Jan. 15, 2002
Making a CASE for Physics
Associate Professor of Physics Gerald Feldman Earns
CASE Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia
By Thomas Kohout
Associate Professor of Physics Gerald Feldman became
the third Columbian College professor since 1995 to receive the Council
for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District of Columbia
Professor of the Year Award. Feldman joins James O. Horton, Benjamin
Banneker Professor of American Civilization and History, who earned
the prize in 1996, and Interim Director of the School of Media and Public
Affairs Jarol Manheim, who won the award in 1995.
For Feldman, an experimental nuclear physicist, the
award culminates a rapid four-year transition from admitted amateur
to academic ace. Prior to his arrival at GW in fall 1996, and his entré
into teaching the following fall semester, Feldman served as a researcher
at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Canada. There, most
of his student interactions were confined to graduate assistants working
at the school’s electron accelerator laboratory.
“Aside from substituting in the classroom occasionally,
all of my experience was in research,” explains Feldman. “It
was nice to get a faculty position and have someone show the confidence
that you can actually teach as well as do research. Maybe this award
validates that confidence a little bit.”
How does a research scientist at the dawn of an academic
career walk away with a prestigious teaching award? By combining a new
approach to physics education — creating an interpersonal, nurturing
help room for his students — developed along with Associate Professor
of Physics Cornelius Bennhold.
As a new professor, Feldman received well-intentioned
advice. Most cautioned him to keep a distance from his students. “They
won’t learn as well if they think you are their pal,” they
told him. “You have to keep a professional distance.” While
he could, and still does, see a need for that type of approach, Feldman
would prefer a more cordial relationship with his classes, although
he admits, “it’s hard to have a rapport with 120 students
in your section.”
It wasn’t long before he and Bennhold developed
the idea of a Physics Help Room to allow more individual interaction
with students.
“We used to have office hours and nobody would
come,” Feldman says. “Why not try a resource room where students
can come and get help?”
The “build it and they will come” philosophy
was a hit with the students. They came, according to Feldman, because
they can work with the faculty or work with their fellow students, and
they have computer terminals to work on their assignments.
“In that environment you can really be much more
informal,” explains Feldman. “So it’s more fun than the
necessarily formal class structure. In a sense you can hang out with
the students and then be more easy-going.”
• Redefining What Students
Think of as Physics
Numerical problems, the traditional sort of physics
problems that cause the scientifically disinclined to shriek in horror,
are only half of Feldman’s approach to physics education. The other
half is the conceptual problems. The conceptual is emphasized because
that’s where the understanding really comes: Do you know what’s
going on?
“The real goal of the course,” says Feldman
“is teaching students how to think. The main aspects are critical
thinking, analytical, logical reasoning, and problem solving.”
The benefit to the students leaving the course is
less the physics knowledge, and more the thinking skills they develop.
Although Feldman certainly emphasizes physics, students come away with
a conceptual understanding of physics.
“Scientific literacy in today’s society
is important,” Feldman says. “To have these students be able
to discern valid statements from junk in the newspaper or reports on
environmental topics, or even to think through making a budget or doing
your taxes. At the same time we’d like them to understand the physics.
Physics is everywhere — it affects many aspects of their daily
lives.”
It’s been shown that students can memorize formulas,
and they can memorize recipes for solving problems — the so called
“plug and chug” problems. Getting his students to break out
of that model is Feldman’s biggest challenge.
“I’m worried that kids in high school get
trained in that memorization fashion,” he says. “It’s
a de-emphasis on thinking and a major emphasis on memorizing. And then
they’re toast when they come upon a problem they have to think
through by themselves.”
His concern is based on personal experience. “I
took physics in high school, but the class was awful,” recalls
Feldman. “My teacher would tell us, ‘Look,
I’ll give you this formula. All you have to do
is plug in the numbers.’ Now I think that’s ironic because
that’s precisely the kind of problem I don’t want to give
people.”
He’s even had students come to tell him how good
they were at physics in high school, clueless as to why they are struggling
now.
“I ask them if they had problems like the formula
F = m • a?,” says Feldman. “A force is applied to this
mass, what’s the acceleration — if you know F and you know
m, then you solve for a. And they say ‘Yeah, that’s what we
used to have in high school!’ Well, that’s a math problem.
The only thing it has to do with physics is the formula, but you haven’t
applied it, you’ve just plugged in the numbers.”
• Bringing Science and
Technology into the Classroom
Feldman and Bennhold get feedback on class work through
an innovative in-class electronic student response system. Every seat
in Corcoran Hall 101 has a keypad, which collects answers to discussion
questions through a system known as Respondex©. Students can input
answers to multiple choice conceptual questions based on the topic of
the day. Then the data are collected and a histogram of the response
is displayed.
“After we show the histogram we ask them to turn
to their neighbor and discuss their answers. The hope is that the right
one convinces the wrong one through logic, thereby the students learn
from each other.”
After a brief discussion, students vote again and
hopefully the class shifts to the correct response.
“We’re trying to get a bit into physics
education research,” Feldman says. “We want to see how people
shift their responses. What questions are conceptually more troublesome
than others. ”
As it turns out, this does fall into the category
of physics education research, one of the fastest growing subfields
of physics, according to Feldman. It’s research focusing on how
students learn — what works, what doesn’t, and why?
While he and Bennhold have been spending extra time
studying the data they have collected, Feldman is not ready to change
his specialization… not yet anyway.
“We’re not physics education people, we’re
both nuclear physicists. Feldman says. “Analyzing this database
is essentially a foray into physics education research. Can we see what
concepts are especially difficult for students through this electronic
response system? How do these results correlate with their homework
scores? More importantly, were the student’s improvements on conceptual
questions translated into learning that can be extended to the exam?
We’d like to present our results to the American Association of
Physics Teachers journals where they publish physics education research.
We would like to publish at some level, but not at the expense of nuclear
physics or teaching.”
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
