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PRISMS ResourcesPRISMS Project
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PRISMS ResourcesPRISMS Project
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The primary resource is the teachers guide with over 130 activities in the form of student instructions and teacher notes with background information on the activities and the physics content in each unit. The introduction of the guide describes the teaching strategy of the project; planning a teaching schedule; evaluating laboratory work; problem-solving hints; teaching about the interaction of physics, technology and society; and sources for physics related career information.
The guide also contains unit outlines of topics, concepts and objectives for a typical high school physics course keyed to activities in the guide. The units of study include kinematics and vectors, dynamics, work and energy, internal energy and heat, wave phenomena, electricity and magnetism, and atomic and nuclear physics. Sample teaching schedules include activities, textbook reading assignments, quizzes and problem assignments. The guide is not designed to replace textbooks, but rather to provide the teacher with resource ideas and instructional strategies designed to cultivate reasoning skills and demonstrate principles of physics in the lives of students. A list of equipment used with the activities is given in the guide.
Sample of Guide Contents
The contents of each unit in the PRISMS Guide are constructed in the
same manner.
Another resource is a video tape that can be used to focus on
common scenes such as at an amusement park, athletic contests,
playgrounds, around the home, etc. used to elicit classification
schemes that students may invent to categorize motion. Another lesson
utilizes video segments of an air track experiment in which the
students take the data from the video tape and experimentally
determine the relationship between velocity of a glider on the air
track and the potential energy of a rubber band used to launch the
glider.
Evaluation materials
The resources also include student evaluation materials. To evaluate
student academic achievement, a computer test bank of over 2,000
questions has been created, which are available on Macintosh,
and IBM platforms. The questions are keyed to common objectives found
in most high school physics courses and ranked by levels of reasoning
as per Bloom's Taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application,
analysis, evaluation and synthesis).
A major purpose of the PRISMS Project is to have students become engaged in the process of science, to find patterns and relationships from observing common events. A sheet titled "Indicators of Student Involvement" allows the teacher to provide feedback to the student (or for the student to self-evaluate) on characteristics normally associated with doing science such as demonstrating a sense of curiosity, independent learning, suggesting alternative procedures, personal responsibility for learning and contributing to group understanding.
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