Collaborative Research: Characterizing Active Learning Environments in Physics

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This project will improve tools to distinguish between active learning environments and is significant to both physics specifically and STEM education generally. Evidence that active learning is superior to purely passive lecturing is decisive, so STEM education research must now build a better vocabulary for comparing active environments. This work will study several "flagship" curricula in university physics, describing those classrooms using a common observation framework and social network analysis to examine student collaboration. The project will compare classroom features and student networks between these high-impact examples, and will also promote tools for faculty to gather similar information about their own classrooms.The goals of this project are: to characterize the social network development within several research-validated active learning curricula; to use the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) to begin to build a standardized vocabulary to compare these environments; and to begin to link specific features of learning environments with the characteristics of student social networks that develop over the semester. Student networks will form the focal measure of the work because of the prominence of student-student interactions in virtually all active learning curricula. Data on this classroom aspect currently lag far behind the detail available for individual-cognitive measures such as conceptual gains. This project will address that deficiency while simultaneously documenting the classroom features that support or constrain these collaborative networks. Data collected will include network surveys and detailed classroom observations from six research-validated curricula. Analyses will include comparison and time evolution of degree distributions, network structure and centralization, and linear modeling combining network metrics with profiles identified from COPUS analysis.