Doing Research and Teaching
Jan Tobochnik
How can we best integrate our
teaching and research? Does the pursuit of one necessarily detract
from the other? Can a physicist be good in one area and not the other?
How can we use knowledge from one area to enrich our work in the
other? The answers to these questions are becoming increasingly important
to physics faculty at all institutions of higher learning.
The current separation between
teaching and research is manifested in the existence of two organizations
of physicists, APS for research and AAPT for teaching. This separation
is not good for our profession. All of us who do research in any
setting should be concerned with communicating the knowledge and
skills of physics. And all of us who teach to any students should
be aware of, if not engaged in, research. Thus, there are many reasons
to bring APS and AAPT members closer together, and more physicists
should be members of both organizations.
Members of APS have an important
role in making their research accessible to students and their instructors.
The American Journal of Physics provides one outlet for you to do
that. As the new editors of AJP, Harvey Gould and I are hoping to
recruit active researchers to write articles that will help bring
contemporary research into the curriculum. Most college physics courses
still primarily discuss topics that are between one and three hundred
years old. When more contemporary material is included, it is usually
very descriptive. We need to make physics research come alive in
the classroom so that students can be engaged in a meaningful way
beyond the level of Scientific American. Some students participate
in on-campus research with their professors, off-campus research
in government and industrial labs, or participate in NSF sponsored
REU programs. However, this student research usually comes late in
an undergraduate's college experience, and is frequently disconnected
from the rest of the physics curriculum.
The computer may help to bring
research activities to students earlier. Undergraduates can learn
enough programming to write meaningful research-type simulations
or perform numerical analysis. They can use the computer to analyze
data from experiments even if they have not done the experiments
themselves. As visualization becomes a more prominent feature in
contemporary research, it should make more research accessible to
students and hopefully motivate students to study physics. Students
can already visit the Web sites of numerous research groups to learn
more about what is going on in physics. Some of these sites have
very good visual aids for explaining research projects. More of this
material should be integrated into the curriculum. However, relying
only on computer technology to make the physics curriculum more interesting
would be a mistake. I also believe that we need to incorporate more
experiments and empirical observations into the curriculum. The physics
curriculum has become too theoretical. That needs to change.
Many of us are looking for specific
help in teaching. From research on physics education, we now know
that students encounter many conceptual difficulties in their physics
courses, and there are new materials that have improved student understanding.
Most of this work is at the introductory level, but there is a growing
interest in student learning beyond introductory physics. In my own
experience I find that many student difficulties carry over to higher
level physics courses.
In addition to the conceptual
difficulties that students face, there are at least two other barriers
to learning physics. First, many students are not very proficient
mathematically. Even though they can do algebra, few can do it quickly
with a low error rate. Perhaps algebra prowess is not as important
as it once was, and we should reduce the number of problems that
require significant algebraic manipulation. Problems that primarily
require students to fill in numbers to evaluate formulas are a waste
of time. They might have been somewhat useful when students had to
use slide rules that required an independent determination of the
location of the decimal point in the answer and limited the precision
of the answer to only a few significant figures. In this way students
gained a sense of the order of magnitude and the precision of physical
quantities. Today it's just an exercise in pressing buttons on a
calculator. I can imagine a similar situation for algebra. Already
many calculators can do graphing, simple symbolic manipulation, and
even some calculus. Why ask students to press buttons to do these
operations? Those who are actively involved in research need to help
answer the question, "What skills are really necessary for understanding
physics and doing scientific research?"
A second barrier is lack of
motivation. Fewer undergraduates major in physics, and many of these
students are more interested in engineering and other fields. Most
of us believe that physics is an excellent major for many career
paths, and it doesn't bother me that many of our students are using
physics for purposes other than becoming research scientists. However,
our teaching becomes less effective if the material is not of interest
to students. We are in the midst of many exciting fundamental and
practical developments in physics, such as quantum computing, the
cosmic microwave background, atomic trapping, and nanotechnology
to name a few. In addition, condensed matter physics, biological
physics, and physics subfields that border other disciplines are
providing a better understanding of complex phenomena. Physicists
as always are at the forefront in developing new ways of attacking
problems in many fields. Thus, there should be much more interest
in studying physics even if students do not major in it. Why isn't
there more interest? I believe that part of the problem is that students
spend too much time in our courses doing work (such as routine problem
solving and cookbook experiments) that is not relevant to anything
else that they are doing, and is not especially useful in any conceivable
future employment including research in physics.
