Paradigms in Physics: Second-Generation Dissemination Strategies

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

The undergraduate physics curriculum has not changed much in the past fifty years. To provide a skilled STEM workforce in the U.S., improvements in undergraduate physics instruction is critical. The Paradigms in Physics Project at Oregon State University recognized this problem early on and reformed the entire upper-division curriculum for physics majors in 1966. This reform involved two actions. The first was a rearrangement of content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field. The second was infusion of evidence-based interactive pedagogies that are known to engage students more effectively. The resulting curriculum has become a local and national model for curricular reform and includes a variety of active-engagement teaching strategies. An ongoing challenge to sharing the Paradigms course materials with other institutions is the large quantity of material available. This project will develop two online resources to freely deliver these materials. The first online resource will be an improved website designed from the ground up to enable faculty to access the resources they need to improve their teaching. The second online resource will be a new textbook for teaching the mathematical skills students need to be successful in advanced physics courses. This textbook will be based on years of research by the Paradigms team on student use of math in physics courses. It will use the latest technologies to deliver an interactive experience that deepens student understanding. The new website will be designed using a user-centered design process to make it intuitive for users to find needed information. Employing a relational database for the structure underneath will allow for adding new layers of information about sequences of activities and courses. The result will be a more effective website that can be used by faculty teaching upper-division physics courses across the world. Many curriculum development groups are struggling to create a website that can be used effectively. The complex structure of the long-term Paradigms project is a further challenge. One of the two major aggregators of physics curricular materials, PhysPort, simply links to the Paradigms site. Making the Paradigms site more useful to those wishing to adopt various aspects of the Paradigms materials could make this site a model for how other curriculum development projects might achieve the same goals. The second strand of this work will build an open source, modular, online mathematical methods book for use in a just-in-time fashion in upper-division courses. Using Pretext and Sage will allow the inclusion of multiple types of collapsible text alongside embedded computer algebra coding and high-quality graphics. This book will document the content, language, and interactive nature of Paradigms courses as a living curriculum, whose continuous further development is driven by what happens in the classroom. Thus, this project will provide a resource not only to Oregon State students, but also to colleagues in mathematics, physics, and science education, both at Oregon State and at other institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.