
4. They have the same luminosity as, but are cooler than red dwarfs.
   
5. (None of the above choices (A)-(D), as white dwarfs are actually larger in size than red dwarfs.)
   

C2. Which one of the following statements best describes how the blackbody (continuous) spectrum of a solid object would change as it is gradually cooled down from a very hot temperature to a warm temperature? On this intensity versus wavelength graph, spectrum W and spectrum X have their peaks at the same wavelength of 480 nm; spectrum Y and spectrum Z have their peaks at the same wavelength of 1,070 nm.

1. Spectrum W will gradually become spectrum X.
   
2. Spectrum W will gradually become spectrum Y.
   
3. Spectrum W will gradually become spectrum Z.
   
4. Spectrum Y will gradually become spectrum X.
   
5. Spectrum Y will gradually become spectrum Z.
   

C3. Which one of following sets of parameters best describes the minimum information required to determine the radius of a star?

1. The distance from the Earth to the star, and its apparent magnitude.
   
2. The surface temperature of the star, and its parallax angle.
   
3. The surface temperature of the star, and its luminosity.
   
4. The parallax angle of the star, and its apparent magnitude.
   
5. The parallax angle of the star, and its luminosity.
   

C4. Which one of the following statements best describes the relationship between a main sequence star and a supergiant that have the same luminosity?

1. The main sequence star is cooler and smaller than the supergiant.
   
2. The main sequence star is cooler and larger than the supergiant.
   
3. The main sequence star is hotter and smaller than the supergiant.
   
4. The main sequence star is hotter and larger than the supergiant.
   
5. (None of the above choices (A)-(D), as it is not possible for a main sequence star to have the same luminosity as a supergiant.)
   

Refer to the table below in answering the following question (C5).

	Surface temperature, in Kelvin	M absolute magnitude	m apparent magnitude
Shaula	25,000 K	–5.0	+1.6
π Puppis	4,300 K	–5.0	+2.7
β Muscae	25,000 K	–1.8	+3.0
Minkar	4,300 K	–1.8	+3.0

C5. Which one of the following choices best explains which star is the largest in size, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law?

1. Shaula.
   
2. π Puppis.
   
3. β Muscae.
   
4. Minkar.
   
5. (Not enough information is given to determine which of the above stars (A)-(D) is the largest in size.)
   

Successful collaborative clicker questions should keep the class "in play" throughout the review session, such that every question until the last counts towards reaching the 80% threshold. Students will not be able to attain this by splitting their answers; they must reach a consensus as much as possible. You can give gentle hints, or remove a choice when class discussion has gone completely astray.

Throughout a review session, encourage students to talk and listen, and even shout and demand accountability from each other--that is what these collaborative questions are designed to do! Emphasize "high-energy" interaction; by the end of the semester students engage in enthusiastic class-wide debates, resort to shouting out their answers, and even try to steer the class by pointing on the overhead projector screen with laser pointers.

If it is not mathematically possible for the class to reach the 80% threshold even with the last question being 100% (this corresponds to a cumulative score of less than 75% before the last question is asked), offer the class a "deal" where if students respond correctly and unanimously to the last question, then they will awarded the doubling of their participation credit (no matter their actual cumulative score), in order to keep the students actively engaged to the very end.


A preliminary study has been done in Fall 2005, on a small number of students (N = 36), supported by an @ONE Scholar Fellowship, and published in the Astronomy Education Review vol. 5, no. 2, p. 5. As opposed to formative and summative questions, collaborative questions in a review session had a higher average rate of correct responses, and a higher rate of self-reported cooperation, where the number of students who took others' responses into consideration while responding increased from 13 to a nearly unanimous 35 out of 36 students.

Due to the small population of this study, future research will look at several years of accumulated data, and investigate whether the inclination to individually answer or cooperatively respond to formative and summative questions is correlated with previous background in science, attitudes towards astronomy, and/or personal motivation for acting alone or interacting with others.

[Acknowledgements to the workshop participants for their suggestions in improving the wording of the clicker questions!]

Questions posed by workshop participants are answered in a subsequent post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (Q & A), while further discussion on the results of research on this topic are discussed in the subsequent post: Formative, Summative, and Cooperative Clicker Instruction in Astronomy (research results).

Crop circle signs of intelligence

Driver comes a cropper in police chase, metro.co.uk
June 25, 2007

Physics 8A learning goal F.3

A driver allegedly under the influence of cocaine, pursued by four police cars in a corn field in the Netherlands. Would this pattern be interpreted as a purposeful sign of intelligence by extraterrestrials?

Open-book quizzes

d12 die
Originally uploaded by Waifer X.

Excerpt from the Cuesta College (San Luis Obispo, CA) Astronomy 10 course policy below. Note that students are already expected to bring their textbooks to class for reference during in-class activities (peer-instruction worksheets, similar to "Lecture-Tutorials" developed by Jeffrey P. Adams, Edward E. Prather, and Timothy F. Slater.

You are expected to bring your textbook to each class. At least one, but no more than two quizzes during a semester may be specially designated as "open book," where you will be allowed access to your own individual textbook during the quiz, but open notes are not allowed. Highlighting, underlining and short comments written in your textbook are acceptable. Lecture notes, reading guides, and other separate study materials are not acceptable. An "open book" quiz will not be announced until just before the start of a quiz. You should be prepared to answer all quiz questions regardless of whether or not you have access to a textbook, and regardless of whether a quiz is "open book" or not. Time spent to retrieve a textbook from outside the classroom during a quiz will be considered time during the 15 minutes allotted to take the quiz. The intent of this practice is to encourage individual ownership and accountability, and to emphasize the importance of utilizing the textbook effectively as a learning resource.

Since there are 12 scheduled quizzes during the semester, a 12-sided die is used for a volunteer student to "roll" for an open-book quiz for the class. The first three quizzes for the semester are always closed-book (as they focus on spatial relationships in determining diurnal, lunar, and planetary positions and motions in the celestial sphere), and midterms are also always closed-book.

The die is cast in the minute just before the start of a quiz, and is done on an ELMO overhead presenter, such that the rest of the class can witness the result. If the die roll (1-12) produces a number that is more than the quiz number, then that quiz is closed-book, and closed-notes. If the die roll produces a number that is less than the quiz number, then that quiz is open-book, but is still closed-notes, and no handouts nor study guides are allowed. Highlighted text and handwritten notes in the textbook are allowed. The probability of an open-book quiz steadily increases from Quiz 4 (4/12) to an almost certainty by Quiz 12 (12/12). However, there is only a maximum of two open-book quizzes are allowed per semester; once there have been two open-book quizzes, there is no more opportunity to roll for another.

Many students realize that they should not depend on a quiz being open-book, and should have studied and mastered the material on their own. Some also realize that access to their textbook during a quiz is a crutch, that can be detrimental to their time management if they rely on looking up the answer to every question. As the emphasis of this course is on understanding concepts and applying analytical reasoning, the multiple choice questions on quizzes are deliberately constructed to test skills in weighing evidence and supporting conclusions, and not on facts that can be memorized by rote, or looked up by scanning summary boxes, the glossary, or the index of a textbook.

Education research on the difference between sections that have open-book or closed-book quizzes may be done in following semesters.