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FUTURE STUDENTS
Faculty of Science
Workshop Tutorials at the School of Physics
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| Students in a physics workshop |
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Over the past three years first year teaching in the School of Physics has undergone significant redevelopment. Change has included complete refurbishment of the main laboratory, updating of the laboratory curriculum and a critical, comparative review of the pedagogical approaches in use.
In many tertiary institutions the teaching of the ‘pure’ sciences has changed little in style over the entire modern era during which significant numbers of school leavers have had access to a tertiary scientific education, a period of 50-60 years or three generations. ‘Traditional’ university science courses meant an unchanging diet of lectures, with little or a least minimal dialogue, lab classes often with an emphasis on individual performance of heavily scripted practicals, and tutorials, which for classes of 25 students can amount to little more than another lecture. Yet due to technological advancements, lifestyle changes and the very different pressures and expectations placed on young people, today’s undergraduates require a quite different approach.
Amongst the new teaching approaches recently implemented at the School of Physics, Workshop Tutorials (WTs) have been received very enthusiastically and to positive critical acclaim in student feedback. WTs engage the student in small, co-operative teamwork activities that are essentially part lab, part tutorial and part problem solving classes. WT teams work from a tutorial script and are given full solution sheets at the end of each Workshop. A complete three-volume set, totalling 150 WT scripts has been produced covering the core areas of mechanics, waves, heat, light, sound, electromagnetism, atomic and nuclear and quantum physics.
Workshop Tutorials have several significant pedagogical advantages over traditional tertiary science teaching modes. The Workshops genuinely engage the students. In contrast, in the regular, large lecture class the student experience is more-often-than-not entirely passive and as a consequence lectures are a comparatively weak learning experience, as is well documented in the literature. Workshop Tutorials are staffed by a small number of ‘facilitators’ to assist students and encourage discussion and discourse, critical assessment and achievement of group consensus. In this way essential ‘graduate attributes’ are rehearsed and refined. Junior lecturers often admit that they really get to grips with theory and achieve a deep, conceptual understanding in their subject only when they prepare to teach it. Correspondingly, student participants in a WT enjoy the powerful learning experience of explaining the subtleties and technical nuances of the subject to their peers.
In many tertiary institutions the teaching of the ‘pure’ sciences has changed little in style over the entire modern era during which significant numbers of school leavers have had access to a tertiary scientific education, a period of 50-60 years or three generations. ‘Traditional’ university science courses meant an unchanging diet of lectures, with little or a least minimal dialogue, lab classes often with an emphasis on individual performance of heavily scripted practicals, and tutorials, which for classes of 25 students can amount to little more than another lecture. Yet due to technological advancements, lifestyle changes and the very different pressures and expectations placed on young people, today’s undergraduates require a quite different approach.
Amongst the new teaching approaches recently implemented at the School of Physics, Workshop Tutorials (WTs) have been received very enthusiastically and to positive critical acclaim in student feedback. WTs engage the student in small, co-operative teamwork activities that are essentially part lab, part tutorial and part problem solving classes. WT teams work from a tutorial script and are given full solution sheets at the end of each Workshop. A complete three-volume set, totalling 150 WT scripts has been produced covering the core areas of mechanics, waves, heat, light, sound, electromagnetism, atomic and nuclear and quantum physics.
Workshop Tutorials have several significant pedagogical advantages over traditional tertiary science teaching modes. The Workshops genuinely engage the students. In contrast, in the regular, large lecture class the student experience is more-often-than-not entirely passive and as a consequence lectures are a comparatively weak learning experience, as is well documented in the literature. Workshop Tutorials are staffed by a small number of ‘facilitators’ to assist students and encourage discussion and discourse, critical assessment and achievement of group consensus. In this way essential ‘graduate attributes’ are rehearsed and refined. Junior lecturers often admit that they really get to grips with theory and achieve a deep, conceptual understanding in their subject only when they prepare to teach it. Correspondingly, student participants in a WT enjoy the powerful learning experience of explaining the subtleties and technical nuances of the subject to their peers.
