Elizabeth Cavicchi

Verified

Elizabeth verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Elizabeth verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Ed.D.
• Instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The International Handbook of Physics Education Research: Special Topics covers the topics of equity and inclusion; history and philosophy of physics; textbooks; mathematics; research history, methodologies, and themes. As the field of physics education research grows, it is increasingly difficult for newcomers to gain an appreciation of the major...

Having students experience historical experiments in the classroom is a powerful tool in teaching about the nature of science. Experiments performed by students support inquiry-based science instruction and have long provided an essential means of producing new scientific knowledge within science itself and throughout its history.

O livro pre­tende apresentar novos elementos para a pesquisa em História e Filosofia da Ciência no Ensino de Ciências. Os trabalhos trazem novas questões filosóficas sobre os modelos e narrativas das ciências; os pressupostos culturais dos experimen­tos e teorias científicas e sua relação com o ensino; e, de maneira inversa, como as teorias e press...

An equal-armed balance at equilibrium—the bar is horizontal—tips into disequilibrium upon displacing a weight. Equilibrium is restored by reversing that move—putting the weight back where it was, or doing the same on the other side. Piaget adopted the idea of equilibration to describe how the intellect, in relating to the world, develops. Equilibri...

Environments of learning often remain unnoticed and unacknowledged. This study follows a student and myself as we became aware of our local environment at MIT and welcomed that environment as a vibrant contributor to our learning. We met this environment in part through its educational heritage in two centennial anniversaries: John Dewey’s 1916 wor...

Doing science as explorers, students observe, wonder and question the unknown, stretching their experience. To engage students as explorers depends on their safety in expressing uncertainty and taking risks. I create these conditions in my university seminar by employing critical exploration in the classroom, a pedagogy developed by Eleanor Duckwor...

This volume provides an artful introduction to the life and work of Harvard Professor, Eleanor Ruth Duckworth. Teacher, learner, researcher, dancer, and social activist, Duckworth has influenced generations of teachers through her surprisingly radical pedagogical stance, Critical Exploration in the Classroom. Teachers, students, and colleagues pro...

Essays in this volume address how instruments and experimenting were manifested in science teaching in the nineteenth century, with extensions by a half-century earlier or later. Both science and education underwent broad-reaching changes in identity and practice during this era: from interpretive ways of natural philosophy to systematic researches...

Our everyday activities occur so seamlessly in the space around us as to leave us unawares of space, its properties, and our use of it. What might we notice, wonder about and learn through interacting with space exploratively? My seminar class took on that question as an opening for personal and group experiences during this semester. In the proces...

Abstract. Following discoveries of self-induction made by Faraday (1834) and Henry (1832/1835), Harvard medical student Charles Grafton Page took bodily shocks in 1836 from his homemade spiralled conductor while interrupting its battery connection. Unlike his famous predecessors, Page inserted connectors intermediate along the conductor which incre...

Galileo's contributions are so familiar as to be taken for granted, obscuring the exploratory process by which his discoveries arose. The wonder that Galileo experienced comes alive for undergraduates and teachers that I teach, when they find themselves taking Galileo's role by means of their own explorations. These classroom journeys include: sigh...

What do you see in a mirror when not looking at yourself? What goes on as a pendulum swings? Undergraduates in a science class supposed that these behaviors were obvious until their explorations exposed questions with no quick answers. While exploring materials, students researched Galileo, his trial, and its aftermath. Galileo came to life both in...

Abstract: For one born to French peasants, Gerbert took advantage of exceptional educational opportunities: monastic training at Aurillac; mathematical studies in Spain; tutoring the Pope and Emperor in Rome. Serving Reims cathedral school for twenty-five years, Gerbert transformed its curriculum and practices; his students disseminated these innov...

Abstract: As a scientific apparatus, a hollow tube can be used to demonstrate and model many properties of the physical world. In medieval times, tubes were an instrument of science and teaching in optics, astronomy and acoustics. By sighting through a tube held both near and away from the eye, eleventh century experimenter Ibn al-Haytham argued th...

Ordinary things pass under our notice. We may assume we know what to expect from them, without ever having set aside the space to scratch beneath those unexamined assumptions, contemplate the behavior and wonder what is going on. Through carving out space for observing and rethinking everyday things, scientists in history generated questions and un...

What goes on as a pendulum swings? As undergraduates in my science class observed pendulums closely, their explorations exposed questions with no quick answers. While exploring pendulums in class, students researched Galileo, his trial, and its aftermath. Galileo came to life both in their presentations about him, and in the context of lab investig...

The authors of the three papers in this issue discuss and analyze the practice underlying “critical exploration,” a research pedagogy applied in common within their separate art, science, and teacher education classrooms. Eleanor Duckworth developed critical exploration as a method of teaching by involving students so actively and reflectively with...

A teacher narrates from activities and discussions that arose among undergraduates and herself while doing critical explorations of mirrors. Surprised by light's behaviors, the students responded with curiosity, losing their dependence on answers as the format of school knowledge. Inadequacies in how participants supposed light works emerged in the...

The curiosity that light's properties provoked among historical observers has the educational potential to be re-expressed by students today. This paper narrates optical explorations of undergraduates in my laboratory classrooms, in response to historical observations by Shen Kua, Ibn al-Haytham, Leonardo, Galileo and others. My students' explorati...

