Thinking About
Thinking: Learning
Commentaries
Kathleen A. Falconer, EER
Joseph L. Zawicki, ESSE
Daniel L. MacIsaac, Physics
Abstract
Learning commentaries are useful meta-cognitive
tools. Students write formal essays describing
their learning and provide examples (evidence)
generated during the lesson. Learning
commentaries allow students to integrate new
ideas into their current knowledge structure.
Many students do not fully appreciate the extent
of their learning, particularly in reformed physics
classrooms; commentaries help students to
appreciate their intellectual growth. Teaching
fosters learning when students integrate new
ideas into their current understandings; selfreflection facilitates the creation of new
understandings and linkages between ideas
(Donovan, Bransford & Pelligrino, Eds., 1999).
Subject/Problem
What understandings do students
develop about their own learning using
learning commentaries?
How do students view writing learning
commentaries in physics classes?
Theoretical Background/
Literature review
Self-Reflection and Internal Dialogues
• learning fostered when students integrate new ideas into
their current understandings
– self-reflection facilitates the creation of new understandings and
linkages between ideas
• development of internal dialogues
– not entirely intuitive process
– the development of this expertise must be facilitated and
supported by the teacher
– modeling by the instructor
– students will be able to independently prompt themselves and
monitor their understanding
(Donovan, Bransford & Pelligrino, Eds., 1999, p. 14).
Different Instructional Approaches to Foster
Student Reflection
– opinion polls
– surveys
– journal entries in various formats
– diagnostic learning logs
– email
– group instructional feedback
(Cross & Angelo, 1993)
Other authors have suggested the use of reflective
writings in an attempt to understand student
thinking.
• students reflecting while reading the textbook
Taylor (1992)
• learning commentaries (Otero, 2003)
Learning Commentaries
• unique in that they typically focus the
student on their own learning process
within the context a particular idea or
concept
– what they learned
– how they learned it
– those moments of insight when the “light bulb
goes on” and new ideas fall into place
Design/Procedure
• Population
– intact groups
– approximately 120 undergraduate and graduate
students
– participated in physics courses (PHY 107, PHY
108, PHY 620, PHY622, etc.)
– pre-service and in-service teachers
– elementary and secondary teachers
Study
• three learning commentaries per course
– formal essays describing, at length, the evolution of the
student’s thoughts on the learning of one specific scientific
concept
– support their thesis with specific data taken from classroom
observations and activities within the course (or from their
own classrooms)
• Examined for themes using grounded theory.
• The data analysis had five stages.
– The first stage consisted of the original annotation of the
writing assignments. The assignments were re-annotated
and we worked on analytic memos (Creswell, 1998).
– In the second stage, we reread the assignments and
annotations. While doing this, we started to seek out
patterns in the data.
– We looked for re-occurrences of ideas and start to make
preliminary “counts.” Then we recursively started to
integrate stage three and stage two. First we open coded the
data from the assignments. We looked for ways to integrate
categories, and then we looked for similarities and
differences.
– In stage four, we axial coded the data.
– Stage five was when we started writing on the themes and
process of teacher self-reflection. we recursively started to
integrate stage four and stage five.
Preliminary Findings and
Analysis
Graduate Student Response
The single scientific idea which evolved for me this week was the
concept of the electric field. I had not thought about it deeply before,
and the discussions, analogies and presentations of this week have
caused me to re-evaluate the significance of the idea, and also caused
me to realize me understanding was not as strong as I had thought.
Previously, I had thought of the electric field mostly as a kind of map
of the path that charges would take, and one that determined how
much force a charge would feel at a given location. I would have told
you that energy was stored in the field, and been able to successfully
describe all of the standard analogies to the gravitational field.
However, my mental picture of the electric field was really only strong
for electrostatic situations. I never really thought about the electric
field inside of a circuit. While I understood the electric fields of
capacitors in isolated situations, I did not even know that electric
fields existed across resistors, or in current-carrying wires. The topic
was not one that I had ever come across or seen the need to study.
During the first week of class, we first attacked fields from the perspective of a
person “riding a positive charge,” and examined how we would feel in the
vicinity of various charge arrangements. This was familiar territory, and we
moved on to activities ranging from placing students of varying masses on
bleachers to using an EM fields computer simulation. The bleacher activity is
fabulous for reaching students, and I tried it last year with my classes. The EM
fields program was okay, but the parallel plates simulation needs a little finetuning. Still, the discussion of why the field gets stronger as more charges pile
on the plates and the lines get closer together was very useful.
