Goals

Content:

To help students/teachers develop a deep understanding of a set of physical science ideas that can be used to explain interesting phenomena. These ideas are similar to the ideas that elementary students learn.

Nature of Science:

To help students/teachers practice the scientific process and understand how knowledge is developed within a scientific community: that doing science involves using evidence and creative thinking; that knowledge is established through collaboration and consensus; and that science knowledge can change over time

Elementary Students’ Ideas:

To help students/teachers analyze and appreciate the thinking of elementary students while they engage in scientific inquiry, and to make connections between children’s learning and their own learning of physics.

Learning About Learning:

To help students/teachers become more aware of how their own physics ideas change and develop over time, and how the structure of the learning environment and curriculum facilitate these changes.

Each Cycle is intended to help develop a specific set of physics ideas. Activities are designed to elicit and challenge prior knowledge and to provide evidence to help decide, if appropriate, to change ones ideas.

As students/teachers participate in small group and whole class discussions focusing on both the results and interpretations of experiments, they make their own ideas explicit and have the opportunity to consider alternative ideas. The “authority” role is shifted from the teacher to the students by having whole class discussions where groups present ideas supported by observational evidence, and where the class comes to consensus. The teacher plays a supportive role, sometimes helping to clarify ideas. In addition to using simple apparatus and MBL motion sensors to conduct hands-on experiments, students/teachers also use specially designed computer simulations. The simulations support both in-class activities and web-based homework assignments. Several homework and in-class activities focus on Elementary Students' Ideas (ESI).

These provide PET/PSET students with the opportunity to apply their evolving physics knowledge in the context of the elementary classroom. Students do this by analyzing video segments of elementary students as they work through physics activities that are similar in nature to activities contained within the PET/PSET Curriculum. In some ESI activities, PET/PSET students also analyze elementary students’ diagrams of physical phenomenon.

A comprehensive web-based PET/PSET Teacher Guide provides detailed information and sample videos to help teachers implement the curriculum in the classroom.  Elementary Students presenting their ideas in class.  You can find out more about PET by visiting the website at: http://petproject.sdsu.edu . You can find out more about PSET by visiting the website at: http://cpucips.sdsu.edu/web/pset/index.html .