121-122 Facilitating in Tutorial


What are Tutorials?

Tutorials are research-based group-learning worksheets created to help students make sense of physics.  They replace traditional problem-solving recitations, which are not very effective, especially for this population of biologists -- but they are not very effective for engineers either! (*) 

 

What does it mean to be "research-based"?

When I say that the Tutorials we use are "research-based" I mean that their topics are chosen as a result of extensive physics education research on what topics are particularly difficult for introductory students.  I also mean that they have been developed through extensive testing, with many groups of students being observed (sometimes videotaped) in class to see how they interact with the lesson.  In addition, pre-post testing shows these Tutorials to be substantially more effective than traditional recitations in helping students build a good conceptual understanding of physics.

 

What's the format of a Tutorial session?

Students buy a manual that contains tutorial worksheets.  They bring these to their discussion session and work on it in groups of three to five.  Each tutorial is a "fill in the answers" worksheet of 4-6 pages. Your job is to get students to "do the right thing" with these worksheets. 

 

What's the point of the Tutorals?

The tutorial has a number of goals:

 

 

The last is tricky.  Students often have misinterprations of their intuitions that lead to "wrong" answers.  It's often easy to convince them that they are wrong, but it is not so easy to get them to transform their intuitions.  There is a serious danger that they will just say "physics makes no sense to me -- I just have to memorize the results (and I will then ignore everything I have learned when I get out of this silly class)." 

 

It is therefore very important never to put down a student's intution, but to try to find why they have that intuition.  There is usually a grain of truthful experience in even their incorrect assumptions.  Often they have generalized an experience they know well incorrectly.

 

What's your role in Tutorials? Facilitating

Your job in tutorial is to keep an eye on the students, check them occasionally, and answer the occasional question.  It is NOT to explain the material in the tutorial to the students.  Mostly you should be listening in to what's going on at the different tables, not talking.  Here are some do's and don'ts:

 

What to do in Tutorials

 

What not to do in Tutorials

 

121-122 TA Guidlines (Redish)