Whether it be at the level of the individual, the academic department, or the entire physics teaching profession, nearly all of us want to do a good job. But how can we know if we are succeeding? To what extent can we trust traditional measures of excellence in teaching, and what alternative measures resting on different—perhaps even unfashionable—assumptions might we consider?
REFERENCES
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E. F.
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E. F. Redish (private communication).
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D. Bligh, What’s the Use of Lectures? (Jossey-Bass, 2000).
6.
See Ref. 1. “Favorable” attitudes are, by definition, those that a group of expert physics instructors mutually agreed on at least 90% of the time.
7.
M. Covington, Making the Grade: A Self-Worth Perspective on Motivation and School Reform (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 1992).
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E. Seymour and N. M. Hewitt, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences (Westview, 2000).
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S. Tobias, They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different: Stalking the Second Tier (Science News Books, 1994).
10.
For example, see “A Professor at Notre Dame Sparks a Quiet Revolution in How Chemistry is Taught,” in the May 25, 2001 Chronicle of Higher Education, which notes that the retention rate in introductory chemistry taught by Dennis Jacobs has been increased by 55%.
11.
A number of anti-plagiarism Web sites exist, perhaps the largest being Turnitin.com, which checks about 6000 papers daily, and compares them to more than 2 billion web sites, according to an article in the June 11, 2001 issue of USA Today. More than 23% of papers tested by Turnitin turn out to have been plagiarized from the web.
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J.
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See: http://www.aip.org/statistics for the Enrollment and Degrees Report.
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“Balancing the Equation: Where Are Women and Girls in Science, Engineering and Technology,” National Council for Research on Women, 2001 Report.
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NSF Program 01-82, “Assessment of Student Achievement in Undergraduate Education.”
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© 2002 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2002
American Association of Physics Teachers
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