Review
by Barry Feierman and the reviewers of the Second Report.

Active Physics by Eisenkraft and published by It’s About Time.

Active Physics came about as a result of a perceived gap in Physics education in American high schools. Why were so few students studying Physics in high school and what could be done to change this? Whereas most Physics textbooks are oriented toward a series of chapters one would likely study in a specific order (kinematics to dynamics to energy) and develop problem solving skills along the way, Active Physics breaks the traditional mold. Active Physics was supported by NSF and by AAPT as a textbook that would have a wider appeal to students in junior high school or high school and might be useful for students who otherwise might not elect to take more traditional Physics courses for a number of reasons.

If one were to design a Physics textbook for “ALL” high-school students (8th – 12th grades) what might it stress that would be different from the more traditional textbooks? First, the textbook might want to appeal to teenagers with topics that they are already interested in (Sports, Transportation, Communications, Medicine, Predictions, and Home). The text would also set out to challenge a student’s preconceptions about the way the world works, and ask them to make predictions, and then test their predictions in a lab setting by designing experiments. This is exactly the paradigm of Active Physics. This text would likely be a guide to a student’s exploration of the world in a laboratory setting, explore the basic concepts, and keep the mathematics and reading level to a minimum.

Active Physics is a new paradigm for teaching Physics, and hence it is difficult to evaluate using the same criteria established for more traditional textbooks emphasizing problem solving. What do students experience in an Active Physics classroom? Do they understand the design of experiments, do they see how science is part of their daily lives, and do they have a deeper appreciation of how science evolves from one model to another? Just as we teach history in high schools for ALL students, not just to history majors, so we need an approach for teaching Physics in high school so that ALL students can be exposed to the beauty of science.

The original Active Physics text was a series of six booklets. One could use these in any order and probably most schools picked which topics most clearly fit their student population. With all six booklets, there was much more material than one could ever hope to cover in a single year. The course was designed around using the Challenges as a key to “authentic” assessment, but we hear that many teachers used a variety of methods of assessment, from group work, lab reports, and sometimes more traditional quizzes and tests.

The text has many different partitions, beginning with a Scenario which students might have experienced. It then features a Challenge, presenting a problem which the student is expected to solve. The Criteria explains to each student how they will be graded, often working collaboratively with other students in a team approach to learning. Students are then asked What Do You Think trying to elicit what students think that they already know before beginning to study it in class. The For You To Do section encourages students to work through problems alone or in small groups or with the whole class. Physics Talk explains new vocabulary or equations and For You To Read includes additional insight or new perspectives. Reflecting on the Activity and the Challenge relate the specific activity to the larger picture. Physics To Go includes exercises, problems, and questions to further develop student’s understanding and relate it back to the overall Challenge. Stretching Exercises include more difficult in-depth problems and questions, and Physics At Work shows how the scientific principles apply in everyday life. Chapter Assessments offer an opportunity to share what you have learned and allow completion of the original Challenge that comprises the overall theme.

Core Select - how it works

A newer edition of Active Physics was first released in 2005 called Active Physics: Core Select and this is the edition which we asked reviewers to comment on. This text is a result of a wide contribution of many leading physicists, university professors and high school teachers with support from the National Science Foundation.

Core Select is a hardback text of almost 800 pages with 12 chapters: Physics in Action, Safety, The Track and Field Championship, Thrills and Chills, Let Us Entertain You, Designing the Universal Dwelling, Electricity For Everyone, Toys For Understanding, Atoms On Display, Patterns and Predictions, Sports On The Moon, and Is Anyone Out There? This is certainly more material than one is likely going to use in a one year course with 9th graders. Unlike most Physics textbooks where one explores acceleration before force, and force before impulse, and impulse before work and energy, Active Physics take a different approach. Topics are introduced on a need-to-know basis and many concepts are reinforced in quite a few chapters. Again, this could be considered a strength or a weakness, depending on one’s point of view of pedagogy.

The style of the book is similar to the first edition, with just enough content on each page so as to now overwhelm the typical 9th grade reader. The book would not likely be read for content, say to brush up on the Law of Conservation of Energy, but rather for suggestions for experiments to be conducted by the students.

For example, Activity 1 of the opening chapter asks about horizontal distances a basketball player travels while “hanging” to do a “slam dunk” during a fast break. Assuming teenagers understand the words (which they probably do) the rest of the Activity suggests ways to measure these quantities. So the strength of the book is the paradigm that students learn best by DOING, not by reading, not by listening to a lecture, not by watching a video. However, a weakness of this approach is the lack on continuity from one topic to the next. In the first 14 pages, the following concepts are introduced: distance, velocity, hang time, relative velocity, acceleration, Galileo, Newton, inertia, unbalanced forces, the kilogram, Newton’s First Law, frames of reference. That is a lot of physics condensed into 14 pages.

