Abstract
A number of studies have described the benefits of the incorporation of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) for learning, and teaching science as a process, for promoting conceptual changes, and a deeper understanding of scientific ideas.Physical Optics is a topic of difficult comprehension, and this fact was also observed at thePontificia Universidad Católica Argentina when students received traditional instruction. This article describes a project to improve the teaching of interference, and diffraction of light within a historical context. Care was taken in developing the line of historical thought, and the study of the hypotheses of the nature of light in proper chronological order.In order to assess the outcome of this methodology, surveys on the subjects of interference, and diffraction of light were conductedduring three consecutive years. During the first year a textbooks based teaching without historical insight was imparted; later HPS based methods were introduced. The results show that students show more enthusiasm in lectures where the didactics uses HPS materials, and this methodology contributed to improve the students’ performance, increasing the percentage of correct answers in the exams.
Highlights
A number of studies have described the benefits of the incorporation of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) for learning, and teaching science as a process, for promoting conceptual changes, and a deeper understanding of scientific ideas
Physical Optics is a topic of difficult comprehension, and this fact was observed at thePontificia Universidad Católica Argentina when students received traditional instruction
The results show that students show more enthusiasm in lectures where the didactics uses HPS materials, and this methodology contributed to improve the studentsperformance, increasing the percentage of correct answers in the exams
Summary
Studies reported in bibliography have shown that teaching physics with lectures based on the structure proposed in books, may led to make Optical physics a topic of difficult comprehension ([1],[2]).This issue was observed in a group of students of Food Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) during the dictation of Physics 3 (subject that comprises electricity, magnetism and optics) when a routine teaching, as reflected in textbooks without historical insight was imparted With these students it was observed that even though they had acquired expertise in handling equations and formulae, they didn't understand the real meaning o had a distorted vision of the described physical phenomena.
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