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The MBL grant TERC had from the AAT program at NSF was critical to creating a new and important sub-field with its own products and research. The history of that grant and its progeny, illustrates the many ways a project can have an influence and the long time scales involved.
With a dozen sensors, a lab interface and a low-cost microcomputer, kids now have unprecedented measurement and computational power that can support inquiry-based learing. In 1983, the NSF awarded TERC approximately $2M for three years to develop the idea of microcomputer-based laboratories. I had been working on the idea of interfacing sensors to computers for use in teaching labs over the previous decade, ever since there were microcomputers, but largely within the college physics community. This grant represented the first opportunity to focus entirely on this technology, and to make it accessible to the teaching profession at large. Fortunately for our analysis, the term MBL was coined and actively pushed by the project, so we can trace the effect of this grant through the use of this name.
The importance of MBL is that it provides an excellent, highly interactive learning experience that removes much of the drudgery often associated with labs, and allows students to focus on the underlying science. It has a proven ability to improve students' science intuition.
The project had a three-part strategy in launching this field: create a few exemplary products for middle grade students, disseminate the technology, and support fundamental educational research in the area. The products resulted in a line of hardware, software, and teacher manuals, packaged into four kits, all licensed to HRM Software. When HRM later went out of business, the line was bought by Queue Software which continues to market these products. Sales figures are confidential, but a total of few tens of thousands of these were sold.
The technology was disseminated through workshops and technical packages which reached hundreds of educators and potential publishers. Again, because of a critical development of the project, we can trace one aspect of this influence. The project developed, and widely disseminated technical information on, an ultrasonic motion detector based on Polaroid technology. All cases in which motion is detected in an MBL environment can be traced to this development. There are now approximately 20 different MBL product lines and at least 12 of them use this technology. A typical example of the spread of this technology comes from a quote in the cover of the EduQuest Elementary PSL Teacher Manuals:
"Six years ago, I was demonstrating a motion probe we developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation when a striking man boomed out that this was the first educational application of computers he had ever liked and that it had to become an IBM product so he could have it for his own kids [presumably, he would never buy the Apple I was using for the demonstration]. In this unorthodox manner began a highly generative collaboration between IBM and TERC that has led to the development of the Personal Science Laboratory and the material described in this manual."
"Phil Smith was striking because he was six-six, dressed in a three-piece dark suit, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon hat. His outward appearance was not all that was striking-he was also a certified wild duck within IBM with an impressive record of development and sales, and an uncanny ability to negotiate the bureaucracy to get things done. He was the starting point for a major commitment by IBM to improved education represented by this product line."
"Educators sometimes wonder why materials developed with government funding are not available for free. The PSL product line is a nice case in point that shows how inadequate and nearsighted such a perspective is. The government funding that led to the PSL started ten years ago. While generous, this funding just started the ball rolling; it permitted us to develop prototype material and to undertake preliminary educational research that indicated the value of this approach at the middle grades. We made our techniques and results available and a few hardy teachers applied our ideas to their teaching. But TERC, as a non-profit, was unable to convert this into a product so the entire approach could have died at this point when funding stopped. The government does not have the resources to convert every good idea into a major product, nor should it. The market must make these decisions and allocate the necessary resources."
"In this case, "the market" was Phil Smith and others at IBM who had the vision to convert our ideas into a product that any school could acquire. This required far more than simply sprucing up our material: the interface had to be completely re-engineered, the software re-developed several times, fundamental research needed to be done on different grade levels, and curriculum material carefully fashioned to utilize the hardware and exploit the emerging research results. The result of this remarkable private-public partnership is an important, effective, and innovative addition to science education. We are proud to have started this process and to have enlisted the help of so many wonderful and dedicated individuals at IBM/EduQuest and TERC."
Some indicators of the present impact of the original MBL project:
At the most recent NSTA meeting, EduQuest released the PSL EL line of MBL software and activities we developed for elementary grades. This long-awaited product is the first since the Voyage of the Mimi interface kit we developed to be targeted for elementary grade students.
