David Brookes
Eugenia Etkina
Rutgers University 

Developing and Assessing Scientific Abilities with Video Problems 

One of the important goals of a physics course is to help students acquire 
abilities used in the practice of science and engineering. We want our 
students to learn how to design and conduct experiments to investigate a 
phenomenon or test a hypothesis; how to collect, represent and analyze 
relevant data; how to cope with anomalous data; how to evaluate somebody 
else's reasoning, etc. The Rutgers PAER gruop is working on devising and 
implementing tasks that help students develop these abilities. We are also 
creating scoring rubrics that help students self-assess their achievements 
and help instructors provide feedback to the students. This talk will 
provide the overview of this NSF funded project, then I will focus on my 
role in the project discussing using video-problems as an alternative to 
back of chapter problems. I will also cover how we use the scoring rubrics 
and how we encourage students to use them for self-assessment.

*The work is supported by NSF grant DUE-0241078.