We developed this website to help teachers access valuable materials that were presented at the 2006 Summer Academy of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education Research. Please use the navigation bar on the left to find the resources offered by this site.
Here you will find tools and methods, the research supporting these tools, and other curricular and assessment resources that will be helpful in bringing knowledge from the physics community to your classroom.
For those who missed the Physics Academies, or if you would like a reminder, please refer to the course descriptions below.
This course made use of computer-based diagnostic instructional tools for middle and high school teachers and students. These tools, which include web-served assessments, are aligned with National Standards and Benchmarks in science. Resources in this project have been developed and tested by teachers and are based on research into the teaching and learning of math and science. The program DIAGNOSER is designed for formative assessments (e.g., assessments to inform learning and instruction rather than assign scores). Students receive feedback on their thinking as they work through their assignments. Teachers can access reports on students' thinking related to the assigned content. Academy participants learned about the software tools and how to implement them in their school classrooms.
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Connecting real-world events to physics (such as the motion of an object or the changing temperature of a fluid) is often difficult for students. Decades of research has shown that well-designed instructional materials can help students gain much deeper insight into processes and events that were previously hard to observe or calculate. The software does the tedious work, the students do the thinking. Participants in this workshop worked with data acquisition software (DataStudio from Pasco) to create teaching lessons in which data are shared among students, communal understanding of a situation is developed, and an appreciation for the nature of science is fostered.
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