Review
John L. Hubisz, Ph.D., Hubisz@unity.ncsu.edu
and the reviewers of the Second Report.

Prisms Plus (2005) by Roy Unruh et.al. and published by Centre Pointe Learning http://www.cplearning.com/ppevotop.htm. Also see http://www.uni.edu/prisms/PRISMSPLUSfeaturesedited_s02.pdf for a detailed description of the material and the philosophy.

[See also Another View on this book]

The Prisms Plus curriculum consists of four soft cover volumes: Unit 1: Force and Motion; Unit 2: Work and Energy; Unit 3: Waves and Optics; Unit 4: Electricity and Magnetism.

This sequence of topics mirrors the traditional sequence found in most single volume regular or honors physics high school textbooks. The student editions have the look and feel of a lab manual. The approach is very activity-intensive. This would not be a good choice for a more traditional lecture/demo style class, which, of course, it is not intended to be.

Within these four topic areas, the material is divided into 44 “learning cycles”, each of which is designed to last 150-200 minutes. This is obviously more than can be completed by most teachers in a regular school year, but most of the individual learning cycles stand alone well, and do not all need to be used in order for students to develop good conceptual coherence.

Individual learning cycles begin with an Exploration activity, a fairly open-ended hands-on activity that activates and elicits prior knowledge. This is followed by a Concept Development activity, a more structured laboratory activity complete with procedural notes, tables to fill in, graphs to draw, questions to answer, and occasional suggestions for extending the activity. Next is a reading called a Conceptual Enhancer that summarizes the background content that students should have come to an understanding of after doing the first two activities. The teacher notes say that these are one to three pages but a number of them are four to five pages in length. Part four of each learning cycle is called Conceptual Practice and consists of a page or two of questions that would be suitable for a homework assignment. These are primarily conceptual questions but there are some in each set that require simple calculations. The final part is an application activity. This is another laboratory activity that in many cases could be used as a practicum.

Single Reviewer: From the perspective of an experienced Physics First classroom teacher and long time practitioner of Modeling Physics Instruction, I see much to like in this curriculum. It encourages collaborative thinking and learning, and provides much student-generated data that can be used for sense-making in small and whole group discussions. Multiple representations and graphical analysis are employed from the outset, and both spatial and algebraic reasoning are cultivated. The student volumes themselves, however, are enough like a traditional lab manual that unless the teacher is vigilant and pro-active, students might easily spend the bulk of their time paying attention to procedures rather than concepts. If I used this series, I would be tempted to just buy the teacher’s manual and use the laboratory activities and the Conceptual Practice questions. The Concept Enhancer, while accurate, is fairly dense and high level in most cases and initially I can see students getting very little out of it if it is assigned for homework. I think it would provide an excellent “study guide” for a motivated parent who is trying to help their child prepare for a test or complete homework problems.

The Teacher’s Guide lists the NSES Content Standards and Benchmarks for Science Literacy that are addressed in each learning cycle and identifies prerequisite student knowledge. It offers a timing guide, teaching and discussion management strategies and detailed notes on what the lab activity results mean. There is a wealth of information here for the teachers who actually read their teacher’s edition, and good ideas about what the teacher should pay attention to in class discussions, but the focus seems to be on moving through the material expeditiously, and without explicit endorsement of student discourse, I believe it would be easy for students to get left behind in this high energy, high activity course. I would recommend that a teacher who chooses this curriculum budget more time than the books suggest for student discussion of lab results and for making sense of Conceptual Practice questions.

Overall we feel this is an excellent curriculum for the college prep 9th grader who is concurrently enrolled in algebra, but it misses a chance to organize the course around themes (such as energy) that will be of particular interest in chemistry and biology.

Accuracy: Most reviewers found the material to be quite accurate for such an ambitious project. Language was used carefully and the diagrams and figures correlated well with the text. This program is less of a text book than a laboratory manual that presents the material using the current philosophies of the Physics Education Research Group.

The teacher’s edition for each lesson has a little table with entries that provide information about the lesson’s ease of set up, ease of calculations, reliability, interest, required time to complete, required processing skill, and required reasoning level. In general I found these tables to be optimistic. Freshmen especially will require more support and a longer amount of time to complete the activities.

The labs all have an “Extending the Activity” section which can give the student the impression that there is always more that can be done with an experiment.

