How the Program Operates PRISMS Project University of Northern Iowa Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0150

This program is designed for any secondary school physics curriculum. It would be appropriate for either a one-semester or two-semester course. Most two-semester courses are taught to students in grades 10-12. Some one-semester physics courses are taught at the 9th grade level for which PRISMS would be an appropriate program. The PRISMS program is designed to supplement a physics curriculum. It encourages teachers to free themselves from having the textbook dictate the curriculum and to develop an integrated strategy for teaching physics. It can become the laboratory component to any physics program. It is designed to be compatible with any text for any level of physics taught.

Curriculum and Instructional Approach

All too often when teachers select a text for their physics course, the text becomes the curriculum. Teachers assign reading material, present lecture/demonstrations, assign mathematics application problems at the end of chapters and conduct laboratory activities that verify the concept already discussed in class. The PRISMS program returns the curriculum to the teacher. With the listing of the concepts, objectives and teaching activities in each unit of the guide, the teacher identifies the concepts to be taught and then uses the guide to select the learning activities.

The task force has created or rewritten approximately 130 activities that are included in the PRISMS guide. The write-ups contain student sheets that can be duplicated and distributed to the students for their instructions. The teacher notes give teaching strategies, sample observations and calculations, a summary of the concept or outcome of the activity, a key for planning the activity indicating the difficulty of the calculations, reliability of results, student interest level for the activity and time required to conduct the activity. The teacher notes also identify which science process and reasoning skills can most easily be cultivated in each of the activities. In most cases there are multiple activities from which to select exploration and application laboratory activities to support the learning cycle. Selection of activities may depend on the materials on hand, appropriateness of some outdoor activities, availability of computers, etc. The selected PRISMS activities in the guide may be photocopied for student use and are an appropriate replacement of traditional laboratory experiments. The concepts addressed in the PRISMS teachers resource guide are those typically included in most high school physics courses which includes kinematics, dynamics, work and energy, internal energy and heat, wave phenomena, electricity and magnetism, and atomic and nuclear physics.

Learner Activities

A few examples of activities follow which will illustrate the materials and teaching strategy. The learning cycle includes three phases: exploration, concept introduction, and concept application. During exploration, students are challenged with a particular phenomenon and asked to describe, find patterns or relationships, and/or explain the event using their intuitive and previously acquired knowledge. In Activity III-6, Phooling Around In Physics, students are given Hot Wheels track, jump ramp, toy cars and an assortment of spheres. They are asked to find points from which the objects can be released to just clear the jump ramp and to find variables that influence the distance the objects can travel between the jump ramp and a catch ramp. The students are confronted with a phenomenon involving several transfers of energy without naming the principle of conservation of mechanical energy. Students are asked to predict whether a sphere will travel farther than the car when released from the same point and what effect they think taping down the track would have on how far the objects traveled between ramps. The purpose of this phase is to stimulate questions about the phenomenon and to encourage curiosity. It could also easily be used to reveal conceptions or misconceptions held by students.

After the student's curiosity is aroused and the students have submitted their interpretations of the phenomenon, the teacher guides the discussion to introduce and/or clarify the selected concept. In this phase the student is lead to the physicists' accepted view of the concept. Students are encouraged to discuss their views of the concept and refine them through subsequent activities to be more in line with the accepted view. From the previously mentioned activity students recognize that an increase in height at which the object is released causes an increase in distance the object can travel between ramps. The relationship of potential and kinetic energy is then developed. Good exploration activities and concept introductory activities should create a mental disequilibration within the student who has not already accepted the physicist's view. The fact that a rolling sphere may not travel as far as a toy car causes some students to be quite surprised. Some students will recognize that some of the potential energy of the sphere is transferred into rotational energy, but loses less to frictional forces. Many of the activities are of such a nature that students can demonstrate various levels of understanding of basic concepts. This feature makes the materials attractive for a wide range of student abilities.

Concept application activities provide additional experiences with the accepted concept and will aid in helping the student regain mental equilibrium in order to align his/her own view into perspective with the physicists' accepted view. In the application activity to the concept of conservation of mechanical energy, (Activity III-7, How Hot are Your Hot Wheels?), the students use this concept to determine the efficiency of the track and to mathematically predict from what height the car should be released to pass through a loop-the-loop and just touch the track at the top of the loop.

Conservation of momentum is taught by having students explore balloon rockets moving across the room on a fish line and then applying this concept to determine the speed of a rubber dart shot from a toy gun as it impacts the back end of a toy car. Forces as vectors are introduced with an exploratory activity in predicting the best angle of wind from a window fan and sail to give a toy sail car maximum velocity. After the concept of component forces has been introduced from the previous activity students are expected to apply this idea to calculating the outward force that a barn rafter makes on the top of a barn wall for different weights of roof and angle of rafters.

The resource guide also contains instructions and suggestions on a rationale and model to teach issues related to science, technology and society. Impact activities are interspersed in the units which bring up issues related to seatbelt safety, collapsing bridges, nuclear energy, and so forth.

Learning Materials

The primary materials that have been developed for the PRISMS program include the guide, with both student sheets (which may be photocopied) and teacher notes for approximately 130 activities. Two video tapes were produced that can be used with two of the activities. One is a collection of common scenes, such as carnival rides, sky diving, hot air balloons, sporting events, cars racing, people dancing, etc. This is used as an exploratory activity to have students group and classify motion. The other video tape allows students to make measurements from an air track and graph the relationship between the energy put into a rubber band and the speed of a glider when launched by the stretched rubber band. A computer based test bank of nearly 2,000 questions keyed to the course objectives in the teacher's guide which are identified by levels of reasoning according to Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives has also been developed for evaluating student learning. The materials used in the activities are commonly available, since the activities focus on phenomena that students are likely to encounter in their everyday lives. Examples of these materials are: balloons, skate boards, wind-up toy cars, bicycles, batteries, bulbs, mirrors, etc.

Staff Development Activities

The implementation of the teaching strategies and activities is best accomplished if the teachers have some inservice experience. It is essential that teachers understand their role as guiding the learning of the students in the exploration activity by asking the proper kind of questions to stimulate the students to search for patterns and connections in their observations. These are the opportunities that the teacher has to engage the students in developing reasoning skills and taking ownership of important concepts. Telling students answers without student engagement in searching for evidence for beliefs is of limited value. Some teachers have considerable inertia in moving from the role of disseminating information by means of lectures and demonstrations to creating situations that allow the student to use their own powers of reasoning to find the relationships.

Although the teaching strategy and the purpose of the PRISMS program is described in the introduction of the guide, we have found it most successful to have teachers work through many of the activities with the learning cycle strategy to appreciate the advocated approach to teaching physics. Teachers select the topics and objectives they wish to incorporate in their course, and then select learning cycle activities that support their objectives creating a teaching plan for the entire year. Materials, since they relate to common experiences of students, can be purchased locally or brought to school by students. It is helpful to have some support during the academic year as the teacher is implementing these teaching strategies. Support may come from telephone conference calls with experienced high school PRISMS teachers or trained staff on the philosophy, methods and materials of the program.

Class sizes for any activity-based science program should be kept to a manageable number and PRISMS is no exception, with a preferred maximum of 20 to 24 students for one teacher in a classroom. An understanding of the dynamics of physics, how physicists go about the process of developing relationships, is of considerable value to a teacher, perhaps more than much content knowledge. Teachers have been very successful with the PRISMS program with a physics background equivalent to a physics teaching minor.

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Last Modified 1/15/97