It is essential that those in
research-oriented institutions and those in teaching-oriented institutions
talk more to one another. Researchers need to communicate better
about contemporary research and the skills students need to develop.
Teachers and researchers in physics education need to communicate
better what skills and beliefs students bring into the classroom,
and how we all can effectively educate our students.
If there is an AAPT meeting
near where you live, I urge you to go to it, at least for a day or
two. Volunteer to give a talk about your work. Think about how you
can convey your research to a general audience of physicists in such
a way that those in the audience can take something of value home
to their students. There are many active AAPT members who want to
learn about contemporary physics research. I am confident that we
can arrange more sessions that focus on contemporary research. Although
you may not find many talks in the existing sessions that appear
relevant to your teaching needs, you will find some. Your presence
in the audience asking probing questions can help provide a different
viewpoint than what is usually seen at many AAPT meetings.
More importantly, we need to
schedule more joint APS/AAPT meetings. A number of regional chapters
already do so. Joint national meetings seem to be dead at the moment.
However, it might be possible to organize specialized APS meetings
in conjunction with the AAPT national meeting. For example, the winter
2001 AAPT meeting was held jointly with the American Astronomical
Society, and I understand that it was a very successful meeting for
both associations.
You can also become more involved
with AAPT and AJP. AJP publishes articles about contemporary research
as well as articles specifically designed to improve teaching. However,
it is not an archival journal of physics research nor are most of
its articles directly focused on the classroom. As I stated, I would
like to see more articles that discuss contemporary research and
present something that could be used directly with students such
as homework problems, mini-research projects, or access to experimental
data to evaluate. In this way you could communicate your research
to a much broader audience than you'll reach by publishing only in
archival research journals. Also, read AJP regularly by subscribing
to AJP through a membership in AAPT. Currently, there is a half price
first year membership for APS members. Also, let me know what your
needs and interests are. What kinds of articles would be helpful
to you? I also encourage you to review manuscripts for AJP. If you
are willing to do so, please complete the reviewer questionnaire
at http://www.kzoo.edu/ajp/referees.html.
Another avenue for building
bridges between research and teaching is the new Gordon Conference
series on Physics Research and Education that was started in June
2000 and meets biannually. The focus topic of the first conference
was statistical and thermal physics, and the focus of the next conference
at Mount Holyoke College, June 9-14, 2002, is quantum mechanics.
The goal of the conference is to bring together physicists doing
research related to the topic, researchers in physics education,
and faculty who are teaching courses in the topic. For more information
on the next conference visit http://www.grc.uri.edu/02sched.html.
The conference focuses on a different topic each time and your suggestions
for the focus in 2004 would be welcome.
I began this article with a
few questions. Now let me summarize my answers. Research and teaching
should be integrated as much as possible. Every time we write an
article for PRL or AJP, we should keep in mind how that article can
contribute not just to the knowledge base of physics, but also to
the enlightenment of our students. In the classroom we should be
constantly searching for ways of introducing research methods and
ideas, and communicating these ways to a broader audience through
talks and articles in AJP and other publications. In our research
we need to involve students at all levels.
Physics is a dynamic field,
constantly changing as new ideas and tools are developed. These changes
must be present in the classroom, and thus the best teachers will
generally have some involvement in research. Many of us find that
our teaching enhances our understanding of physics which in turn
is useful in our research, and that our research provides excellent
applications of the physics we are teaching. Separation of teaching
and research is artificial and damaging. Let us all look for ways
of reducing that separation.
Jan Tobochnik is the Editor
of the American Journal of Physics and a Divisional Associate Editor
for Physical Review Letters. His current research includes studies
of the glass transition and granular material. In collaboration
with Harvey Gould, he has written textbooks, edited a column, and
developed software for the educational and research use of computer
simulations in physics.
Jan Tobochnik, Physics Chair
Departments of Physics and Computer Science Editor, American Journal
of Physics Kalamazoo College 1200 Academy Street Kalamazoo, MI 49006
(616) 337-7098 JANT@kzoo.edu AJP related messages should be sent
to ajp@kzoo.edu
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