Physics Education

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Chandralekha Singh has developed and carried out an active program in Physics Education Research (PER) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. For a description of her research interests, please see
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/people/fprofile.php?id=182. She has also been a driving force in making her colleagues aware of PER findings and introducing new instructional methodologies into the department. For example:

• With support from an NSF grant and University funds, Singh set up our Physics Exploration Center (PEC). It is designed to motivate beginning physics students and help them gain a better understanding of basic physics concepts by performing self-paced laboratory activities that are designed to be more conceptual and open-ended than the standard introductory physics labs. Many of the activities are specially designed to challenge commonly held misconceptions. The impact that regular use of the PEC has on students has been tested with two groups of students enrolled in a large introductory physics course: one group used the PEC regularly for demonstration-based homework problems that were assigned in addition to the textbook homework problems, while the control group was only assigned textbook homework problems. Scores on standardized pre- and post-tests showed that PEC activities helped students understand and remember physics concepts.


• Two years ago Singh and Koehler obtained a grant to equip the three large lecture halls in which most of the introductory physics and astronomy courses are taught with electronic student response systems. These systems enable the instructor to pose questions during lectures and record and display the students. responses. PER has shown that beginning students will not give up prior misconceptions unless they are actively engaged during lectures, forced to respond to conceptual questions on the current material, and to make predictions about the outcome of lecture demonstrations. In the student response systems we use, each student is assigned a numbered response unit ("e;clicker,"e; resembling a TV remote) so the instructor can track individual responses. Surveys of students and instructors have shown that both groups really appreciate the real-time feedback indicating whether or not newly introduced concepts have been understood. Students also like the fact that they can respond anonymously in front of their classmates, although they are well aware of the fact that the instructor knows who responded and how, as indicated by a substantial improvement in class attendance when these systems are used.


• Singh has investigated the difficulties that advanced undergraduate students and graduate students were having at the end of a full-year upper-level quantum mechanics course with the conceptual understanding of quantum measurement and time-development. Common misconceptions originate from over-generalization of concepts learned in one context to another and an inability to discriminate between related concepts. She is currently designing a set of tutorials for helping students learn various topics in advanced quantum mechanics. (This work was described in a feature article "e;Improving students. understanding of quantum mechanics"e; in the August 2006 issue of Physics Today, authored by C. Singh, M. Belloni, and W. Christian.)