Content Information

Energy and Equity Portal Content Information:
Help for Finding What You Need

Contributors to the Energy and Equity Portal include information about their materials that define the general format and usage. This information is designed to help teachers find and use content on the Portal. The Portal Editors review the information supplied by contributors for materials submitted to the Vetted Library to help ensure its accuracy and usefulness. 
Some of the terms used in these resource descriptions may be unfamiliar to users of the Portal. The listing below provides definitions of the materials and, in some cases, links to more information.

The information categories listed here are: 

Resource Types: Resource Types describe the nature of content or activities, usually related to how they are used as part of a course or learning module. Examples of Resource Types are lecture materials, homework, and labs.

Teacher Resource Types: Teachers Resource Types describe the nature of materials for teachers and what teachers can use these materials for. Examples of Teacher Resource Types are scientific explanations, pedagogical essays, reading/resource lists, and journal articles.

Pedagogical Approaches: Pedagogical Approaches give more detail about how and why the contributed learning activities are used in classes. Most of these approaches are based on research into how students learn physics and how to improve the learning process. Understanding the important aspects of these pedagogies will help teachers use content from the Portal more effectively. Examples of Pedagogical Approaches are Peer Instruction, Modeling, Tutorials, and Just-in-Time Teaching.

Resource Types:

In-class activity:

These resources provide or support extended-time activity/ies for students to work on during a synchronous class or recitation session. These activities take all or a significant portion of a class meeting, or perhaps more than a single class. Although questions or tasks for individual students may be included, in most cases In-class activities take advantage of the real-time nature of the class with small or large group interactions. Examples include tutorials and group problem-solving tasks.

Clicker question:

These are questions presented during a class using some form of student response system. They are used to help students and teachers gauge understanding of the material being presented. In many cases, these questions are designed to stimulate student-to-student or whole-class discussions. Finding Clicker Questions

Lecture materials:

These resources are sets of slides or notes that a teacher uses to present content and/or guide discussion during a class session. They provide examples of how a teacher organizes and runs presentations in his or her class.

Lab:

Lab activities involve students in the measurement and/or processing of data related to physical systems. Labs often have students performing physical experiments but also may involve working with existing data or generating data from numerical simulations. Labs develop quantitative skills used to explore real physical phenomena.

Demonstration:

Demonstration resources are used by teachers to present physical phenomena to students during class. Demonstrations are most effective when integrated with interactive student predictions and discussions. 

Video:

Video resources are used to present content to students asynchronously, generally through internet-delivered videos and audio. 

Pre-class assignment:

Pre-class assignments, meant for students to complete before a particular class meeting, are used to prepare students for the material to be discussed. These assignments can improve student learning in class and help teachers prepare class activities to better address student questions. (Example: Just-in-Time-Teaching)

Homework:

Homework problems or activities are meant for student work outside of class. Homework problems provide students with practice, reinforces learning, and extends content covered in class.

Exam problem:

Exam problems are designed to be given on an exam or quiz, usually during a fixed time-limit summative assessment of student learning.

Student reading:

Student reading materials are assigned to students to help them understand the course content. The materials may also be used to explain for students the course pedagogy, structure, or grading.

Project:

Project resources provide student activities that take an extended period of time, often one or more  weeks. Projects often involve work outside of class and reports and/or presentations upon completion.

Teacher supplement:

These are materials intended for teachers and not usually given to students. Examples include lesson plans, instructions for implementation of specific activities, overviews of the philosophy behind curricular materials, and solutions or rubrics for grading.

Restricted access:

Restricted access files can only be viewed by verified educators logged into the Portal. For example, this might be an answer key for a set of exam questions.

Teacher Resource Types:

Scientific explanation:

Scientific explanations are explanations of science and/or equity topics for teachers, or other discussion of scientific or equity content relevant for teachers.

Pedagogical essay:

Pedagogical essays are discussions of teaching approaches, strategies, or philosophy.

Commentary:

Commentaries are opinion pieces offering a perspective or viewpoint relevant for integrating science and equity.

Reading/resource list:

Reading/resource lists are general bibliographies of readings and/or resources for teachers.

Report:

Reports are formal documents or white papers summarizing a body of work.

Journal article:

Journal articles are papers published in a journal or conference proceedings that you have permission to share.

Presentation:

Presentations are slides, videos, or posters from a presentation at a conference or elsewhere.

Restricted access:

Restricted access files can only be viewed by verified educators logged into the Portal. For example, this might contain ideas you want to share with other teachers but not the whole world.

