Active Learning with PhET PDF

Active Learning with PhET Our simulations are designed to be flexible tools that you can tail...

Active Learning with PhET Our simulations are designed to be flexible tools that you can tailor to your classroom environment and student population. To make the best use of the simulations and maximize learning outcomes for your students, it is important to not only consider the PhET Sim you will use, but how you engage in Activity Design (the plans you have for your students) and Teacher Facilitation (the way in which you carry out the plan). In this document, we will discuss Active Learning, a pedagogical approach that we believe should be the foundation for making decisions about how to effectively incorporate PhET sims through activities and teacher facilitation. A Spectrum of Active Learning This image below shows a spectrum of the ways in which simulations can be used in class. On the extreme left side is teacher lecture, wherein the teacher provides demonstrations and explanations, and students observe. The teacher uses a simulation as a visual and dynamic aid and explains to their students what the simulation contains and why, what is being observed, and what is happening. Although simulations can be powerful visual tools that enable students to connect ideas, this way of using the simulation is based on a model known as transmission-reception learning. Such a strategy presumes that students learn only if they are given very good examples, demonstrations, and explanations, limiting their participation to just listening, taking notes, This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”. observing, making some connections, and reproducing what the teacher does and says. This approach to teaching is also known as teacher-centered learning, in which the design of class activities and the role of students in the classroom is focused on what the teacher does and says. The current evidence-based trend in education is to move towards Active Learning, in which students are the protagonists of the learning process. More student-driven, Active Learning kinds of teaching approaches are illustrated as you move to the right along the spectrum. Student-centered learning can take place in small groups or through independent work, but it can also still occur when the teacher is in front of the class. For example, teachers can ask the students to observe and describe what is happening in a simulation, to obtain data and analyze it, and to suggest what changes could be made to the variables governing the simulation. Students can discuss and explain the context and meaning of the simulation, generate conclusions, and build models of the topic being addressed. Characteristics of Active Learning Active Learning is focused on the actions students take to achieve the desired learning objectives. The following are some of the essential characteristics of Active Learning that teachers should take into account: 1. Understand and address students' prior knowledge. Active Learning acknowledges that students come to STEM classes with prior ideas or preconceptions. These initial ideas are the foundation of the learning process, since learning means that students must either build new knowledge based on these ideas, explore and create new connections between them, or refine and modify them. In the case of STEM, students' prior ideas may be incomplete or incorrect. For example, in science, some students believe that the mass of a physical body affects the velocity with which it falls in the absence of air resistance. Most of these preconceptions are limited because they were established on the basis of empirical observations. For example, mass does influence how quickly objects fall in the presence of air resistance, and most students have not seen situations in which an object falls through a vacuum. Similarly, electric and magnetic attraction may seem to be the same phenomenon to students because they observe that charged and magnetized objects attract and repel other objects. In these cases, students analyze the world simply as a means to provide an explanation of how objects tend to interact, and they do not always consider the principles of scientific inquiry and systematic evidence. Math is not an exception to this need to be aware of students’ prior ideas. Students may already have problem-solving strategies and that may not be the most efficient or ideas that are not completely correct. For example, students might understand what is a fraction, but fail to correctly associate it with its pictograph representation in different contexts; similarly, students may struggle to differentiate the terms “negative” and “minus.” Learning challenges encountered by students may be the consequence of teachers not considering prior knowledge in lesson planning. Students may even associate and learn that both, their prior ideas and the newly introduced ones, explain a certain This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”.  phenomenon equally well. Students might respond correctly to a test question, but continue to carry non-scientific or illogical beliefs into their experiences outside the classroom, generating a disconnect between what is taught in the classroom and their everyday experiences. Students are not necessarily aware that they have such prior ideas, not the risks of using uninformed intuition when learning about the world. A strategy widely used in science classes is cognitive dissonance. With this approach, the teacher generates a need for the students to adapt their prior ideas to newly presented evidence. The teacher presents a phenomenon that challenges students’ naive beliefs (causing them to feel a sense of surprise, wonder, and productive frustration), encouraging them to reconcile their prior beliefs with a new experience that does not match what they believed to be true. This experience compels students to think deeply about the way they think about the world, and challenges them to revise or replace their mental models. PhET Simulations are an excellent tool for presenting such contrasting cases. For example, in physics, a typical prior idea among students is to believe that for an object to move at a constant velocity, they must apply a constant net force. How would you use the Force and Motion: Basics simulation to generate an example that challenges such an idea? For chemistry, how can you use the State of Matter sim to challenge students to see that heat is not the only way to change the state of a substance? In biology, a common prior idea is believing that natural selection involves organisms actively “trying” to adapt to new environments. What contrasting case can you use with the Natural Selection sim? With Unit Rate for mathematics, how can you challenge students to bring their own ideas for how to calculate prices? How can you support their understanding of rates? 2. Connect the content of a lesson to daily experiences of students and apply it in different contexts. Active Learning acknowledges that for learning to be meaningful to students, it must be based on what they already know: their experiences, and familiar contexts. Simulations already pave the way by demonstrating various situations that are familiar to students. For example, by using water to explore the Waves Intro sim, building sandwiches with discrete ingredients to understand the concepts of Balancing Chemical Equations, or using savings and debts to compare positive and negative integers using the Number Line: Integers sim. Knowing the contexts your students are comfortable with, being familiar with the simulation itself, and mastering the topic being addressed are critical for creating meaningful and effective simulation activities. When teaching about energy transfer, what scenario would you come up with when using the Energy Forms and Changes sim? 3. Support collaboration. Active Learning is a social process that requires interaction and communication among students. Sharing and working collaboratively are key. Make sure to give your students the opportunity to work in teams, and ask them to explain, present arguments, and discuss. As a teacher, you have almost certainly had an experience in which you have understood a topic better yourself by explaining it. The same principle applies to your students! Communicating ideas in verbal, written, mathematical, or pictorial representations is a skill fundamental to science and mathematics that is nurtured best when students share with each other. It provides more opportunities for students to be heard and to compare and discuss ideas with their peers, as well as to interact in groups and spark discussions to formalize ideas, and draw conclusions. This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”.  