Fiat lux: new light on an old subject

Physicist and education professor Les Blatt wants his students to experience for themselves his fascination with the workings of the physical world. But he also knows that, for many non-science majors, the thought of fulfilling Clark's science requirement can be intimidating.

After several years of research, collaborating with physics colleague Harvey Gould and retired high school physics teacher Mauri Gould, and with valuable help from physics senior Josh Gutwill, Blatt began offering a course called Discovering Physics (PHYS020). THIS physics course has received rave reviews from non-science majors and is always oversubscribed. Blatt and the two Goulds (father and son) are thinking of putting together a textbook -- or, more likely, a CD or Web site -- to accompany the course.

Blatt's area of specialization is experimental nuclear physics (investigating the structure and interactions of the particles in an atom's nucleus). But during his years of teaching at the college level, he became increasingly interested in exploring non-traditional ways of making physics more accessible to non-science students. In the process he thought carefully about what he wanted non-science majors to learn, and combed the education literature-both at the college and pre-college level--on the most effective ways to teach science. In Discovering Physics, using constantly-evolving materials based on the original collaborative work, he puts these findings into practice.

The course is designed to meet several objectives, including:

Create students who are "scientifically literate"; that is, they have a solid understanding of the scientific approach to learning about the physical world
Provide students with a deep foundation in a limited area of physics, rather than the more-typical broad but shallow "coverage" of the whole subject
Show students that physics is fun

Unlike many introductory physics courses, Discovering Physics

1. Is centered on an inquiry-based learning approach:

Small teams -- typically four students -- perform experiments designed to answer questions that have been posed about the phenomenon under study; each team has a research organizer, a data and discussion recorder, and a final report coordinator
Incorporates "discrepant" events; that is, events whose outcomes are unexpected, and therefore challenge the students' thinking and curiosity
Class discussions are held regularly to make sure everyone understands the questions posed and the beginnings of answers being developed by each group
Additional questions and activities are assigned for each student to complete individually
Toward the end of the semester, each team formulates and completes a teaching project. This can consist of designing and implementing a strategy to teach some aspect of physical science, either at the college or pre-college level, or critiquing a body of literature about teaching science.

2. Limits coverage to one area of physics (in this case, "the nature of light") so that emphasis can be placed on learning how to "think like scientists," that is, to

Formulate interesting and useful questions about the physical world
Design methods to explore them
Generate models to relate the observed phenomena in a larger context
Formulate hypotheses that can be tested

Blatt and his colleagues decided to focus on the nature of light for several reasons:

Many properties of light lend themselves to accessible observations and experiments
Light is a phenomenon that most people interact with every day
Visual effects are, in many cases, intrinsically fascinating

Blatt's interest in teaching science is not limited to college students. In his complementary role as professor of education, he also teaches courses, workshops, and summer institutes for both Clark education students and teachers in the Worcester Public Schools, ultimately hoping to help students at all levels and with a wide range of backgrounds to think like scientists.