Can Direct Measurement Videos Inspire Lab-like Learning?

Abstract:

Hands-on labs can offer students a rare opportunity to confront the laws of physics first hand and to gain experience using science practices. As such, hands-on labs are an important learning tool which have played a foundational role in science education since the time of Galileo. But labs also have features that make them difficult to implement in practice. They are often time consuming for the instructor to plan and setup, time consuming for students to perform, expensive to implement, and fraught with potential missteps that can send confused students into a spiral of misunderstanding. Our Direct Measurement Video team is working to create several series' of videos with an interface that allows students to interact with them in a way that (we hope) will start to feel lab-like, but with fewer of the impediments that tend to undermine lab-learning in the real world. We hope that lab-like videos will soon provide a needed complement to traditional hands-on labs in science classrooms across the nation. In this talk, I will present our vision of the pedagogical possibilities of video and highlight our progress toward the goal. This work is supported by NSF TUES award #1245268