Monitoring Retention of PRISMS PRISMS Project University of Northern Iowa Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0150

A telephone survey was designed to assess the retention rate of PRISMS in schools that had adopted the program in the fall terms of 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1990 or later.

A form was developed so that all callers would ask the same questions of the teachers and record the responses uniformly. A few teachers had been reassigned to another school or a different subject. When this occurred they were told to make the comparison to the last year they taught physics. We were quite surprised to find that all 47 teachers claimed to still be currently using PRISMS or using it during the last year they taught physics. This of course included teachers that had implemented the program eight years ago. This is a very striking retention, but does not attempt to determine the level of use.

A question was asked, "To what degree did you implement the program immediately after taking the workshop?" The choices are as follows:

1) A few PRISMS activities here and there in the curriculum;
2) Sometimes used PRISMS activities in a learning cycle;
3) Use PRISMS learning cycle activities where appropriate for me in my curriculum.

With this interpretation we find that 43 out of 47 (91.5%) of the random sample started with an appropriate implementation of PRISMS. Three out of 47 (6.4%) showed limited implementation and one (2.1%) showed no implementation of PRISMS.

We were also interested to see how the level of implementation changed in time. The next question was, "How would you compare your current use of PRISMS to when you first implemented the program?" It appears that the level of use of PRISMS remained stable or improved somewhat over time with 53.2% indicating they use it at the same level, 31.9% using it more than when they started PRISMS and 14.9% using it less.

The next question was the same as question one, but asking about current use, with the same choices as question one. Now 87.2% show an appropriate level of implementation, and 12.8% showed limited implementation. No one showed no implementation. The highest level of implementation may be when participants apply the teaching strategy of PRISMS to other courses that they teach. Forty-two percent of the teachers reported that they applied the learning cycle teaching strategy to other courses that they taught.

One of the needs that PRISMS seeks to address is to make physics more interesting to students with applications to phenomena that are of interest to them. In the telephone survey teachers were asked whether student interest in learning physics had increased, remained the same or decreased from the time they implemented PRISMS. Eighty-seven percent of the teachers indicated that their student interest had increased. To support the observation that student interest in physics has increased, student enrollment increases were reported by 87.2% of the teachers in the survey. One teacher in Alabama reported that his enrollment in physics increased from 32 students to 160 students in just a few years. Since student enrollment is capped in science classes to 32 students per section and since five sections is a full load for one teacher, the maximum number of students that can take physics in his school is 160 students. He had 196 students sign up to apply to get into the class. He reported being stopped by students in the hall begging for permission to enroll in the physics course. He has also received some calls from parents, pleading that their son or daughter be allowed to take physics. Other teachers also report large percentage increases in physics enrollment.

PRISMS | College of Natural Sciences | University of Northern Iowa | cns-computing-support

Copyright © 1997 College of Natural Sciences. All Rights Reserved.
Last Modified 1/15/97