Maria Teresa Caccamo - Physics Education for Students: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Expansive framing, which positions students as participants in larger conversations that span time, place, people and disciplines, can be a valuable approach for designing curricula and learning experiences, to help students learn physics through an interdisciplinary approach. This chapter reports on the efforts to use expansive framing as a guiding principle while transforming and revitalizing an introductory physics laboratory class. This chapter, describes student experiences with two central elements of the lab course that are strongly influenced by the concept of expansive framing and related to interdisciplinary learning. First, we sought to incorporate and emphasize experiences related to the students real-world and professional experiences, such as connections between biology and physics, that will be interesting for the health-science majors who take the lab. Second, we sought to promote discussions between students and their graduate student instructors about the epistemology of experimental physics, which we refer to as the nature of science, which is an important interdisciplinary goal for the lab class. We explore the need, design, and implementation of these two elements of the lab course by analyzing student interviews and coursework. Consequently, we propose that using expansive framing for the design of student learning should be considered a best practice for implementing introductory college physics laboratory courses when seeking to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to student learning.

What does it mean to learn something? One answer involves the concept of transfer, or the ability to take the knowledge learned in one context and applying it in a different context [].

To understand expansive framing, it may be useful to start off with its antithesis, bounded framing. Learning activities that employ bounded framing presume that the concepts students learn are relevant only for limited contexts. These limited contexts might include specific places, times, and participants. For example, physics learners might perceive that Newtons laws of motion apply to physics problems, but are not relevant in the physical world, in their other classes, or in their future studies or career. Such a perception might develop if student learning concentrates on solving problems set in artificial contexts, regardless of the instructors intentions or their own perspective that the laws of physics are general and broadly applicable. Bounded framing may also limit the intellectual role played by students, situating them at the periphery of the learning process [].

By contrast, expansive framing promotes students understanding of concepts by connecting different contexts, developing links between settings and roles to create intercontextuality [].

In an experiment with high school biology students, Engle, Nguyen, and Mendelson found that students who were tutored with an expansive framing demonstrated substantially better transfer of their learning to a new context []. In this case, the two important aspects of expansive framing were temporal connections with other contexts and the roles of the learners as members of a larger community of people interested in the topic.

Related studies in physics education have analyzed the roles of framing and scaffolding [].

Expansive framing can be a useful approach to interdisciplinary education. By bringing a focus to transfer and intercontextuality, expansive approaches to lesson and curriculum design encourage educators to think about how learners can make meaningful connections between the physics they learn in their classes and their personal interests and career goals []. Likewise, the nature of intercontextuality calls educators to ask increasingly fundamental questions about the learning goals of their courses, which may result in questions and issues that are broader than the scope of any one course, or even any one discipline.

In this chapter, we will outline how expansive framing was used in the design of student learning activities in an introductory physics lab course. First, we will consider how expansive framing was used to guide the development of lab-work. By seeking to make learning meaningful for students, many on health-science career tracks, we created opportunities for students to demonstrate transfer. This included both bringing ideas and skills from their other studies and interests into the physics lab, as well as applying physics concepts in the context of their other studies and interests. Second, we will examine how we used expansive framing to improve student learning about the nature of science during the lab course. As a fundamentally interdisciplinary topic, the nature of science is a good example of intercontextuality. This allowed for ample opportunity for students to reflect on elements of the nature of science in the context of the physics lab as well as in other contexts.