Teachable Moment: THE ROAD TO A PROJECT-BASED CLASSROOM

Author(s): Gintaras Duda

Source: Change, Vol. 46, No. 6 (November/December 2014), pp. 42-45
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44081687
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 Teachable Moment

THE ROAD TO A
PBOJBCT-BASBD

By Gintaras Duda

how to give students the basic knowledge base in quantum

ductory physics courses, convinced the physics mechanics that lectures deliver.
community that active-engagement strategies In an ideal world, I'd give my students reading assign-
produce superior student learning, as measured ments and some resources, and they'd read and struggle and
Richard produce by ductory community prebyHapreke,anadnposd physt conceptua
ics sulperiexamors. posSincet then,that ithen conceptual his courses, active-engagement student landmark convinced learning, exams. 1998 as Since study strategies the measured physics then, of intro- the come to class prepared to move forward. However, as we all
physics and astronomy community have embraced active- know, the great majority of undergraduates aren't prepared
learning techniques, offering new-faculty workshops where to take charge of their own learning at this level. Without
techniques such as peer instruction, just-in-time learning, scaffolding, even the best students flounder, having difficulty
etc. are taught to faculty members who are just beginning to differentiating the important details from the trivial. Without
teach their own courses. tasks clearly laid out, students prioritize more traditional
But despite all of the innovations at the introductory phys- assignments and learning in classes where deadlines and
ics level and excellent work by colleagues (for example, assignments are more urgent and defined.
fellow Professor of the Year award winner Steven Pollock), I don't remember where or from whom I heard it, but the
much of the innovation has not migrated to the upper divi- following statement about teaching has stayed with me: If
sion. And when these innovations do appear, they are varia- you're working harder than your students in the classroom,
tions on a mode: Instructors primarily lecture but supple- then you're doing something wrong! I wanted to try some-
ment those lectures with active-learning exercises. Although thing more radical in my teaching, something that would
research shows these methods can be successful in improv- transform my classroom into a completely active one where
ing student learning, I've always felt that they are a band-aid students were in charge of their own learning.
and not a cure-all.
I had been thinking about how to transition out of a pri- Project-Based Learning Basics
marily lecture-based course in my upper-division, junior/ Project or problem-based learning started originally in
senior-level quantum mechanics course for several years. medical education. It consists of teaching by providing
I had experimented with a host of active-learning prac-
tices: group exercises, think-pair-share questions, computer
applets and visualizations, and competency-based education
(students came individually to my office to work out certain Without scaffolding, even the
problems in mini oral exams). My dilemma in introducing
more innovative pedagogies was due to my uncertainty about
best students flounder, having

Gintaras Duda (gkduda@creighton.edu) is an associate

difficulty differentiating the
professor of physics at Creighton University and a Carnegie
Professor of the Year. important details from the trivial
42 Change • November/December 2014

