Dr. Fred Goldberg, San Diego State University

CIPS (Constructing Ideas in Physical Science) is a yearlong middle school physical science curriculum (http://cpucips.sdsu.edu/web/cips), and PET (Physics for Elementary Teachers) is a semester-long curriculum for prospective or practicing elementary teachers (http://cpucips.sdsu.edu/web/pet).  Both curricula use a pedagogy where students make explicit their initial ideas, perform experiments to test their ideas, work through a sequence of questions to help them make sense of the evidence, engage in whole class discussions to reach consensus, and apply the final ideas to new situations. In this talk I will show movies from both the CIPS and PET classrooms and use them as a context to discuss how research on student learning of physics informed the development of the curricula.

*Supported by NSF Grants ESI-9812299, 0096856 and 0138900