Watching a video of fidgeting second-graders explain how they think a light bulb works can turn the light bulb on in the minds of education majors across the nation learning to teach using a new curriculum designed by a TTU professor and his colleagues.

Physics Professor Steve Robinson and collaborators at San Diego State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder have spent the past four years building a curriculum that began by observing how college students studying to be teachers often have the same misunderstandings about physics as elementary students do. By asking education majors to watch videos of elementary students, the curriculum's creators were able to see how college students interpreted what the children said.

"The key to teaching both groups is to let them learn physics by doing guided experiments, then leaving it to them to interpret their own results," says Robinson. "We've found typical misunderstandings are hard to change with lecture classes, so we developed a new approach."

The Physics for Elementary Teachers, or PET, curriculum, replaces lectures with activities, text with worksheets, and mathematics equations with illustrations. PET was tested at more than 20 two- and four-year institutions and has been offered as a workshop for practicing elementary teachers. Robinson says future teachers learn and retain more about physics using PET instead of a more traditional curriculum.

PET is an aggressive step toward meeting a challenge presented to universities when the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 passed. It will soon require assessing all elementary school students in science content by the end of the fifth grade.

"But we recognized that few elementary teachers are prepared for this," says Robinson. "Plus, it is quite a challenge to university physics departments to help this audience because they traditionally do not specifically target elementary education majors."

In a PET classroom, students spend most of their time working in small groups, performing experiments, manipulating computer simulations, making sense of their observations and sharing ideas in class discussions.

So where are the mathematical formulas?

"For this audience, math anxiety sometimes gets in the way of understanding the concepts," says Robinson, who spent many years performing research in nuclear structure physics before moving into physics education.

"Science and math are not the same thing," he explains. "Math is a very useful tool in science, but it is not the only tool. There is still a lot done with graphs and pattern recognition, which is still math, just not equations."

This type of teaching and learning is not a comfortable slipper for all faculty members and students.

"It can be very uncomfortable for both groups at first because there are ingrained expectations of what students and professors should do," says Robinson. "But we encourage them to try our method for a while and see the power."

Just introduced to the market, PET is the only curriculum that offers a full course of activities specifically designed for elementary education majors. Robinson and his colleagues are now working on a two-year extension of the project to develop a physical science curriculum. The original PET project was funded by the National Science Foundation at $1.2 million.