Development of a Studio Course in Physics

Dr Judith Pollard
Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics

"By taking control of their own learning and working in groups gaining hands-on experience, students can maintain their enthusiasm and develop better understanding."

Background | Aims | Process | Evaluation | Cost | Contact

Background

The Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics has developed a Physics studio class for its first year students, replacing the traditional structure of separate lectures, tutorials and practical sessions. Although the traditional lecture/tutorial course used many strategies to increase the involvement of students with both the subject and each other, for many students the course was still not satisfactory:

• there was little opportunity to monitor the progress of students and provide feedback until after an exam at the end of first semester which had a large assessment weight. There was a consequent lack of opportunity for rescuing students at risk of failing
• the laboratory course was not closely integrated with the theoretical part of the course
• despite effort to make the material presented in lectures lucid and memorable, lectures remained an ineffective learning environment

In the first semester of 1999 a new approach, the studio class originally developed for an introductory physics course by J M Wilson at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Ref 1), was tried.

Aims

In a studio class all aspects of the course are integrated and presented to the group of students in the same room, in order to:

• reduce the dependence on lecturing
• integrate the theoretical and laboratory components of the subject
• encourage cooperative learning
• make the students more responsible for their learning
• integrate the use of information technology into the course
  
  

Process

The Studio Program
With the assistance of a Committee for University Teaching and Staff Development (CUTSD) grant, the level I, second semester topics Electricity and Magnetism, Thermodynamics, and Quantum Physics were repackaged so that a pilot group of students experienced an integrated program comprising a series of Preparation Activities and Studio Sessions.

In the Preparation activities, each student worked through a set of notes at his or her own pace; the notes give a clear statement of the aims and learning objectives of the section, provide a guide to the text book (Ref 2), introduce supplementary information (Ref 3) and include short concept-based questions to allow self-testing.

Each Studio Session was a class in which students worked in groups of 5 or 6 for approximately 150 minutes to develop the ideas introduced in the Preparation. Each Session was structured around thematic Activity Sets which guided the students through interrelated pencil-and-paper exercises, computer simulations and computations and short practical activities. The Session also included brief lecture segments which provided an overview of the current topic with emphasis on aspects which particularly benefited from verbal description. Printed Solutions were supplied at the end of each Session, to help students consolidate their understanding.

Evaluation

Evaluation was undertaken through interviews and focus groups (conducted by a staff member of the Advisory Centre for University Education), a free response questionnaire, written evaluation and a comparison of final assessment. The main points to emerge from the evaluation were:

• teaching staff had greater opportunities for meaningful interactions with students
• most of the students were enthusiastic about the studio program. Attendance at the sessions was excellent, with the incidence of absences less than half that at the lecture-tutorial program
• students were more actively engaged in the learning process during sessions
• more time was spent each week outside teaching sessions by studio students (3.5 hours) than by traditional program students (1.5 hours). This increase of 2 hours per week for studio students in private study was partly compensated by a reduction of 1 hour per week in class time. Studio Physics students did comment on the increased workload required
• overall, students reported that the studio approach aided their understanding of the work. Most studio students believed the small group environment offered greater opportunities for learning and appreciated the opportunity to work at their own pace, to monitor their mastery of the work and to work collaboratively
• studio students experienced a growing understanding of the concepts of physics during the semester, whereas students in the traditional lecture/tutorial program very commonly achieved most of their understanding in the period immediately preceding the exam
• exam comparisons gave mixed results. Capable studio students performed as well as their first semester results would predict. Struggling studio students who applied themselves consistently throughout the semester did better than expected. On the other hand, those students who failed to work effectively before and during the sessions had very poor final results

Further development

The program is being revised and presented to the entire class of 120 students for a large part of the second semester of 1999. This requires offering 3 streams of Studio Physics with as many as 44 students in each stream, assisted by a member of staff and a postgraduate student. Significant practical difficulties are caused by the need for students to attend two 2 hour sessions each week, instead of the 'standard’ pattern of lectures, tutorial and laboratory session. The response of these students to the Studio format will be used to identify the best aspects of the program, with a view to incorporating them into Physics I in future years.

Cost of Implementation

The requirements for the preparation, equipment and face-to-face teaching of a Studio Program differ from those of a standard lecture-tutorial-practical subject, and all contribute to the implementation costs.

If the content of the subject is based closely on a suitable text book, the time required for production of Preparation and Session notes is similar to that for preparing a new course of lectures with associated practical work.

If the program is designed to make significant use of computing and to introduce a new range of experiments, significant costs are incurred. On the other hand, it is often possible to design a Studio program which operates within the constraints of existing computer and laboratory resources, thereby avoiding large additional costs.

A comparison of face-to-face teaching costs is dependent on the number of students taking the subject, the number of Studio classes and the number of students in each class. For Physics I, which requires a repeated series of lectures because of timetable rather than class size constraints, there was a saving of 6 lecturer-hours per week. In addition, 1 tutor-hour per group (of up to 16 students) was replaced by 2.5 staff-hours per group (of up to 24 students). Thus for classes smaller than 96 students, total contact time was comparable for lecturers, and less for tutors. As the total number of students increases, the Studio program may become relatively more expensive because the "economies of scale" of large lecture classes are lost. However, if the timetable and teaching spaces are sufficiently flexible, the class size and number of classes can be adjusted for optimum economy, so that face-to-face teaching costs are comparable with those of a standard program.

References

1. J M Wilson, 'The CUPLE Physics Studio’, The Physics Teacher 32, 518-523 (1994)
2. D Halliday, R Resnick and J Walker, Fundamentals of Physics (5th edition) Wiley, New York (1997).
3. D C Giancoli, Physics for Scientists and Engineers (2nd edition) Prentice-Hall, New Jersey (1988).

Contact
Dr Judith Pollard can be contacted on:

Tel: +61 8 8303 5316
Fax: +61 8 8303 4380
E-mail: judith.pollard@adelaide.edu.au

Adelaide University, Australia 5005

Last updated 23/12/99