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students with complex, ill-defined but real-world problems
that draw them organically into learning. Within the physics
world, Barbara Dutch and her collaborators at the University I am responsible for providing
of Delaware have done groundbreaking work on adapting
this pedagogy to physics instruction, albeit at the introduc- scaffolding and the prompts for
tory level (1996 and 2001).
For example, students learn about the conservation of
momentum by examining an accident scene from the per-
learning, but the students are
spective of a traffic cop. Students learn the fundamental
principles of physics by solving real-world problems in responsible for their own learning
groups, thereby learning in an active and connected way.
Several years ago, I became intrigued by problem/project- and managing the use of precious
based education - this was exactly the sort of radical, stu-
dent-centered pedagogy I had been thinking about. However, in-class time.
the barrier I described earlier about building a sufficient
knowledge base for students before tackling projects still
remained. It seemed one thing to expect them to learn intro- ing objectives that I expect students to master that week and
ductory physics principles "on the fly," yet another to do so reflect upon when they finish it.
in an upper-division course that was much more theoretical. The in-class lecture tutorials lay down the necessary
Fortunately, this difficulty evaporated for me at the 201 1 knowledge base. Every tutorial begins with a clear-cut list
summer American Association of Physics Teachers meeting. of the learning objectives students should master by working
A colleague at Berry College, Todd Timberlake, described through the tutorial. The lecture tutorials cover essentially
how he was using lecture tutorials to replace many of the the material that I would lecture about, but instead of pas-
traditional lectures in his quantum mechanics course. So I sively receiving the content knowledge, students work it out
decided to convert my junior/senior-level quantum mechan- for themselves in their project teams.
ics course into a project-based learning course. The first Each tutorial has embedded within it questions developed
iteration of this course ran in fall 201 1 . through inquiry by the physics education research com-
munity to probe particular student difficulties with topics in
Day to Day in a Project-Based Course quantum mechanics. And each contains a self-assessment in
which students reflect on their learning: whether they have
Over the past three years (and through three iterations),
my course has evolved from a lecture-based to a whollymet the learning objectives and if not, where they need more
help. And each post-tutorial assessment includes a short,
project-based learning course that I'm pretty sure is working
well (as supported by student assessment data) and thatnew
I'm(but related) problem for students to work through. Fuse
happy with. The basic philosophy of the course is thatthese post-tutorial assessments to gauge student learning and
as the
provide
instructor, I am responsible for providing scaffolding and the me with material for in-class discussions.
prompts for learning, but the students are responsible forThe HELL packets and lecture tutorials provide the back-
their
own learning and managing the use of precious in-class ground
time. knowledge and foundation, while the projects that
The weekly scaffolding to support students as they introduce
move each new section help students flesh out their
understanding and provide real-world, concrete applications
through the course is provided by weekly HELL packets.
The acronym is a tongue-in-cheek response to studentof the utility and beauty of quantum mechanics. Although
jokes
weand
about the course (it is referred to as a "rite of passage") don't spend all of our time working on projects, they
stands for Homework, Examples, Lectures, and Literature. take center stage. They motivate learning and help students
To add a bit of fun, I've coupled the weekly HELLanswer
pack- the important question, why am I doing this, and what
is it good for? The projects act as a "hook" to get students
ets with descriptions of Dante and Virgil's descent through
interested in what are sometimes very abstract concepts.
the layers of hell in the Inferno. This seems to have captured
the students' imaginations; it provides them with a senseFor
of example, one project from quantum mechanics last
progress and the course with an ultimate goal. fall was for students to examine the puzzle of the radio-
Each HELL packet contains homework problems for active
the decay of uranium, first solved through a brilliant
flash
week, a list of lecture tutorials they should complete, a read- of intuition by George Gamow in the late 1920s. In
ing assignment coupled with detailed reading notes on another
the course I used the zombie apocalypse as portrayed
material, the written lecture I would have delivered inina the
tra-AMC 's Walking Dead to motivate students to study
and solve coupled differential equations.
ditional course, and examples and papers from the literature
I've come to believe that we don't teach physics or pre-
that either shed historical light on the topic or that provide
an interesting application of the physics we're studying pare students to do physics the way it's actually done. For
that
week. But most importantly, each packet lays out the example,
learn- PhD students or researchers in industry or at a

