Resource Letter EPGA-1: The education of physics graduate assistants

Preparing Physicists for Work, edited by Amy Schlaub (American Institute of Physics, Career Services Division, College Park, MD, 1997).

“Communication in industrial research laboratories,”

Frank E.

Jamerson

, (), – ().

“Realities of the Physics Job Market,” Roman Czujko, in Physics Graduate Education for Diverse Career Options, edited by Judy R. Franz (American Center for Physics, College Park, MD, 1995), pp. 40 and 43.

“What Work Requires Of Schools: A Scans Report For America 2000,” The Secretary’s Commission On Achieving Necessary Skills (U.S. Department Of Labor, June 1991); http://www.ttrc.doleta.gov/SCANS/ work.html

“Can we survive technology?” John von Neumann, Fortune (June 1955) p. 106 ff.

Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, Second Edition, Enlarged, edited by Robert Ulich (Harvard U. P., Cambridge, MA, 1975).

Eight Hundred Years of Physics Teaching, George Bishop (Fisher Miller, North Waltham, Hants, U.K., 1994).

Toward a Theory of Instruction, Jerome S. Bruner (Harvard U. P., Cambridge, MA, 1966), Chap. 2: Education as Social Invention, pp. 22 ff.

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, The National Commission on Excellence in Education (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1983).

College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, Ernest L. Boyer (Harper and Row, New York, 1988).

“How Are We Doing? Tracking the Quality of the Undergraduate Experience, 1960s to the Present,” George D. Kuh, Rev. Higher Educat. 22 (2), 99–120 (Winter 1998); http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/review_of_higher_education/v022/22.2kuh.html

Faculty Development in a Time of Retrenchment, The Group for Human Development in Higher Education (Change Magazine, New Rochelle, NY, 1974).

“Reforming the Graduate Schools,” in The Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman (Doubleday, New York, 1968), pp. 510–543.

“Preparation for College Teaching,” in Challenges to Graduate Schools, Ann M. Heiss (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1970), pp. 227–241.

Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, 1990).

Renewing the Promise: Research-Intensive Universities and the Nation: A Report Prepared by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1992).

The Research University in a Time of Discontent, edited by J. R. Cole, E. G. Barber, and S. R. Graubard (The Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore, 1994).

Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University; http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/

“Déjà vu all over again,”

Jules B.

LaPidus

, (), –(Spring ).

The physics community has long recognized that something more is required. In a Report by the Educational Committee of the American Physical Society entitled “The Teaching of Physics: With Especial Reference to the Teaching of Physics to Students of Engineering” (presented to the Council 24 February 1922, ordered printed 21 April 1922), the committee has the following comment (p. 55): “Theory of Teaching. This topic has been left to the last, since it is probable that opinions on it will differ. It is a frequent remark of experienced teachers of college subjects that the work of new instructors often suffers from a lack of some elementary knowledge of the theory and art of teaching. College teachers are supposed to be born, not made. Each stumbles through the series of mistakes of his predecessors, and at length by experience, discussions, and reading, comes to some more or less adequate knowledge of the practical psychology of his profession. Some say that this is the only way of becoming a competent teacher. But we believe that many broad-minded and experienced teachers do not subscribe to this view. It is true that writers on the theory of education have usually been concerned chiefly with the work of elementary and secondary schools. It may also be true that the college teacher, because of his superior education and intelligence, stands in less need of formal instruction in methods of teaching. Allowing for these factors, it is, we believe, nevertheless true that many experienced teachers could be of service to novices by drawing their attention to certain broad principles of instruction on which practically all college teachers of experience would agree, and to some mistakes and fallacies into which most beginners fall. There are psychologists and lecturers on the theory of education in American colleges who could be of great service in this connection by brief articles, of not too technical a nature, on the practical psychology of college teaching. It is, of course, true that little or no attempt has been made to do this for other subjects of college instruction. But this does not show that the thing is not in itself desirable and possible. Moreover, since it is generally admitted that physics is an especially difficult subject to teach, it should be the one for which such aids to intelligent teaching are especially necessary, and it might well lead the way.” In his article “Physics is Physics,” on the first page of the first issue of the American Physics Teacher in February 1933, F. K. Richtmyer comments: “The responsibility, then, for training young teachers lies. I believe, with the subject-matter departments. It is the duty of the older, more experienced teachers in a department to impress the idea upon the beginner, by precept, example and friendly counsel, that teaching is a serious business, requiring careful study; that his obligations to his students, present and future, require that he should make every effort to profit by the opportunity to acquire teaching experience under expert guidance; and that to this end he should strive to adopt teaching methods best suited to his own personal characteristics, to his students, and to the subject matter taught” (p. 4). “It is frequently remarked that we American teachers teach far too much in comparison with our European colleagues: that it is better for the student if we expect him to take some initiative in his reading, studying and thinking. This criticism of the American method is, I believe, justified; but I do not think that the criticism applies to our training of college teachers. I do not think we train them too much! Perhaps we overdo the matter of leaving them to their own devices” (p. 5).

Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhancing Human Performance, edited by D. Druckman and R. A. Bjork, Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council (National Academy, Washington, DC, 1994), p. 306; http://books.nap.edu/catalog/2303.html

“Teaching physics: Figuring out what works,”

E. F.

Redish

and

R.

Steinberg

, (), – () and references therein.

