Introductory College Physics Course Research Articles

Are Virtual Labs as Effective as Hands-on Labs for Undergraduate Physics? A Comparative Study at Two Major Universities

Most physics professors would agree that the lab experiences students have in introductory physics are central to the learning of the concepts in the course. It is also true that these physics labs require time and money for upkeep, not to mention the hours spent setting up and taking down labs. Virtual physics lab experiences can provide an alternative or supplement to these traditional hands-on labs. However, physics professors may be very hesitant to give up the hands-on labs, which have been such a central part of their courses, for a more cost and time-saving virtual alternative. Thus, it is important to investigate how the learning from these virtual experiences compares to that acquired through a hands-on experience. This study evaluated a comprehensive set of virtual labs for introductory level college physics courses and compared them to a hands-on physics lab experience. Each of the virtual labs contains everything a student needs to conduct a physics laboratory experiment, including: objectives, background theory, 3D simulation, brief video, data collection tools, pre- and postlab questions, and postlab quiz. This research was conducted with 224 students from two large universities and investigated the learning that occurred with students using the virtual labs either in a lab setting or as a supplement to hands-on labs versus a control group of students using the traditional hands-on labs only. Findings from both university settings showed the virtual labs to be as effective as the traditional hands-on physics labs.

Correlating student interest and high school preparation with learning and performance in an introductory university physics course

Students who take introductory university physics because they are interested learn more than students who take the course because it is required.

Students’ Difficulties in Solving Physics Problems in Introductory College PhysicsCourses at King Saud University

The purpose of this study was to identify the difficulties facing students in introductory college physics courses at King Saud University in solving physics problems, by exploring faculty members' perceptions of these difficulties, and through analyzing students' answers to physics problems in final exams. The study mainly focused on four themes of difficulties, including: the problems verbal context, physics laws, mathematical skills and graphs or diagrams. The study also sought to learn about faculty's perception towards the degree of influence of the proposed solutions. The study sample consisted of 27 physics faculty members, in addition to 391 students. The study showed consistency between the faculty members' perception towards the difficulties of solving problems and the analysis of student answers in final exams. The difficulties related to the verbal context were the most common among students, whereas difficulties related to mathematical skills were the least common. In addition, the results revealed that there were also difficulties related to physical laws, and knowledge of graphs or diagrams. The findings showed that the perceptions of faculty members towards proposed solutions as being as a “high effect”on fourteen suggested techniques, while their perception towards the rest of the techniques were as “medium effect”. Finally, their perception towards only one technique was being of “low effect".

Students’ Difficulties in Solving Physics Problems in Introductory College PhysicsCourses at King Saud University

The purpose of this study was to identify the difficulties facing students in introductory college physics courses at King Saud University in solving physics problems, by exploring faculty members' perceptions of these difficulties, and through analyzing students' answers to physics problems in final exams. The study mainly focused on four themes of difficulties, including: the problems verbal context, physics laws, mathematical skills and graphs or diagrams. The study also sought to learn about faculty's perception towards the degree of influence of the proposed solutions. The study sample consisted of 27 physics faculty members, in addition to 391 students. The study showed consistency between the faculty members' perception towards the difficulties of solving problems and the analysis of student answers in final exams. The difficulties related to the verbal context were the most common among students, whereas difficulties related to mathematical skills were the least common. In addition, the results revealed that there were also difficulties related to physical laws, and knowledge of graphs or diagrams. The findings showed that the perceptions of faculty members towards proposed solutions as being as a “high effect”on fourteen suggested techniques, while their perception towards the rest of the techniques were as “medium effect”. Finally, their perception towards only one technique was being of “low effect".

Problem-based labs and group projects in an introductory university physicscourse

This article describes problem-based labs and analytical and computational project workwe have been running at the University of St Andrews in an introductory physics coursesince 2008/2009. We have found the choice of topics, scaffolding of the process, timing inthe year and facilitator guidance decisive for the success of these activities. Instructors canemail the corresponding author to obtain the problem texts and instructor resources for allthe activities described here.

