Abstract
Providing less prepared students with supplemental instruction (SI) in introductory STEM courses has long been used as a model in math, chemistry, and biology education to improve student performance, but this model has received little attention in physics education research. We analyzed the course performance of students enrolled in SI courses for introductory mechanics and electricity and magnetism (E&M) at Stanford University compared with those not enrolled in the SI courses over a two-year period. We calculated the benefit of the SI course using multiple linear regression to control for students’ level of high school physics and math preparation. We found that the SI course had a significant positive effect on student performance in E&M, but that an SI course with a nearly identical format had no effect on student performance in mechanics. We explored several different potential explanations for why this might be the case and were unable to find any that could explain this difference. This suggests that there are complexities in the design of SI courses that are not fully understood or captured by existing theories as to how they work.
Highlights
Supplemental instruction (SI) is a commonly used approach in mathematics and chemistry education to provide additional help to students
The basic premise is that students who desire extra help or are determined to be at risk in introductory STEM courses will take an additional SI course to provide them with more targeted practice, individual attention, and, in some cases, social-psychological interventions
We present a mixed result for the effectiveness of a cooperative group problem-solving based SI course
Summary
Supplemental instruction (SI) is a commonly used approach in mathematics and chemistry education to provide additional help to students. The basic premise is that students who desire extra help or are determined to be at risk in introductory STEM courses will take an additional SI course to provide them with more targeted practice, individual attention, and, in some cases, social-psychological interventions. Despite the popularity of SI in other disciplines, we could find no published studies in the physics education literature documenting the effects of SI courses, though there exist SI courses in physics and some more general studies suggesting positive benefits of such courses in physics [11,12].
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