The National Institute of Health awarded two professors from Texas Tech’s Department of Physics an $809,700 two-year grant as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to do an assessment of how effective the laboratory method is at teaching physics and how well students understand the material.
Professor Kelvin Cheng and associate professor Beth Thacker already were developing a way to improve teaching at Tech when the grant was announced.
“It was a good fit with what we were doing and what the National Institutes of Health wants to do,” Cheng said. “We proposed four existing interventions and several assessment tools to gauge the learning outcome of the students.”
The grant is part of the NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research program and is geared towards challenge areas that will have a high impact in biomedical or behavioral science or public health. The Tech professors received one of 19 grants given from the program.
“The NIH received 20,000 plus applications in a number of areas,” said Shiva Singh, chief of the Special Initiatives Branch in the Division of Minority Opportunities in Research at the NIH. “Their application was reviewed by the center, then the NIH selected those that received high priority scores. It’s a rigorous review process.”
The research will include giving students standardized tests before and after instruction to be a common gauge of how well they have retained information from the lab and how Tech scores compare to other schools. Students will not receive a grade for the tests.
“We have tried to move more towards an integrative lab approach and combine the lecture and the lab and see whether or not the students learn better,” Thacker said.
Thacker and Cheng said they agree some of the existing teaching methods used in physics were “old fashioned” and needed to be updated.
“The laboratory component of physics in general has been very passive,” Cheng said. “Students read the manual, follow procedures, and get their report. We are trying to have more student engagement and have a more interactive approach.”
There are two types of physics offered at Tech: One is more algebra based and is geared toward students going into a health-related career while the other is calculus based and is designed for science, technology, engineering and mathematics students.
Cheng said he believes Tech needed different strategies of teaching for students with different aptitudes. The NIH is trying to benefit both kinds of physics teaching methods.
“I hope that this sill benefit mankind in general,” Singh said. “In this case, the research is applicable to everyone with the potential to benefit from higher education.”
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