Using online telescopes to explore exoplanets from the physics classroom

The search for habitable planets offers excellent opportunities to advance students’ understanding of core ideas in physics, including gravity and the laws of motion, the interaction of light and matter, and especially the nature of scientific inquiry. Thanks to the development of online telescopes, students can detect more than a dozen of the known exoplanets from the classroom, using data they gather, assess, and interpret for themselves. We present a suite of activities in which students apply basic physics concepts to their investigations of exoplanets. The activities were developed and successfully tested with physics and earth science teachers in secondary schools in 14 states. Included are additional challenges and assessments suitable for introductory college physics courses.

Interactive online optics modules for the college physics course

A new learning tool for geometrical optics is presented which has been developed for an algebra based introductory college physics course for life science majors. The interactive online learning module contains images, videos of problem solutions, short animated videos, and interactive animations, which allow students to actively explore the physics content beyond the pictures in a textbook. These elements are accompanied by narration and a transcript to guide the students while allowing them to navigate freely between the different parts of the module. The results of student learning, a comparison with a control group, and a survey of student attitudes toward this new instruction method are discussed.

Modeling the Mousetrap Car

Many high school and introductory college physics courses make use of mousetrap car projects and competitions as a way of providing an engaging hands-on learning experience incorporating Newton's laws, conversion of potential to kinetic energy, dissipative forces, and rotational mechanics. Presented here is a simple analytical and finite element spreadsheet model for a typical mousetrap car, as shown in Fig. 1. It is hoped that the model will provide students with a tool for designing or modifying the designs of their cars, provide instructors with a means to insure students close the loop between physical principles and an understanding of their car's speed and distance performance, and, third, stimulate in students at an early stage an appreciation for the merits of computer modeling as an aid in understanding and tackling otherwise analytically intractable problems so common in today's professional world.

Integrating electrostatics with demonstrations and interactive teaching

Teaching electrostatics is challenging due to its complexity and high degree of abstraction. To facilitate students’ understanding of the meanings and relations of the key terms, this paper describes a series of demonstrations and conceptual questions based on an interactive teaching approach. The context was an introductory university physics course for engineering and science students in Taiwan. Features of the teaching intervention include the utilization of a series of demonstrations for repeated practice applying the important concepts, the incorporation of derivations of equations and verbal elaboration of concepts, and the engagement of students in thinking and discussing. Data show that the teaching intervention benefited the students’ academic performance and their satisfaction with the learning achievement.

Turning a Common Lab Exercise into a Challenging Lab Experiment: Revisiting the Cart on an Inclined Track

A common lab exercise in the introductory college physics course employs a low-friction cart and associated track to study the validity of Newton's second law. Yet for college students, especially those who have already encountered a good high school physics course, the exercise must seem a little pointless. These students have already learned to accept Newton's laws without question, and any experimental data that contradict the second law would immediately alert students to an error in procedure or analysis, or, worse, reinforce the widely held opinion that simple laws are inadequate to explain the behavior of “real” systems. A better approach is to ask students to apply their understanding of Newton's laws to determine one or more unknowns inherent in the laboratory apparatus. We illustrate this approach in the experiment described below: a small amount of complexity is added to a standard experimental exercise, forcing a careful analysis of the collected data and yielding very accurate results plus a thorough understanding of the physical system under study. If development of experimental skills is one of the primary goals of the introductory laboratory, then the strategy illustrated below might be widely adaptable and appropriate in laboratories throughout the introductory mechanics curriculum.

An Introduction to Solar Cells

Most likely, solar cells will play a significant role in this country's strategy to address the two interrelated issues of global warming and dependence on imported oil. The purpose of this paper is to present an explanation of how solar cells work at an introductory high school, college, or university physics course level. The treatment presented here will be qualitative and somewhat simplified, in order to reach the desired audience; references are provided for a more detailed and mathematically sophisticated treatment. It is hoped that this paper will, in a small way, motivate students to learn more about this technology, so critical to the energy and environmental future of this country.

Student Behavior and Epistemological Framing: Examples from Collaborative Active-Learning Activities in Physics

The concept of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics is useful for understanding student reasoning. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's framing affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We find evidence of framing in easily observed features of students' collaborative behavior. We apply this observational methodology to explore dynamics among behavior, framing, and the conceptual substance of student reasoning in the context of collaborative active-learning activities in an introductory university physics course. We find evidence that certain student behaviors indicate and support a relatively sophisticated epistemological framing of these activities, one in which students discuss the substance of the ideas at hand.