A teacher and a college student explore experimental science and its history by reading historical texts, and responding with replications and experiments of their own. A curriculum of ever-widening possibilities evolves in their ongoing interactions with each other, history, and such materials as pendulums, flame, and resonant singing tubes. Narra...

In the 1830s, American experimenter Charles Grafton Page pioneered electromagnetism, developing instruments, experimental practice, and understandings that were foundational for nineteenth-century technologies such as the telegraph and induction coil. While a student, Page detected electricity in a spiral conductor where direct current had not pass...

The paper describes the author's witnessing of images projected from an eighteenth-century solar microscope made by John Dollond, now at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Peter Heering facilitated this session as part of his research on the solar microscope. A rectangular mirror, the length of a hand, mounted outside a museum window caught the sunlig...

Two students, meeting together with a teacher, redid historical experiments. Unlike conventional instruction where science topics and practices often fragment, they experienced interrelatedness among phenomena, participants’ actions, and history. This study narrates actions that fostered an interrelated view. One action involved opening up historic...

Modernity now seems inseparable from electricity, but in the past these two jolted in unsteady, often renegotiated rhythm. Andreas Killen tracks that rough ride's effect on the bodies and psyches of Germans through the diagnoses and treatments they incurred as well as the insurance systems paying—or not—for their treatment. The capital city of Berl...

Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic induction in 1831 using an iron ring wound with two wire coils; on interrupting battery current in one coil, momentary currents arose in the other. Between Faraday's ring and the induction coil, coiled instruments developed via meandering paths. This paper explores the opening phase of that work in the late 1830...

The natural philosopher Michael Faraday and the psychologist Jean Piaget experimented directly with natural phenomena and children. While Faraday originated evidence for spatial fields mediating force interactions, Piaget studied children's cognitive development. This paper treats their experimental processes in parallel, taking as examples Faraday...

When battery current flowing in his homemade spiraled conductor switched off, nineteenth century experimenter Charles Grafton Page saw sparks and felt shocks, even in parts of the spiral where no current passed. Reproducing his experiment today is improvisational: an oscilloscope replaces Page's body; a copper star spinning through galinstan substi...

Technology and Culture 46.1 (2005) 243-245 An eighteenth-century orrery, the first cyclotron, and a grating spectrometer are unlikely to occupy a lab shelf together. Yet each involves physical understanding—not only of planetary motion, particle beams, or spectral lines, but also of whatever else attends its use, design, and makeup. They not only p...

The natural philosopher Michael Faraday and the psychologist Jean Piaget experimented directly with natural phenomena and children. While Fara-day originated evidence for spatial ªelds mediating force interactions, Piaget studied children's cognitive development. This paper treats their experimental processes in parallel, taking as examples Faraday...

This study investigates nineteenth century laboratory work on electromagnetism through historical accounts and experimental replications. Oersted found that when a magnetic needle was placed in varying positions around a conducting wire, its orientation changed: in moving from a spot above the wire to one below, its sense inverted. This behavior wa...

School students, and their teachers, seldom have opportunities to investigate something in nature. Yet children's development, as perceived by Piaget, and historical scientists' learning, involves investigation. We acted to include these investigative responses and historic resources into our work with new science teachers. We did this in the conte...

The authors conducted action research by developing workshops that involved teacher-participants in their own exploratory learning. The authors facilitated participants in researching of what they noticed, and wanted to understand about light and shadows by structuring the environment, and the questions that wereasked of them, in ways that integrat...

The pull of electromagnets on weights acts through the magnetism evoked in iron by current flowing in wires coiled around that iron. Learning to work with this instrument entails engaging with how effects of current show different behavior under series and parallel connections of the wire windings. This experience was new for Joseph Henry when, aro...

Physics is conventionally taught as a fixed curriculum which students must master. This thesis changes that: curriculum emerges from what learners try and question in experiments they invent. The thesis narrates: three adult students exploring wires, batteries and bulbs with me as teacher; nineteenth century investigations of electromagnetism; my l...

This paper narrates learning as it evolved through experimental work and interpretation in two distinct investigations: the explorations of permanent magnets and needles conducted by a student, Joann, as I interactively interviewed her, and Faraday's initial experimenting with diamagnetism, as documented in his Diary. Both investigators puzzled ove...

What questions come about as learners explore physical materials? How does their learning deepen through inventing experiments and making and testing their own interpretations? I present episodes from the investigatory work of three adult learners who met regularly with me to explore batteries, bulbs and wires. I taught by engaging the learners' in...

The origin and nature of nonlinear optical effects in organic and polymeric materials is discussed. Approaches to the applications of these nonlinear optical effects in prototypical devices is explored. In glancing through a flat windowpane we immediately confront light's interaction with glass, but ignore it. We assume that the world's image is no...

In linear optical spectroscopy, atomic and molecular structure is probed by light. The intensity, frequencies, and spectral width observed in the signal output from a sample--whether by reflection, transmission, absorption or scattering--reveal clues of energy transitions, and hence information about the electronic, vibrational, and other motional...

The major work for this thesis is the creation of a sculpture, constructed as an independently running fountain. The sculpture is composed of ceramic figures, and is installed at the M.I.T. Student Center Library. The written paper begins with a statement about water and traces the myth of Arethusa, the subject of my fountain sculpture, through ref...

The CAMSEQ processor used to carry out molecular mechanics as well as other molecular structure calculations is described in detail. General comments concerning potential energy functions, exploration of conformational space, and optimizing, with respect to size and speed, structure and coding of various subroutines of a molecular mechanics package...