Provide a brief course description and suggest the intended learners. What are the learning objectives for this course?

The objective of the TEAL project is to transform the way physics is taught in large introductory physics classes at MIT in order to decrease failure rates and increase students' conceptual understanding, as well as maintain analytic problem solving skills. Visualization technology can support meaningful learning by enabling the presentation of spatial and dynamic images that portray relationships between complex concepts.

The motivation for moving to a different mode of teaching introductory physics courses was threefold. First, the traditional lecture and recitation format for teaching the mechanics and electromagnetism courses at MIT has had a 40-50% attendance rate, even with good lecturers, and a 10% or higher failure rate. Second, a range of educational innovations in teaching freshman physics has demonstrated that any pedagogy using interactive-engagement methods results in higher learning gains than the traditional lecture format.

Finally, unlike many educational institutions in the US and around the world, the mainline introductory physics courses at MIT have not included a laboratory component for over three decades. We felt this was a crucial weakness, and we were intent on to re-introducing experiments into the mainline courses in a meaningful way.

What are the major topics and how are the pedagogical contents organized?

For electromagnetism, our major topics are in order:

1. Fields

2. Coulomb's Law

3. Electric Potential

4. Gauss' Law

5. Capacitors

6. Current and Resistance

7. Direct Current Circuits

8. Magnetic Fields

9. Sources of Magnetic Fields

10. Faraday's Law

11. Inductance and Energy in Magnetic Fields

12. Alternating Current Circuits

13. Maxwell's Equations and Electromagnetic Waves

14. Interference and Diffraction

Describe the pedagogies (lecture, discussions, hands-on activities, project-based) and the technologies you use (course website, power-point presentations, blackboard), as well as the rationale for any recent changes.

The TEAL project is centered on an active learning approach, aimed at helping students visualize, develop better intuition about, and better conceptual models of electromagnetic phenomena. Taught in a specially designed classroom with extensive use of networked laptops, this collaborative, hands-on approach merges lectures, recitations, and desktop laboratory experience in a media-rich environment. In the TEAL classroom, nine students sit together at round tables (Fig. 1), with a total of thirteen tables.

Five hours of class per week is broken into two, two-hour sessions and a one-hour problem-solving session led by graduate student teaching assistants. The students are exposed to a mixture of presentations (PowerPoint), desktop experiments, web-based assignments, and collaborative exercises. The desktop experiments and computer-aided analysis of experimental data provide the students with direct experience of various electromagnetic phenomena.

Course materials and information are disseminated via a flexible course website, to which instructors can individually add (or modify) content, including lecture presentations, in-class problem solutions, problem sets, office hours, and so on. In addition to the public site, a private database-backed course management system keeps track of student grades in real time as the semester progresses. Students can log in at any time and instantly see how they are doing in the class.

What teaching methods, tools or publications, developed by colleagues at MIT or other institutions, were helpful in developing your course?

TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) is taught in the "Studio Physics" format. This term loosely denotes a format instituted in 1994 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by Professor Jack Wilson. This pedagogy has been modified and elaborated on at a number of other universities, notably in North Carolina State University's SCALE-UP program, under Professor Robert Beichner. Our format is closely to that of NCSU.

What pedagogical tools and materials were constructed to facilitate the delivery of the curriculum and the students' understanding of the subject matter?

TEAL incorporates advanced two- and three dimensional visualizations and simulations that employ Java applets, Macromedia Shockwave visualizations, and moves produced using 3ds max. These materials are freely available online. They allow students to gain insight into the way in which fields transmit forces by watching how the motion of objects evolve in time in response to those forces. The animations allow the students to intuitively relate the stresses transmitted by electromagnetic fields to more familiar forces, for example those transmitted by strings and rubber bands.

In addition, a set of course notes were developed specifically for the class, covering the topics listed above and incorporating these visualizations as part of their exposition. We are also developing problem sets that explicitly integrate with and address our interactive simulations.

What are the most significant challenges for the students presented during this course?

In terms of subject matter, the basic difficulties in this course stem from the fact that vector fields are something many students have no feel for, and they have to master many aspects of this subject to understand the physics.

In terms of pedagogy, many students are passive learners because that is the way they have been taught. Students had to be convinced that using active learning techniques in teaching was indeed superior to what they are used to. We cannot overemphasis the importance of continually telling the students why you are doing what you are doing and why it works better in terms of learning gains.

What refinements have been made to the course because of student feedback and assessment activities?

Because the TEAL Project has had a robust assessment effort from the outset, we have been able to understand and document the successes and failures of the implementation over the course of the last four years, and to learn from them. For TEAL to succeed in the long term, it is crucial we maximize the learning environment for the students. Since we feel that class attendance is a central part of this teaching method, we continually improve on the structure the course so that coming to class is seen by the students as a profitable use of their time.

The refinements we have made over of the course of our four year implementation are: (1) heterogeneous grouping, and more training of students in collaborative methods; (2) more extensive training for course teaching staff, both section leaders, graduate student TAs and undergraduate TAs; (3) an increase in numbers of the course teaching staff (students have felt that we were understaffed during class); (4) fewer experiments that are better explained and better integrated into the course material; (5) better planning of individual classes to break our active learning sessions into smaller units that can be more closely overseen by the teaching staff.

Provide examples of student work or other evidence that highlight how the teaching methods enhanced student understanding.

The TEAL Project has had a robust assessment and evaluation effort underway since its inception. This effort is led by Professor Judy Yehudit Dori, a faculty member in the Department of Education in Technology and Science at the Technion. We use a variety of assessment techniques, including the traditional in-class exams, focus groups, questionnaires, and pre and post testing. Our pre and post tests consists of 20 multiple choice questions covering basic concepts in electromagnetism. Some of these questions are taken from standardized tests that have been developed and used at other institutions, and some of these questions were developed at MIT.

The figure above shows the results of the pre and post testing for Spring 2003 8.02. The results are given for three categories of student scores: High, Intermediate, and Low. This separation allows us to gauge the effectiveness of instruction across the range of student backgrounds; the separation is made using the student score on the pre-test. The difference between the pre and post scores is a measure of the effectiveness of instruction.

To summarize those results, the learning gains in TEAL Spring 2003 by standard measures are about twice those in the traditional lecture/recitation format across the entire range of student backgrounds. In particular, we compared our results in TEAL to the standard MIT lecture/recitation format taught in Spring 2002. The fact that interactive-engagement teaching methods produce about twice the average normalized learning gains when compared to traditional instruction replicates the results of many studies obtained at other universities, including Harvard.