Entropy and evolution

Quantitative estimates of the entropy involved in biological evolution demonstrate that there is no conflict between evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. The calculations are elementary and could be used to enliven the thermodynamics portion of a high school or introductory college physics course.

The Two High-School Pillars Supporting College Science

Out-of-discipline high-school science courses are not associated with better performance in introductory college biology, chemistry, or physics courses, but high-school math counts.

Um mapa conceitual para interações fundamentais

At first, the paper stresses a modern trend concerning the curriculum of high school and introductory college physics courses. According to this trend, the curriculum must be modernized by the introduction of contemporary physics topics and by teaching traditional classical physics tapies from a modern point of view. Following this trend, a concept map for fundamental interactions of nature is presented focusing the topic "forces" from a unifying standpoint showing that the number of fundamental forces of nature is actually quite small. Finally, the question of contextual dependence of the meanings assigned to physical concepts is also discussed.

Use of analogy in learning physics: The role of representations

Previous studies have demonstrated that analogies can promote student learning in physics and can be productively taught to students to support their learning, under certain conditions. We build on these studies to explore the use of analogy by students in a large introductory college physics course. In the first large-scale study of its kind, we demonstrate that different analogies can lead to varied student reasoning. When different analogies were used to teach electromagnetic (EM) waves, we found that students explicitly mapped characteristics either of waves on strings or sound waves to EM waves, depending upon which analogy students were taught. We extend these results by investigating how students use analogies. Our findings suggest that representational format plays a key role in the use of analogy.

Reducing the gender gap in the physics classroom

We investigate if the gender gap in conceptual understanding in an introductory university physics course can be reduced by using interactive engagement methods that promote in-class interaction, reduce competition, foster collaboration, and emphasize conceptual understanding. To this end we analyzed data from the introductory calculus-based physics course for non-majors at Harvard University taught traditionally or using different degrees of interactive engagement. Our results show that teaching with certain interactive strategies not only yields significantly increased understanding for both males and females, but also reduces the gender gap. In the most interactively taught courses, the pre-instruction gender gap was gone by the end of the semester.

Student representational competence and self-assessment when solving physics problems

Student success in solving physics problems is related to the representational format of the problem. We study student representational competence in two large-lecture algebra-based introductory university physics courses with approximately 600 participants total. We examined student performance on homework problems given in four different representational formats (mathematical, pictorial, graphical, verbal), with problem statements as close to isomorphic as possible. In addition to the homeworks, we examine students' assessment of representations by providing follow-up quizzes in which they chose between various problem formats. As a control, some parts of the classes were assigned a random-format follow-up quiz. We find that there are statistically significant performance differences between different representations of nearly isomorphic statements of quiz and homework problems. We also find that allowing students to choose which representational format they use improves student performance under some circumstances and degrades it in others. Notably, one of the two courses studied shows much greater performance differences between the groups that received a choice of format and those that did not, and we consider possible causes. Overall, we observe that student representational competence is tied to both micro- and macrolevel features of the task and environment.

Modeling Vehicle Rollover

Inspired by the recent paper1 in The Physics Teacher on the dynamics of vehicle rollovers, we modeled “rollover” in a laboratory experiment. The combination of fundamental physical principles, application to a “real world” problem, and ease of doing the experiment with readily available material and equipment makes the experiment an attractive one for use in a high school or introductory college physics course. A suggested method, sample results, and suggestions for further experimentation follow.

The impact of epistemology on learning: A case study from introductory physics

We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student’s difficulties were epistemological in nature. Our primary goals are to show instructors and curriculum developers that a student’s personal epistemological stance—her ideas about knowledge and learning—can have a direct, causal influence on her learning of physics, and to describe a mechanism for this interaction. This influence exists even when research-based curriculum materials provide implicit epistemological support. For this reason, curriculum materials and teaching techniques could become more effective by explicitly attending to students’ epistemologies.