Readability: Since this is an activity-based course, the bulk of the student editions were lab activity guides. These were clearly written and fairly easy to understand. The Concept Enhancer reading included with each learning cycle, although accurate and not too long, was dense and written at a fairly high level. It assumes certain knowledge (for example, in the first activity of unit 1, it assumes that students know that the slope of a position time graph is velocity, and it mentions vector quantities even though vectors are not the topic of a learning cycle till the fourth activity in this unit). In practice, students do very little reading of their physics textbook, but I would not eliminate this series from consideration on this basis. While many textbooks are “busy” with photos and figures, Prisms Plus is relatively spartan by comparison. There are lots of pages without any figures at all. Most of the figures consist of uncaptioned line drawings, along with a few photos.

There is a different type of readability issue for displayed equations. Some are written in-line instead of using a math editor, which makes some of them hard to read, and possibly incorrectly understood. As an example, the expression for Electric field from Learning Cycle 2 in the Electricity, Magnetism, and Modern Physics text has subscripts that overlap. In addition, it is not obvious whether the denominator contains two terms or only one.

One reviewer felt that Prisms Plus was beyond the reading level of the average ninth grader, but most either did not or made qualifications with regard to some sections.

Age and sex appropriateness: This would be a good sex neutral choice for high school freshmen with lots of accessible fun interesting activities. As with most inquiry-based programs, this one also encourages and requires exploration of familiar objects and events. The mathematics does not get too involved, even in the later electricity and magnetism sections. The sample calculations also include references to different sexes. Cutting out sex references in pictures and diagrams may avoid reinforcing sex stereotypes in science, but it also does little to portray physics in an inviting way to young female students.

Mathematical Requirements: This course is to introduce the concepts of physics. This does not mean there are no calculations, but the calculations fall within the pre-algebra to algebra level of mathematics. There is a little trigonometric calculations with the vector addition section, but that could easily be taken out and the students use rulers and protractors to do the calculations. The later materials are also presented without many calculations. The most difficult calculations fall within the Forces and Motion unit. This is the material that is most often presented in a conceptual physics course for older students, but could easily be altered to meet the mathematics background of any level of student with minor alterations. Additions could easily be made to the problem solving sections to enhance the material for older, more advanced mathematics students as well.
The course utilizes algebraic reasoning and representations and often relies on graphical interpretation. It is well within reach of students who are concurrently enrolled in a regular 9th grade Algebra course if the teacher is willing to help them get up to speed with graphical analysis in the beginning of the course. The bulk of the course could be used with students of lower mathematical ability, but the Concept Enhancer readings would probably be of little value to these students, and only some of the Conceptual Practice questions would be of use.

Some reviewers felt that the labs presume the kind of formal reasoning ability that is beyond ninth graders, who are in general very concrete thinkers. Many of the activities rely on students to design and conduct experiments on concepts which they have not mastered and using equipment that the students have only just been introduced to. These labs tend to be very high up on Bloom’s taxonomy. We want our students to be able to think this way – eventually - but we cannot presume the kind of reasoning ability that we hope to develop.

Some activities - image formation in mirrors, for example - are similar to ones common with freshmen, but even for these activities the directions in the Student Guide are just not friendly to ninth graders. Paragraphs may contain seven or eight separate steps. This prose is very dense. A reader who is used to paying very close attention to every sentence will recognize the value of this density. However, most freshmen have not yet developed this capability, and would benefit from more examples. At least one reviewer thought that it was about time that we got the students to this level of reading.

The Concept Enhancer sections presuppose that students have done all or most of the activities. Previous activities are referred to by name in the reading. Therefore, a teacher who omits an activity due to lack of equipment, time, or just chooses to substitute an activity which is more a developmentally appropriate, will need to modify the readings to alleviate confusion.

The questions in the Conceptual Practice exercises are good thought-provoking questions for higher-level thinkers. However there are not enough low-level questions to provide sufficient scaffolding. For example learning cycle seven question one reads “explain the physics of the neck injury called whiplash and the purpose of the head rest.” Analyzing whiplash is a profitable activity to do, especially if you have access to crash test videos specifically designed to show the neck motion during whiplash. Freshmen can relate to this because some of them have been in accidents themselves and all of them anticipate driving in a couple of years.

One reviewer: Some of the labs involve equipment that I’d be hesitant to let freshmen work with. I could see using these activities as part of a summer program with exceptionally talented students, but not as part of a general first-year curriculum with regular or even honors juniors or seniors, much less with freshmen. I could see using it as part of a physics II course, but not as the main resource. It is worth mentioning that the idea of physics for freshmen is foreign to a lot of people. At our high school we are beginning our seventh year of physics first, and we have to explain the rationale behind the program every year. Parents and students are very concerned that the material is presented at an age-appropriate level. Prisms Plus does not fit the bill. Any school that is converting to physics first ought to look elsewhere for its freshman text.