4. Create a safe environment for your students. Active Learning is not an easy task, and it must take place in an environment that gives students room to engage in productive struggle. Try to create an environment in the classroom that encourages engagement, motivation, tolerance for making mistakes, and that effectively manages frustration. Additionally, it is important to consider the context students may have on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, or age; it will help if you consider how your activities can have more inclusive dynamics, making your students feel comfortable participating and feel safe sharing their ideas with the class. At the end of this document, you will find links with additional information on how to create a positive environment for the promotion of Active Learning, and how to support student engagement in science and mathematics classes. 5. Provide appropriate scaffolding. In some situations, Active Learning has been confused with giving little or no instructions, which can lead to frustration and confusion. With PhET, we typically recommend that teachers start by not giving instructions on how to use a simulation. However, scaffolding is often necessary to support students’ interpretations of the visualizations. Scaffolding is also important to facilitate the construction of new knowledge related to the principles illustrated by the simulation. The learning activity must have suitable scaffolding tailored to the abilities of the students. Activities should be challenging, but achievable by the students. Scaffolding consists of the aids that teachers design in their activities, so that students can achieve the learning objectives on their own. Scaffolding does not simply consist of giving hints or shortcuts such that the activities become easier. Teachers must possess a solid understanding of what prior knowledge the students have, their skills, and ways of thinking, so the teachers can construct activities that will challenge students and motivate them to use the simulation to engage with the activity. This process requires that teachers continuously improve the structure and questions of their activities. Activities should contain questions that allow students to collect data and make observations themselves, as well as provide a structure that allows students to organize collected data. Also, activities should support students’ interpretations and identifications of relationships and patterns, as well as their crafting of conclusions. A learning objective can be divided into a series of such questions that would challenge students followed by group and team discussions. Teachers can support their students in the following ways: (1) allowing them to progress at their own pace in solving challenges both individually and through group discussions; (2) helping them make sense of the information they have accumulated; (3) formalizing those ideas; and, finally, (4) making sure that every student reaches the same level of content understanding. 6. Make assessments a part of the learning process. Because Active Learning allows for students to make mistakes, it is important for teachers to assess students (and help students assess themselves) throughout the learning process. Formative assessment, being low-stakes, gives the teacher an accurate picture of what students are learning. Quick, small assessments can be part of self-evaluation activities and can be reviewed in discussion groups. In this manner, both teachers and students can identify the extent to which the set learning objectives have been achieved. Such a process generates a feeling of achievement in students. In turn, these small successes help motivate students to continue their learning. These activities also This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”.  give crucial feedback to teachers that they can use for decision-making about how to guide the class so that all students achieve the learning objectives. 7. Establish certain practices and expectations as a response to specific behavior. Changing from a traditional lecture approach to active learning is a demanding process, as it requires completely different class dynamics. When active learning is progressively implemented, students become familiar with their new role and what is expected of them in each part of an activity. This approach will help them to gradually focus more on learning and not on behavioral or classroom expectations. Preparing activities that guide a learning cycle can serve as a road-map for teacher planning and help students focus on what should be learned and how. A simple and reproducible learning cycle can start with a section devoted to open play with the simulation that reveals preconceptions and include sharing discoveries. You can use a worksheet to support students to collect and interpret data from the simulation, followed by a group discussion to formalize ideas. Keeping the structure of your PhET teaching activities similar to those that PhET suggests does not necessarily limit innovation. Each part of your learning cycle can be progressively refined, adapting it to the particular characteristics of your group of students to continually obtain better results. After mastering how to implement the activity structure in your class, other methods can be integrated to make the class more dynamic. The PhET team and numerous other researchers have evaluated the impact of using simulations with Active Learning. The results of this research have been extraordinary. Students experience better and deeper conceptual learning, and they build more complete mental models. Peer communication is encouraged and improved. Students also show a more favorable attitude towards learning science. Moving to an Active Learning classroom does not necessarily mean avoiding traditional teacher lectures entirely. Rather, lectures can become more meaningful to students, after the students have built some prior understanding of the important ideas by themselves with the simulations. Lectures can still serve a valuable purpose in the way that they lay out content organization, more fully describe scientific models, apply mathematical expressions, formal definitions, and terminology. When using simulations, it is normal to question whether simulations can really replace physical hands-on experiments and demonstrations. Our studies have shown that PhET simulations are more effective at stimulating conceptual understanding than many hands-on labs. However, there are many elements beyond conceptual knowledge that simulations do not take into account. For example, hands-on laboratories might address specific knowledge and experience regarding the way teams function, manual skills, and the need for error analysis with real-world data. Depending on the objectives laid out for the laboratory experiment, simulations alone or a combination of simulations with real hands-on experiments can be effective. Now that you are familiar with the teaching philosophy upon which PhET is built, it is time to get some experience and start designing active-learning-based activities with the aid of our simulations. This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”. Additional Readings To learn more about Active Learning, review the following articles from PhysPort: How do I help students engage productively in active learning classrooms? How can I set clear expectations in active learning classes, so students see the value of engaging? How can I help students become more expert learners, so they engage in active learning? How can I assess the level of student engagement in my class? What if I get low student evaluations, or hear complaints about active learning? How can I create a community in an active classroom, so that students feel encouraged to engage? This document is an open educational resource available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). Should you modify this document, the following attribution is required: “Modified from PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder, https://phet.colorado.edu”.