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 Project-Based Learning: Lessons Learned
I've had several surprising revelations about teaching
Many of the brightest, most and learning from my experience with this course. Th
first is simply that it is entirely possible to teach upper-
traditionally successful students division physics courses without lecturing. It works, a
students both learn (as evidenced by assessment instru
ments such as the QMS and QMAT exams) and thrive
I've seen are successful precisely the environment.
Secondly, I've had many "Randy Pausch" moments
because they excel at school rather teaching. In Randy's book, The Last Lecture (2008), h
has a moment where he's simply blown away by the w
than at learning. his students have done. What does he do? His mentor tells
him to go back to class and say something along the lines
of, "Hey, that was pretty good, but I know you can do bet-
national lab don't take a course when faced with unfamil- ter." This class has given me many moments like that. It
iar material. Instead, they dig into the literature, seek helphas reminded me to challenge my students, and to keep
from colleagues and mentors, and try to work through it in mind that my expectations are often limited my by too-
themselves, step by step. narrow imagination.
Also, problems in the real world are never quite so neat I've also found, to my surprise, that it is the "weaker"
and clearly defined as homework problems in the back students who often shine in a project-based environment.
of a textbook. The projects in my quantum course are Many of the brightest, most traditionally successful stu-
ill-defined, open-ended, and require research, hard work, dents I've seen are successful precisely because they excel
and some serious calculations. Each project comes in at school rather than at learning. The very best students
stages, so I can judge the work students have done to datewill learn despite what we as instructors do, but project-
and not give away key details (the students don't get to based learning gives all students a chance to shine and
see the end). develop.
Each project has a deliverable. For the first project, And finally, many of my students take, for the first
students use LaTeX (a type-setting language used in time, ownership of their own education. Although science
mathematics and science to format equations) to write a majors find written reflections odd at first, by the end of
"new result" journal article in the style of a submission tothe course they begin think seriously about their contribu-
. Physical Review D. The second project involves writing ations to their groups and to their own learning.
longer review article. The third involves working through
a paper and preparing a presentation on it to ajournai Where the Road Leads
club. And the final project culminates in the building and Project-based learning has allowed me build a truly
presentation of a scientific poster. All of these are good student-centered, active-learning environment for my
examples of the types of communication that professionalquantum mechanics course. Am I done? As all teachers
scientists do regularly. know, the answer is no: It can always be better! But since
To give some final details about the course, I usu- this course is an active area of research for me, I'm pas-
ally divide the semester up into four to five modules and sionate about continuing to revise it.
projects. Each is a logical subdivision of the quantum In particular, I'm curious about how effective the lec-
mechanics material, such as solving the Schrodinger ture tutorials are, how student epistemologies change and
Equation in one dimension (the first project). The semes- develop in the course, and how reflection aids in student
ter ebbs and flows with these projects. learning. I continue to struggle with how best to use
At the start of a module, a project is introduced to moti-reflections and metacognitive self-monitoring exercises
vate learning, and students are subdivided into their proj- in the course (see for example, Ambrose et al.) as well as
ect groups (usually three students). For the next week or how much scaffolding to provide students and how to get
so, they do preliminary research on the project, complete them to provide their own.
tutorials to acquire the necessary background knowledge, David Meitzer, a physics education researcher, has
and solve homework problems. Once they have a suf- pointed out that "highly successful physics students ... ar
ficient knowledge base, the latter stages of the project are active learners. They continuously probe their own under-
introduced and the earnest work on it begins. standing of a concept" (1999). My goal is to help student
While they are busy with these activities, I don't lec- become "reflective practitioners" of physics and thus to
ture - although I do hold short discussions in class with develop more expert-like epistemologies and attitudes -
individual groups or the entire class, in response to stu- in essence, to grow as physicists through their experience
dent difficulties. The use of class time is entirely directed in this course.
by students. They are even allowed to set due dates for the One concrete plan for the future is to incorporate pre-
project deliverables. tests for each lecture tutorial. Each would have a pre-clas

44 Change • November/December 2014

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 My goal is to help students

become 'reflective practitioners' ■ Ambrose, S., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M.,

Lovett, M. C., Norman, M. K., & Mayer, R. E.
(2010). How learning works: Seven research-based
of physics and thus to develop principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass.
more expert-like epistemologies
■ Dutch, B. (1996). Problem-based learning in
and attitudes. physics: The power of students teaching students.
Journal of College Science Teaching, 26, 529-541

■ Dutch, B., Groh, S., & Allen, D. (2001). The

power of problem based learning, Sterling, VA:
Stylus Publishing.
assignment as well as a post-class reflection paired with
■ Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement vs.
it. The lecture tutorials themselves are a subject of future
traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey
collaboration with Todd Timberlake. I also plan to experi-
of mechanics test data for introductory physics
ment with some new technology and incorporate some courses. American Journal of Physics, 66( 1), 64-74.
"flipping-the-classroom" ideas. In particular, students
from last fall helped me identify several areas in which■ Meitzer, D. (1999). APS Summer 1999 Forum on
some pre-recorded "mini-lectures" would be helpful. Education Newsletter. Retrieved from http://www.
aps.org/units/fed/newsletters/upload/summer99.pdf
Ultimately, the goal is to provide students with sufficient
scaffolding and resources to be successful in this lecture-
■ Pausch, R. (2008). The last lecture. New York,
free environment.
NY: Hyperion Publishing.

Acknowledgements ■ Pintrich, P. (2002). The role of metacognitive

knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing.
My project-based course in quantum mechanics devel-
Theory Into Practice, 41{A), 219-226.
oped over time and through the help and wisdom of many
colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank Jon Stolk,
Rob Martello, Randy Crist, Barbara Dutch (and collabo-
rators), and Todd Timberlake - all of whom contributed to
make this course possible. Ē

■ The Problem-Based Learning Clearinghouse at

University of Delaware: https://primus.nss.udel.
edu/Pbl/

■ Todd Timberlake 's Active Quantum Mechanics

Tutorials: http://facultyweb.berry.edu/ttimberlake/
active_quantum/

■ My webpage for Project-Based Quantum

Mechanics: http://physicsweb.creighton.edu/
pbLquantum

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