College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Large-class success

By using breakout sessions and group projects, Craig Ogilvie's physics 222 clicks with students.
Seat a couple hundred students in a large lecture hall, and Craig Ogilvie knows what they dread most.

"Everybody's worst fears are these large classes with the professor up front talking, talking and talking," he said.

The associate professor of physics and astronomy has worked to alleviate those fears in physics 222, which enrolls an average of 400 students a semester in up to three sections.

Ogilvie uses several innovative methods to engage students in the lecture hall and small-group recitation sections. For his efforts he was named a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Master Teacher earlier this academic year.

Physics 222 is primarily engineering students. Ogilvie uses automated personal response units (aka the clickers) and brief group discussions in the lecture hall to personalize the large classes. In the recitation sessions students engage in midsemester group projects and two group exams.

Ogilvie believes he was the first ISU faculty member to use clickers in a large class. With a grant he purchased a class set a few years ago. Each student grabbed one of the devices from a box upon entering the class and returned it on the way out.

Now ISU students purchase their own devices, which are a large-class staple. Ogilvie uses them in the large lecture class as part of an effort to encourage small-group discussions. He will ask a "conceptual-type" question every 10 minutes or so. Students answer with their clickers then Ogilvie asks them to discuss the question among themselves in brief breakout sessions.
Each group provides its own answer via the clicker.

"Typically what I see is that the percentage of correct answers from the breakout sessions go right up," said Ogilvie, who walks about the room during the breakouts allowing students to ask him questions

Ogilvie's group projects in the recitation sessions challenge the students to choose an item they regularly use and apply physics principles to improve its performance. "It could be a George Foreman grill and the time it takes to cook a steak," Ogilvie explained. "Or it could be to increase the insulative properties of different blanket designs."

With teaching assistants as group mentors, the projects teach students how physics works in a complex system, and then the students use that understanding to build a mathematical model.

The twice-a-semester group exams follow a similar idea. Ogilvie said, "I'm interested in developing the students' skills of how to attack complex problems."

The students are challenged because he purposely gives them little data to use. For example, the assignment could be to calculate the amount of ice needed in an ice chest to keep drinks cold for a certain length of time. He might not indicate, for example, the thickness of the ice chest's walls.

"It assesses how students can attack complex problems, how they can work in a group in a finite time." Ogilvie explained. "The whole theme is to encourage students how to attack ill-structured, less-well-defined problems because that is what they will be doing when they graduate."

Ogilvie is dedicated to his teaching, and he also is an active researcher in ISU's experimental nuclear physics group. The research often pulls him away from campus to places such as the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y.

Ogilvie is one of many physicists worldwide who use Brookhaven's RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) to study collisions of subatomic particles that might shed light on what the universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its creation.

But his travels curtail in the spring. That's when he teaches the scores of students in physics 222.