Investigation of the Interactions Between Instructors and Students in an Introductory Interactive-Engagement College Physics Course.

摘要

The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion/lab instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the interactive-engagement (IE) elements of the course. Because so many different instructors participate in disseminating the IE course elements, we find it essential to the instructors' professional development to observe and document the student-instructor interactions within the classroom. Out of this effort, we have developed a computerized Real-time Instructor Observation Tool (RIOT) to take data of student-instructor interactions. We use the RIOT to observe 29 different instructors some over multiple quarters, and discover 1) the range of instructor behaviors is more extreme than previously assumed, 2) the students, the curriculum, and the individual instructor's style contribute to this variation 3) there are some instructor-student interactions (specifically actively observing students, and explaining to students in small groups) that are correlated with student achievement as measured by their final exam score. In this dissertation, I introduce the RIOT, and describe how I came to each of these conclusions.