Critical aspects of Staff Development

Continuity – practice, implement, reflect several times with the same people

Research Results:

(Lillian McDermott)

Student Learning

Facility in solving standard quantitative problems is not an adequate criterion for functional understanding.

Connections among concepts, formal representations, and the real world are often lacking from traditional instruction.

Certain conceptual difficulties are not overcome by traditional instruction. (Advanced study may not increase understanding of basic concepts.)

A coherent framework is not typically an outcome of traditional instruction.

Growth in reasoning ability often does not result from traditional instruction.

Teaching by telling is an ineffective mode of instruction for most students.

Teaching

Questions that require qualitative reasoning and verbal explanation are essential for assessing student learning and are an effective strategy for helping students learn.

Students need repeated practice in interpreting physics formalism and relating it to the real world.

Persistent conceptual difficulties must be explicitly addressed in multiple contexts.

Students need to participate in the process of constructing qualitative models and applying these models to predict and explain real-world phenomena.

Scientific reasoning skills must be expressly cultivated.

Students must be intellectually active to develop a functional understanding.