Comparison of student performance between virtual and in-person modalities of introductory calculus-based physics

Abstract

Physics educators keep adding many skill developments to science and engineering students during their education as individuals and groups including critical thinking, conceptual understanding, problem-solving, mathematical implementation, computational implementation, etc. Here, we are discussing how to reach and analyse students’ outcomes within the context of introductory calculus-based physics courses by investigating two different teaching modalities. We found that there is no significant impact of teaching modality on student learning. By performing two different assessments: chapter-ending midterm assessments and unit-based (three to four chapters) midterm assessments, shows that students can perform much better with short-time assessments in contrast to the long-time assessments. Further, we study any possible effects on students’ final grades from students’ prior knowledge of calculus and conceptual physics. This investigation shows that although there is no correlation between student’s prior proficiency in calculus the class performance, however, there is a correlation of conceptual physics understanding towards class performance.