Associate Dean for Budget and Operations in the College of Arts and Sciences
Reseach interests I have been engaged in research in physics education for approximately fifteen years. My research has focused on the development of intelligent computer tutors for use in introductory physics classes. I have developed a special natural language system that enables my programs to conduct a dialogue with students that achieves a high degree of realism. Research in physics education that documents the difficulties students have in learning introductory physics concepts has been a guide in the design of these programs.
My current work involves on-going investigation of student understanding of physics and how best to use computers to address their difficulties. I am currently working on the development and testing of several programs.
I have taught large lecture classes, small group classes, and special laboratory-based courses for inservice and preservice teachers. I am continuously involved in investigating ways to engage students more actively in their learning through non-traditional approaches to classroom and laboratory instruction.
I also participated in the development of the Physics by Inquiry curriculum, now published in two volumes by Wiley. I have worked closely with many of the inservice teachers, sometimes in their classrooms, helping them to adapt our materials for their various grade levels. I have supervised inservice teachers working on masters degree projects involving the development and testing of non-traditional physics curriculum.
ALBERT allows a student to specify the problem as long as it is within the domain of one-dimensional kinematics. The student does this by typing in a problem just as it appears in the textbook. If desired, the student can make up his/her own problem. A typical problem could contain as much as four or five lines of text and might be as long as fifty words or more.
Although ALBERT has not seen the problem before, ALBERT can understand it, knows how to solve it in two different ways and can teach the student how to solve it. ALBERT does this by engaging the student in a dialogue about the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the problem. When the student has solved the problem completely, ALBERT's solutions are displayed for comparison with the student's own solution.
ALBERT records the entire dialogue with the students for later review by the instructor. This output reads like an interview transcript and is useful for tracking student progress in a class and for research in problem-solving.
ALBERT is most useful for students at high school and introductory college level.
ALBERT runs equivalently on Macintosh and PC computers. Please contact me for more information about program.
FREEBODY uses the natural language system that was developed for ALBERT. It discusses the forces with the student in a plain English dialogue and teaches the student how to draw and describe them correctly.
FREEBODY identifies and addresses many of the common difficulties that students have with drawing free-body diagrams and identifying forces. The program can recognize many of the commom misconceptions about forces and corrects them through an appropriate dialogue with the student.
FREEBODY can record the complete student-computer dialogues. These data can be used to monitor student progress and to investigate student understanding.
FREEBODY contains ten exercises. The instructor can determine which of the exercises to present to students for a given assignment and in what order they will appear.
FREEBODY is suitable for use at the high school and introductory college level.
FREEBODY was a winner in the fifth annual Computers in Physics National Software Competition in 1994.
FREEBODY is available from Physics Academic Software..
PHOTOELECTRIC does not use the natural language system that was developed for ALBERT. However it uses a similar dialogue system to discuss the photoelectric concepts with a student in plain English.
PHOTOELECTRIC is available from Physics Academic Software..
I conducted a two-year evaluation of the PLATO system and in the process, established the Computer-based Education (CBE) Unit to provide instructional computing facilities for the university. I provided training and support for faculty in many different departments of the university, and managed a team of programmers developing educational software for a wide range of subjects.
Part of the CBE Unit was an outreach program in which educational computing services were provided to the wider off-campus community. I implemented a wide-area network for this to connected schools, universities and industrial training units in a 600 mile radius. I worked closely with pre- college teachers and their counterparts in industry to ensure the successful application of computer technology in their classrooms.
I later designed, developed and implemented a microcomputer-based LAN for computer-based instruction. This system known as CALNet later replaced PLATO at Rhodes University and was used by various other universities.
This project is described in detail in:
Computer-based Education and Training in South Africa: A Collection of Case
Studies, Ed. R. Lippert, JL van Schaik Publishers, Pretoria (1993) "A decade
of computer assisted learning at Rhodes University" pp. 29-50
I currently run and maintain the physics web server at CSUSM.
Radio and electronics - KF6LWU