 Andy Johnson, associate director of
Center for Excellence for Math and Science, presented at
the annual meeting of the American Educational Research
Association (AERA) this week. He presented a poster in a session called
"The Impact of Instructional Reform Strategies on
Future Scientists and Teachers." The title of his
poster is: Sociophysics Norms in an Innovative Physics
Learning Environment
His presentation discusses
productive patterns of classroom interaction and
successful course reforms for the development of courses.
According to Johnson, the ways that students talk to each
other and how they interpret the instructor's actions can
make great differences in their learning, particularly in
inquiry-based classes.
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His
paper describes results of research on patterns of social
interactions in a college physics course for prospective
elementary teachers. Students in this course developed
physics concepts for themselves with support from
particular pedagogical structures, collaborative group
work, and special computer software. Data consisted of
videotapes of class work, interviews, and collections of
students' work. This
paper extends Yackel & Cobb's
"sociomathematical" norms (1996) to the field
of physics, and introduces two "sociophysics
norms" that emerged in the course. These were class
criteria for accepting evidence and the obligation for
each group to have a scientific model of magnetic
materials that they could support with acceptable
evidence. Implications of this study are that classroom
norms seem to be influenced by the instructor, by
pedagogical structures and by students' actions, and that
the development of norms seems to be part of the process
of developing understanding.
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