Activity 2 begins on page 86 with a question “What is the safe distance between your car and the car in front of you?” Clearly this is a question that all teenagers (and all drivers) need to consider. If by the end of such a unit, a student can state that there is a reaction time between wanting to stop and actually applying the brakes, and that the car travels at a constant speed during this time, and then, once the brakes are applied, the stopping distance is directly proportional to the square of the car’s speed, then that student has mastered quite a few basic physics concepts.

Activity 3 asks another fundamental question: “How can you protect yourself from serious injury, or even death, should an accident occur?” Again, what could be better questions for new drivers unaware of the concepts of inertia and Newton’s Laws of Motion? A picture of an actual automobile accident with a car wrapped around a tree (page 101) drives home the point of inertia that no verbal description could come near. All of the seat belts and airbags could not prevent the driver’s death due to a ruptured aorta.

Activity 4 and Activity 5 have to do with seat belts and introduce the concept of pressure using seat belts and snow shoes as examples. Activity 6 introduces Air Bags and the concept of impulse using simple mathematics and constant forces. Activity 7 introduces the idea of “automatic triggering devices” and asks the question “How does the airbag know whether to inflate or not?” Students can and often do share experiences being in automobiles where an air bag did deploy. Here Newton’s Second Law comes into play naturally as the text explores the relationship among force and mass and acceleration. Activity 8 deals with an issue many of us are unfortunately familiar with, whiplash. So what happens in a rear-end collision when your body if pushed forward by your seat, but your seat has no “head-rest”? Activity 9 looks at how to “cushion” collisions and again deals with impulse and stopping time for an automobile. About the most mathematical discussion appear on page 135 with graphs of force vs. time asking the reader to compare the average force with cars which have the same impulse acting on them but over different times. One can clearly see that as the time is drawn out (bigger) the average force is reduced. Of course, the point of this is to show that the force is what is dangerous, not the time and not the impulse.

One strange feature that I felt annoyed with was the repetition of certain pictures throughout the text. A picture of two female news broadcasters (describing a sport) appears 9 times in the first 74 pages of the text. Surely, there could be a bit more variety.
But if a class did all of the activities, the labs, the discussions, and explored these to the depths suggested in the textbook, then one might argue that this physics might save one’s life one day as drivers learn a little more about safety.

Classroom Visits

So how does this all play out in actual 9th grade classes? Are Challenges the way of the future assessment rather than fill-in-the-blank lab reports, spot quizzes and hour-long exams? I had the pleasure of visiting Physics classes during a 2006 spring sabbatical leave from my high school. During that time, I visited about 40 teachers in over 20 schools and had the pleasure of visiting a number of Physics First classes including Arthur Eisenkraft’s Physics classes in Bedford, New York. The day of the visit students were presenting their summaries of sound and light waves and the excitement could be felt everywhere. Watching Eisenkraft orchestrate the class so that students in groups could demonstrate their knowledge of sound and light was a thrill for me. The kids were really excited and knew their stuff, demonstrating various aspects of sound as it relates to music. There was no question of the importance of these topics in their daily lives. Of course, less-experienced teachers might have faltered at some of the discussion that ensued about decibels, diffraction, and dispersion of waves, so I wondered how Active Physics might fare in classrooms with rookie Physics teachers or teachers who were teaching a 9th Grade Physics class, but were trained in Biology or Chemistry or Earth Science.

I also got to visit John Roeder’s Physics First classes at The Calhoun School in NY City and saw the same enthusiasm and excitement with much younger 9th grade students. Clearly John Roeder is an able and experienced teacher and could probably teach an excellent course using any textbook (or no textbook) but John decided on Active Physics because he felt it fit the needs of his students more so than the traditional textbook he had been using with his 9th graders. John admits that Active Physics in 9th grade would not be an adequate preparation for the NY Regents Physics text, but then that is not the objective of his course. Many of John’s 9th graders in Physics go on to take a more analytical advanced course in their 11th or 12th grades.

The reviewers of Active Physics had all taught from the books and represent a good cross-section of the schools in America from East coast to West Coast. All of the teachers enjoyed the variety and open-ended aspect of Active Physics, and the nature of allowing and encouraging student inquiry and student participation. Classes were “active” rather than “passive” i.e. listening or watching a teacher. However, the same strength can be considered a weakness as the teacher now becomes more of a guide to the activities. All of the reviewers felt that weak or inexperienced or out-of-discipline Physics teachers would likely struggle with the paradigm of Active Physics, more so than relying on a traditional text book to fall back on for structure and content.

Active Physics has been adopted by some very large public school districts like San Diego, Boston, Prince George’ County MD as well as many smaller independent schools. As the course evolves and a newer third edition is published, some of the weak links may be treated, including an acknowledgement that users of Active Physics need more support and professional development than traditional textbooks. We have yet to see how this new course has made its impression on the high school Physics arena.