Conclusions
When students entered PAT, they held a range of expectations
regarding both the pedagogy they would experience
and the role of the course in their education. As a whole,
students expected both lecture and hands-on activities in a
fairly standard lab-lecture design, even though many of the
students had friends who had previously taken PAT.
Students generally did not have a developed sense of the
purpose of the course, assuming both that it was an item to
check off their list and that it would somehow prepare them
to teach science. Students valued somewhat different outcomes
than did instructors, indicating a disconnect that
likely led to misaligned expectations regarding the role
of the course.
Some of students’ initial expectations about the course,
such as the frequency with which they would interact with
each other and the instructors and the fact that the course
would contain much hands-on investigation, were similar
to their actual experiences. In those instances where
expectancy violation did not occur, students were generally
very positive. However, students also expected far
more frequent lecture, whole-class discussions, and
opportunities to present and practice teaching than they
received, indicating an expectancy violation that seemingly
led to confusion and frustration within the course.
Orientation to the course, which consisted mostly of the
instructor reviewing the syllabus and process of the
course, did not shift those expectations or alleviate those
areas of negative affect. Some frustration was alleviated
for students who acclimated to the course, a process that
was immediate for some and quite slow for others. A
suggestion for improving student affect in courses like
PAT would be to dedicate class time and instructor effort
to more thoroughly orienting students to the course by
providing explicit instruction on epistemology, reinforcing
the purpose of the course, and explaining the reasons
behind pedagogical choices, both at the beginning of the
course and throughout the term.
A major effort of STEM reform is to improve the
preparation of middle and elementary school teachers, so
that they will teach more high quality science. Teachers
who are intimidated or frustrated by physics are likely to
avoid physical science topics in their classrooms. As such,
physics content courses must not only improve content
knowledge, but they must avoid generating negative affect
with respect to physics. This study suggests that such
negative affect arises within the classroom when students
are unsure of the role of the course within their professional
development (for example, treating it as an education
course rather than a science course) and when their expectations
about how they will learn are violated (for example,
when there are fewer lectures or opportunities to present
their work to the class than they expect). When instructors
are cognizant of such violations, they can produce more
effective orientations to reduce that negative affect and thus be more successful in motivating future teachers to
teach science.