Sustaining Change: Instructor Effects in Transformed Large Lecture Courses Documents

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Sustaining Change: Instructor Effects in Transformed Large Lecture Courses 

written by Steven J. Pollock and Noah D. Finkelstein

We investigate the transfer of classroom reforms from PER faculty to more traditional physics-research faculty. This study is part of an ongoing effort to assess necessary and sufficient requirements for success with research-based course transformations. We have previously demonstrated the ability of PER faculty to replicate the success that other researchers achieve when implementing research-based reforms in large, introductory calculus-based physics courses. Here, we present new data from four implementations of Physics II, including quantitative and qualitative measures of successful transfer of courses to new faculty: validated pre/post surveys covering content, assessments of student views about physics and learning physics, and informal affective surveys. We investigate questions of sustainability, reproducibility, and instructor effect through a contextual constructivist theoretical lens, and find that replication of research-based results is possible, but a variety of factors including instructor beliefs and institutional constraints play important roles.

Published January 30, 2007
Last Modified January 31, 2011

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