Pedagogical Approaches:

Peer Instruction / Think-Pair-Share:

These are collaborative, active learning strategies that engage students in small group discussions to help each other learn. Classes are structured as short lectures interspersed with conceptual questions for students that increase engagement and provide formative feedback on student thinking. Research-based best practice has students first think individually about a question, commit to an answer usually using a student response system, share their solution and analysis with one other or a small group of students, and then provide a final answer. The class responses can be used to guide subsequent activity in the class. Peer Instruction, Teaching with Clickers

Collaborative problem-solving:

These are student activities where interactive student groups or teams solve challenging problems or exercises. Questions and problems are designed to be sufficiently sophisticated, complicated, and/or open-ended to challenge a group and be beyond the capabilities of most individual students. Groups may be informal but research has shown the benefits of formally organized groups with assigned members, roles, and tasks. Groups are usually small with 2 to 5 members. Larger groups are sometimes used for case studies or simulated work environments. Facilitating Groups, Small Group Problems

Conceptually-oriented activities:

These are student activities to help develop and/or assess student understanding of basic physics concepts or principles and how they apply to biological systems. These activities generally make use of non-numerical questions, order-magnitude estimates, drawings, diagrams, or written responses.

Context-rich problems:

Context-rich problems typically involve open-ended and somewhat ambiguous physical situations requiring students to use real-world experiences to define and solve a problem. Problems may have incomplete information that require students to make estimates and decide on the concepts and physical models to be used. These problems may be designed for small groups or for individual students. Context-Rich Problems

Ranking tasks:

In ranking tasks, students are asked to order different systems based on the variation of one or more physical properties of the systems. Ranking tasks exercises stress conceptual understanding of physics and discourage a “plug-and-chug” approach. An example question might involve ranking the accelerations of systems consisting of different masses and forces. Ranking Tasks

Project-based learning:

Project-based learning engages students in longer-term activities. Students gain knowledge and skills by working on authentic, complex, real-world questions, problems, or challenges. Projects usually allow students to design the questions and approaches for answering them. These activities work best for projects that students find personally meaningful.

Guided inquiry:

Guided inquiry describes a range of activities in which students take partial responsibility to define the question, develop and modify an inquiry, analyze results, and generate new questions. Instructions for the activity allow interpretation and exploration by students rather than being prescriptive. Teachers act as facilitators in this process, Guided inquiry can be used in labs, classroom settings, or as group study. Guided inquiry activities are typically based on the idea of learning cycles and active learning.

SCALE-UP / studio / workshop physics:

Studio physics, and similar instructional approaches, place a strong emphasis on active learning through laboratory-based activities, peer learning, group work, and guided-inquiry. Lectures during class-time are either eliminated or greatly reduced and integrated with lab activities and small group discussions. In most cases, a specially designed learning space that facilitates student interactions is used. SCALE-UP Classrooms

Modeling Instruction:

A curriculum and pedagogy that integrates lab and lecture into a learning environment where students build, test, deploy, and revise physics models. The modeling curriculum focuses on a few basic models, organized to help students see physics as a coherent whole rather than a disconnected set of facts and equations. This is a particular example of guided inquiry incorporating a learning cycle pedagogy, small group discussions, and the deliberate use of modeling terminology to facilitate concept building. Modeling Instruction

Mathematically-focused activities:

Mathematically-focused activities engage students in mathematical processes, such as algebraic manipulations, derivatives, or integration. Mathematical skill building and/or connecting mathematics to physical meaning are integral and necessary parts of these activities.

Computationally-focused activities:

Computationally-focused activities have students employ computers and/or numerical computation learning physics concepts and solving problems. These activities include programming, interacting with simulations, or performing data analysis.  PICUP

Experimentally-focused activities:

Experimentally-focused activities have students interact with and perform measurements on real physical systems. These activities can be used both to build students’ conceptual understanding and to develop skills in experimental design, problem-solving, and the understanding of data.

Tutorials:

Tutorials are guided-inquiry activities, usually worksheets, used for student exploration of a topic using chains of carefully vetted questions. These activities are generally used in recitation sections by small groups of students collaborating to answer the questions. Teachers facilitate group discussions but do not provide direct answers. The questions and question sequence in tutorials should be developed through careful research on student responses and understanding of the topics covered. Tutorial Resources, UW Tutorials, Open Source Tutorials

Just-in-time Teaching:

Just-in-time teaching (JiTT) is an active learning strategy where students answer questions related to an upcoming class such that the teacher can review the answers before class. The teacher uses the students’ responses to customize the class lesson plan and address concepts and skills on which students need help. JiTT is also designed to promote student preparation for class and encourage students to come to class with well-defined questions. JiTT Book, JiTT Questions