Search

For years there has been an acknowledged interest in having students assess the rationality of their solutions to physics problems. In fact, many textbooks now routinely include end-of-problem assessments as part of the authors' detailed solutions to examples. Over the past two decades, I have experimented with various forms of end-of-problem assessment strategies for my students in introductory, college-level physics classes. In this note, I will share my observations and recommendations for how this aspect of students' solutions can be productive and valuable for them, while providing insights into the students' understanding for the instructor.

The various aspects of projectile motion have been analyzed many times in this journal. As a sample, over the years, authors have investigated particular details of the path of a projectile and different situations for launching projectiles. Others have written about a nifty way to determine the maximum height of a projectile, finding the range of a projectile under very general circumstances, and the challenging question of how to hit a moving target. Finally, some authors have published articles detailing fun and interesting approaches to using projectile motion in the classroom or laboratory. This paper will examine a practical projectile motion question involving the game of catch. Specifically, we will find the angle at which a thrower should toss a ball such that its speed when caught is a minimum.

In the United States, the undergraduate general education curriculum by and large requires students take courses from the arts and humanities as well as the sciences in order to produce well-rounded or liberally educated individuals. This educational philosophy is in line with C. P. Snow's recommendation for increased communication between the "two cultures", though the exchange of ideas may not be optimal as one would like. Most colleges and universities expect undergraduate students to take introductory science courses, sometimes designed for non-science majors. In our experience, many of these students are inadequately prepared in science and mathematics, and have weak attitudes about the nature of science and scientific inquiry. We find students in traditional lecture classes eventually lose interest in these content-driven courses, fail to see the relevance of the material they learned, and miss out on the excitement of scientific discovery. To address these concerns, we created a single-theme, general science course with the help of government and institutional funds in which non-science students engage in simple activities designed to help them understand basic light phenomena. In our course, "A World of Light and Color," students learn how to think like scientists rather than simply learn about science. It is this sense of student ownership of learning coupled with carefully crafted curricular material inspired from physics education research that has made our course very successful and measurably effective. In this paper, we will present our development model, outline the structure of a typical class, provide examples of activities, and discuss assessment strategies and results.

Discussions of diagnostic tools that gauge students' conceptual understanding permeate the literature. Many instructors report their class' normalized gain to characterize the change in scores from pre-test to post-test. We describe a new procedure for characterizing these changes. This procedure, which we call the normalized change, c, involves the ratio of the gain to the maximum possible gain or the loss to the maximum possible loss. We also advocate reporting the average of a class' normalized changes and utilizing a particular statistical and graphical approach for comparing average c values. [DOI: 10.1119/1.2372468]

In 1993, Rensselaer introduced the first Studio Physics course. Two years later, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was used to measure the conceptual learning gain in the course. This was found to be a disappointing 0.22, indicating that Studio Physics was no more effective at teaching basic Newtonian concepts than a traditional course. Our study verified that result, = 0.18 [+ or -] 0.12 (s.d.), and thereby provides a baseline measurement of conceptual learning gains in Studio Physics I for engineers. These low gains are especially disturbing because the studio classroom appears to be interactive and instructors strive to incorporate modem pedagogies. The goal of our investigation was to determine if incorporation of research-based activities into Studio Physics would have a significant effect on conceptual learning gains. To measure gains, we utilized the Force Concept Inventory and the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). In the process of pursuing this goal, we verified the effectiveness of Interactive Lecture Demonstrations [ = 0.35 [+ or -] 0.06 (s.d.) and = 0.45[+ or -] 0.03 (s.d.)] and Cooperative Group Problem Solving ( = 0.36 and = 0.36), and examined the feasibility of using these techniques in the studio classroom. Further, we have assessed conceptual learning in the standard Studio Physics course [ = 0.18 [+ or -] 0.12 (s.d.) and = 0.21 [+ or -] 0.05 (s.d.)]. In this paper, we will clarify the issues noted above. We will also discuss difficulties in implementing these techniques for first time users and implications for the future directions of the Studio Physics courses at Rensselaer.