31Videos done by Clint Sprott
University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group
Edward F. (Joe) Redish
Professor of Physics
In particular, in his excellent book Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, Professor Redish describes a similar experience to that described by Eric Mazur in his Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1997). After doing a demonstration, Professor Redish says, "Overall, I was pleased and felt it went well." A colleague who was sitting in his class said, however, that fully half the class simply stopped paying attention. Some pulled out newspapers while others started talking discreetly to friends.
Then Professor Redish describes another demonstration in which a ball is set rolling in a partial ring to address the commonly held misconception that circular motion, once established, will continue even after after the forces producing it are removed -- that the ball has a memory. After doing the demonstration, he describes what happened next.
Then, by a lucky chance, instead of saying: "There. You see it goes in a straight line," I asked them what they saw. To my absolute amazement, nearly half the students claimed that the ball had followed the curved path they expected!
He then repeated the demonstration but placed a meter stick along what would be a straight path for the ball. When the ball actually followed the straight path, he got a gasp from the half the class who thought they had seen it go in a curved path.
Professor Redish points out that these two experiences of his illustrate two problems with doing a science demonstration in the classroom. The first is that the students may not see the demonstration as important, and the second is that the students may not see what the teacher expects them to see.
Both stories show that the way in which a demonstration is done is as important as the demonstration itself.
The Mazur Group at Harvard University
Lecture demonstrations have two important purposes: to increase student understanding of the concepts demonstrated, and to increase student enjoyment of class. Previous studies have cast doubt on whether traditional demonstrations accomplish the first, finding that passive observation of demonstrations does not significantly improve student understanding of the associated concepts. Indeed, many students alter their memory of demonstrations to match their ideas about the underlying physics!
National Digital Science Library website
U.C. Berkeley Physics Lecture Demonstrations
Mirrors
E+40+10 Phantom lightbulb: Image in a plane mirror.
University of Maryland Demonstrations arranged by chapters in Tipler
Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC Physics demo videos in North Carolina.
“Web video clips of … physics demonstrations used by the Wake Forest University Department of Physics. The principal goal of this project is to make the classroom demonstration available to students for review and additional study.” Science as a process, as opposed to science results, is best taught with demonstrations – quick experiments done in the classroom. “Demonstrations are rarely available for subsequent review. Many happen very quickly, and students have little opportunity to look again or to look more closely.”
Since beginning the project, we have found additional uses for the videos.
o New faculty find the videos helpful in learning the demonstrations.
o Students at a few other universities are using these demos for review.
o Teachers at high schools and colleges are using these videos to supplement their own demonstration collection. Science resources on the web are of particular help to high schools with limited science resources.
These are very short videos showing only the phenomena. The most useful for the purpose above stated are the videos on the wave machine. Some videos are available in both mpg format for better quality using the VLC media player and Real Player format for faster download. At present (February 23, 2007), they have videos covering 12 topics.
The videos were filmed mostly over fall and spring semesters 1997-1998. Helpful production notes are on their website.
In private correspondence, Rick Matthews at Wake Forest University, has told me that he is working on longer versions of the very short videos he now has up.
a part of the National Science Digital Library – logged in as davewall uarkphysics