Stargazing Live! aims to capture the imagination of learners with a combination of live and interactive planetarium lessons, real astronomical data, and lessons built around interactive knowledge representations. The lessons were created using a co-creation model and tackle concepts in the pre-university (astro)physics which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions. An evaluation study in 9 Dutch classrooms showed that learners are inspired and engaged by the planetarium lessons but are not always able to link the content to the classroom. Pre- and post-tests showed that the accompanying star properties activity significantly increased learners’ understanding of the causal relationships between mass and other properties (such as luminosity, gravity, and temperature) in a main sequence star.
DOCUMENT
The challenges of physics teacher education are obvious: 1) physics teaching in schools is often uninspiring and ineffective, the many brilliant ideas for exciting physics are underused; 2) in many countries there is a shortage of qualified physics teachers, enrolments in physics teacher education are minimal, well qualified baby boomers are leaving, un- or under qualified teachers take their place, and physics teacher education has a low status in university physics departments; 3) good physics teaching needs lifelong nurture and maintenance. What can we do? First of all, we are lucky to have a very exciting subject, let’s make use of physics excitement and put that as a first priority in our teacher education. Then there are pre-service teaching activities which can contribute much to the learning of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and subsequent better teaching as these methods are generating PCK within the pre-service teacher’s own classroom. Six examples are described in this paper including fast feedback as an example of formative assessment which leads teaching and almost inevitably results in development of PCK. Finally some examples are presented of induction and professional development initiatives.
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Research has shown that female students cannot profit as much as male students can from cooperative learning in physics, especially in mixed-gender dyads. This study has explored the influence of partner gender on female students’ learning achievement, interaction and the problem-solving process during cooperative learning. In Shanghai, a total of 50 students (26 females and 24 males), drawn from two classes of a high school, took part in the study. Students were randomly paired, and there were three research groups: mixed-gender dyads (MG), female–female dyads (FF) and male–male dyads (MM). Analysis of students’ pre- and post-test performances revealed that female students in the single-gender condition solved physics problems more effectively than did those in the mixed-gender condition, while the same was not the case for male students. We further explored the differences between female and male communication styles, and content among the three research groups. It showed that the females’ interaction content and problem-solving processes were more sensitive to partner gender than were those for males. This might explain why mixed-gender cooperation in physics disadvantages females in high schools.
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