A useful pictoral representation of the distortion of the electron cloud
surrounding an atom in a conductor was drawn and discussed, and
emphasized in Chabay and Sherwood as well. Dan then showed us how a
beaker of ions, placed between two parallel plates, creates its own external
electric field in response to the externally imposed one of the plates, and may
completely cancel or negate some of the external field. The charge residing on
the edge of the beaker may reinforce the external electric field in the air
between the beaker and the plates, and this modeled a conductor between two
plates. This was a pretty painless way to understand dielectrics. We also
looked at how plastic (an insulator) might work differently, and some
questions were raised in my mind as to how that would affect the external field
and thus the attraction between two plates or charges. I had never thought
before that electric fields acted like gravitational fields in that they are never
just “cancelled out” or turned off.
Previously, I had thought that electric fields were prevented from spreading
when you placed, say, plastic or glass around a charge. The image I had was
not unlike that of a blanket’s” insulating” something warm by preventing heat
from flowing. I thought that insulators somehow prevented electric fields from
flowing. From class activities and discussion, and particularly from reading
Chabay Ch. 14, as well, I came to understand that an electric field interacts
with the atoms of a material so as to promote a rearrangement of charges,
causing an internal electric field which is superimposed upon the original field,
and that the field continues to exist, even beyond the material.
In order to more fully develop my understanding of field, I need to read a bit
more. Chabay pointed out that the models we learned should not be overly
generalized to all situations, and that in a circuit, the battery prevents
equilibrium from occurring, and that this is why electric fields in a circuit’s
wires are not “neutralized” by superposition. I need to get a copy of the next
chapter of Chabay so that my understanding of the fields in a circuit may
deepen.
Preliminary Findings and
Analysis
Undergraduate Student Response
As the semester progressed and the discussion began to focus on different kinds
of forces, I found that things were not quite what I had originally believed. During
cycle one, we ran activities that had us predicting what would happen when there was
a friction pad attached to the cart. Although we weren’t concerned with forces at that
point, the term did come up in class discussions of why the cart slowed down. As we
began to talk about the role that friction played in mechanical reactions, I (and I
believe many others as well) had the notion that friction was a force that acted in an
upward motion on the cart. It made sense to me that if friction is the result of two
surfaces rubbing up against each other – in this case the friction pad and the track –
then the forces involved were gravity (which was pushing the pad/cart down toward
the track) and friction (which would have to be pushing up against the force of
gravity). This seemed to be a logical way to think about friction in relation to the
experiments we were doing with the cart/pad and track.
As we progressed further into cycle two, we began to focus on labeling diagrams with
force and speed arrows. Based on my original thinking about what happens between
the cart/pad and track, I initially drew a force arrow for friction upwards towards the
bottom of the cart. Other force arrows, such as when you give your friend on a
skateboard a push, were easy to understand – they went in the direction of the push.
For some reason, the correct place to put a force arrow due to friction eluded me until
we worked through activity five. This was the activity where we used a rubber band
launcher to push a block over three different degrees of sandpaper and then a row of
sticky notes.
Preliminary Findings and
Analysis
Undergraduate Student Response
At first, when we were pushing the block over the sandpaper, my mind still
firmly held onto the concept that friction was an upward force. Gravity was pushing
the block down into the surface of the sandpaper which was, in turn, pushing back up
against the sandpaper. When we pushed the block over the sticky notes, that notion
started to become a little hazy. It no longer made as much sense to describe it in the
same way. There was a summarizing question for activity five that asked us to use the
row of sticky notes as an analogy for how friction works to slow an object down. This
was a difficult question to answer because it challenged the notion of how I thought
friction in this type of interaction behaved. The more our group talked about it, we
started to see that the sticky notes essentially acted as little roadblocks to the blocks
forward progress and that each time the block hit a sticky note it caused the block to
slow down. In fact, it was like each sticky note was a hand that was giving the block a
little nudge in the opposite direction. If this was true then the force arrow had to be
drawn, not upwards against the force of gravity as I originally thought, but in the
opposite direction of the motion of the block.
Honestly, I’m still a little baffled as to why I was so conflicted as to where to draw a
force arrow that was due to friction. I knew that friction was a force that opposed the
motion of an object. I had no problems drawing other types of force arrows and now
it makes perfect sense to me that if friction is what is making an object slow down, then
it must be acting on the object in the opposite direction of the motion of that object.
Preliminary Conclusions
• Learning commentaries are useful meta-cognitive
tools.
• Learning commentaries allow students to
integrate new ideas into their current knowledge
structure.
• Many students do not fully appreciate the extent
of their learning, particularly in reformed physics
classrooms
• Commentaries help students to appreciate their
intellectual growth.
References
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Donovan, M. S., Bransford, J. D., & Pelligrino, J. W., Eds. (1999) How people learn:
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MacIsaac, Dan (2007). Course grading and procedure policy: PHY622. State
University of New York, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York.
Otero, V. K. (2003) Cognitive processes and the learning of physics part I: The
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Stewart, James. (2007). Final Learning Commentary. Available at:
http://newton.physics.wwu.edu/jstewart/scied390/learningcommentary.html.
Last accessed August 23, 2007.
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