I did a survey of the most recent Physics Teacher (April, 1994) to see what traces of the original project could seen. There are ten pages of advertising, of which 3.5 were devoted to MBL products. The lead article is "Real-World Physics: A Portable MBL of Field Measurements." A second article "Teaching the Nonlinear Pendulum" makes use of MBL and references it.
Three of 55 workshops this summer's AAPT meeting mention MBL in the title. Four others use MBL concepts but not the name.
MBL is built into the extended labs that accompany the latest version of the BSCS Biology "Green" version. The manufacturer reports growing sales.
The HRM "Experiments in Chemistry", an MBL package developed at TERC after the MBL grant, was the best-selling MBL package for several years and won several awards. It was the first to interface a pH probe, now routine in numerous packages.
A first scholarly collection of MBL papers, based on a 1992 NATO conference in Amsterdam, will soon be released.
Ron has developed a simple, qualitative matching test, based on items developed in the MBL project, to gauge student intuition for these concepts. Ron has used these tests on hundreds of students. He reports:
It was surprising to find error rates as high as 40%-60% on these simple velocity questions after kinematics had been covered in lecture. Most physics professors had predicted that fewer than 10% of their students would miss these questions and felt that students who were unable to answer such simple questions understood very little kinematics.He found that, student error rates stayed high, even when students were exposed to lectures, traditional labs, and related homework. This was true at both the high-school and college level in physics courses for majors and non-majors using calculus and non-calculus treatments, for advanced and remedial students, before and after many combinations of lecture, lab, homework and standard tests. A breakthrough in learning came only when students had a good MBL lab, coupled with appropriate curriculum material. Then the error rates dropped to the 5%-15% range and stayed there, even after a while. There is no doubt from this research that one good MBL experience was uniquely able to convey basic intuitive ideas that seem to elude most students.
Rich, kinesthetic activities designed around the ultrasonic motion detector help kids at all grades connect aspects of their motion with features on the graph. While Ron Thornton's students were high-school and college physics students, Mei-Hung Chiu (1990) has obtained remarkably similar results at the seventh grade. She used a control group and showed that the group using the motion detector and suitable curriculum material improved significantly, regardless of gender and general level of performance. Observations by researchers at TERC confirms this result with students at least as early as third grade.
MBL is not magic and it cannot make a good learning experience without good teaching and curricula. This has been well documented by Marcia Linn's work, also initially supported by the MBL grant. Each time her group offered this MBL-based curriculum student gains have been greater as the curriculum and instruction has become better. One key improvement has been learning to make best use of the time and freedom from drudgery that MBL offers. Unless you focus student attention, students will ignore the apparatus while it records temperature and think about more pressing things.
Computer interface probes to measure light, sound and temperature are now commonplace. Packages that involve measurement of pH, voltage, heart rate, skin resistance, ECG, EMG, optical absorption, earthquakes, visual illusions, response time, dissolved oxygen, force, magnetic field, pressure, turbidity, wind speed, insolation, heat flow, humidity and much more are available. Battery-operated interfaces for field measurements are available, soon to be interfaced to PDAs like the Newton. All these developments can be directly traced to the original grant.
Chiu, Mei-Hung, 1990. The effectiveness of microcomputer-based laboratories in teaching scientific skills and concepts. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.
Halloun, I. A. & D. Hestenes, 1985. The initial state of college physics students. American Journal of Physics, 53(11):1043-1055.
Kim, Hoyshin, 1989. Microcomputer-based laboratories and learning. PhD dissertation. Harvard University.
Linn, Marcia C, et al., in press. Using technology to teach thermodynamics: achieving integrated understanding. In Furguson, D. L. (editor) Advanced technologies in the teaching of mathematics and science. Berlin:Springer-Verlag.
Linn, Marcia C. & N. B. Songer, in press. Teaching thermodynamics to middle school students: what are appropriate cognitive demands? J of Research in Science Teaching. Thornton, Ronald K., & D. R. Sokoloff, 1990. Learning motion concepts using real-time microcomputer-based laboratory tools. American Journal of Physics, 58(9):858-867.
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