Characterizing Studio Physics Instruction Across Instructors And Institutions

An increasing number of institutions are adopting a collaborative student-centered studio approach for their introductory physics classes, although there is considerable variation in their deployments and a wide range of success in these different cases. Using a modified version of the TDOP observational protocol, we observed and coded 13 instructors teaching SCALE-UP (one studio implementation method) physics classes at two universities to characterize each studio class. We coded different types of instructor dialogue, class discussion, and students' group and individual work, as well as technology used in the classroom. We identified both similarities and differences among the various classes. Here, we report the percentage of intervals in which certain codes were observed, highlighting the most prevalent codes and noting common code combinations. This is the beginning of work to characterize different studio physics classes to determine effective practices.