See, for example, “Institutional Impediments to Effective Training,” in Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhancing Human Performance, edited by D. Druckman and R. A. Bjork, Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council (National Academy, Washington, DC, 1994), pp. 295–306; http://books.nap.edu/catalog/2303.html

In a paper entitled “The diameter of the Internet” (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat?9907038), Albert, Jeong, and Barabasi note that while the number of documents on the Internet already exceeds 300 million, any two randomly selected Web pages are, on average, 18 hyperlinks or clicks apart. They predict also that were the number of documents to increase by 1000%, the number of hyperlinks required would only grow from 18 to 20 and that if an intelligent robot agent could interpret and follow the relevant Web links, it could find information much faster than the current generation of search engines. Progress in producing such autonomous intelligent agents has been reported in, e.g., “A Personal News Agent that Talks, Learns and Explains,” D. Billsus and M. Pazzani, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents ’99), Seattle, 1–5 May 1999 (http://www.ics.uci.edu/∼dbillsus/papers/agents99-news.pdf) and in “The Daily Learner: An intelligent online newspaper that learns and explains,” http://dailylearner.ics.uci.edu/

Online University Teaching Centers in the USA http://eagle.cc.ukans.edu/∼cte/OtherSites.html Dalhousie University’s Instructional Development and Technology Sites Worldwide http://www.dal.ca/∼oidt/ids.html#AN

A random sample of such centers and of “Handbooks for TAs” in the USA can be found at the following URLs. Carnegie Mellon University: http://www.cmu.edu/provost/teaching/center.html http://www.cmu.edu/provost/teaching/bestpractices.htm #REFERENCES Massachusetts Institute of Technology:  The Torch or the Firehose: A Guide to Section Teaching, Arthur P. Mattuck (1995)  http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/o/odsue/tll/www/  torch-table.html Pennsylvania State University:  http://www.psu.edu/idp_celt/PST/pst.shtml University of Massachusetts at Amherst:  http://www.umass.edu/cft/handbook.html University of Texas at Austin:  www.utexas.edu/academic/cte/ University of California at Santa Barbara:  http://id-www.ucsb.edu/IC/TA/ta.html University of California at San Diego:  http://www-ctd.ucsd.edu/toc.htm University of California at Berkeley:  http://www.grad.berkeley.edu:5900/gsi/ Queen’s University at Kingston (Canada):  http://www.queensu.ca/idc/HandBook/tofc.html University of Washington:  http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/TAITATraining.html The Ohio State University:  http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/education/ftad/services.html University of Michigan Ann Arbor:  http://www.umich.edu/∼crltmich/gsi_work2.html

“Teaching and learning,”

Frank

Oppenheimer

, (), – ().

Accounts of the course content may often be obtained from the faculty member involved, but few have been made available on the Web. See, for example, “Physics 708: Graduate Seminar in Teaching College Physics for Physicists,” Department of Physics, University of Maryland; http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/ripe/perg/gsrl.html

J. C. Maxwell, “Inaugural Lecture at Marischal College, Aberdeen, 3 November 1856,” The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Volume I 1846–1862, edited by P. M. Harman (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 1990), p. 428.

“Progress Report Commission on College Physics,” Am. J. Phys. 32 (6), (1964);

“Report of The Commission on College Physics,” Am. J. Phys. 34 (9), Part 2 (1966);

“Report of The Commission on College Physics,” Am. J. Phys. 36 (11), Part 2 (1968); for other discussions of physics curricula in this era see “Undergraduate Curricula in Physics: A Report on the Princeton Conference on Curriculum S,”

E. Leonard

Jossem

, (), – ();

“Less May Be More,”

Philip

Morrison

, (), – ();

“Dialogs Concerning Some Old Sciences—The Seattle Interdisciplinary Conference,”

E. Leonard

Jossem

, (), Part 2, – ();

“ ‘New Physics’ and the Minnesota Conference on New Materials for Introductory Physics Courses for Science and Engineering Majors, 6–8 May 1965,”

Peter G.

Roll

, (), Part 2, – ();

“Teaching physics for related sciences and professions,”

A. P.

French

and

E. L.

Jossem

, (), – ();

“The rise and fall of PSI in physics at MIT,”

Charles P.

Friedman

,

Stanley

Hirschi

,

Malcolm

Parlett

, and

Edwin F.

Taylor

, (), – ();

“An example of an informative ‘postmortem’ of a type much needed in higher education,” “Autopsy,”

Paul R.

Camp

, (), – (). Another example from the University of Maine.

Toward a Theory of Instruction, Jerome S. Bruner (Harvard U. P., Cambridge, MA, 1966), p. 164.

In “Education by Presence,” an interview with Frost published in the Christian Science Monitor, 24 December 1925, reprinted in Robert Frost, Poetry and Prose, edited by E. C. Lathem and L. Thompson (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, New York, 1972).

In an address to the AAAS Science Policy Seminar Series, 16 September 1998. Rita Colwell, Director of the National Science Foundation, remarked  “Furthermore, we cannot expect the task of science and math education to be the sole responsibility of K through 12 teachers while scientists and graduate students live only in their universities and laboratories. There is no group of people who should feel more responsible for science and math education in this nation than our scientists and scientists-to-be.” “In fact. I would say that America’s continuing leadership will depend more on the caliber of its human resource than on any other resource. It will not be enough to have a top layer of scientific elite, and another of mediocrity below. And the situation is really worsened by widespread public science illiteracy.”