Rate My Professor Keith Oliver

Oliver has made notable contributions to physics pedagogy through peer-reviewed publications in The Physics Teacher. Key works include "3, 2, 1 ... Discovering Newton's Laws" (2017, co-authored with Joe Lutz, Kevin Sylvester, and Deborah Herrington), which details a reversed-order instructional approach emphasizing activities prior to conceptual definitions to improve student understanding of Newton's laws beyond rote memorization. Another is "Kinematics Card Sort Activity: Insight into Students’ Thinking" (2016, co-authored with Erin Berryhill and Deborah Herrington), offering diagnostic tools to reveal high school students' kinematic misconceptions. He has also supervised undergraduate research projects, such as Tim Steenwyk's "Development and Assessment of Materials which help students Apply concepts of Energy Conservation and Entropy" (2006) and Brandon Branch's "A Comparative Study of the Effects of Teaching Techniques on Student Learning During Lessons in Geometrical Optics" (2006). Actively engaged in educational programs, Oliver participates as faculty in the Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Engineering Teachers (PCKET) project, contributes to the Target Inquiry initiative, supports the Integrated Science Program, and co-presents workshops at the Roger That! Conference on topics including acoustics and science education methods. In 2024, he was honored with a service award at Grand Valley State University.