Introductory College Physics Research Articles

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.

Gender Differences in the High School and Affective Experiences of Introductory College Physics Students

The disparity in persistence between males and females studying physics has been a topic of concern to physics educators for decades. Overall, while female students perform as well as or better than male students,1 they continue to lag considerably in terms of persistence. The most significant drop in females studying physics occurs between high school and college.2 Since most female physicists report that they became attracted to physics and decided to study it further while in high school, according to the International Study of Women in Physics,3 it is problematic that high school is also the stage at which females begin to opt out at much higher rates than males. Although half of the students taking one year of physics in high school are female, females are less likely than males to take a second or Advanced Placement (AP) physics course.4 In addition, the percentage of females taking the first physics course in college usually falls between 30% and 40%.1 In other words, although you may see gender parity in a first high school physics course, this parity does not usually persist to the next level of physics course. In addition, even if there is parity in a high school physics course, it does not mean that males and females experience the course in the same way. It is this difference in experience that may help to explain the drop in persistence of females.

Factors affecting student drop out from the university introductory physics course, including the anomaly of the Ontario double cohort

The course drop-out rate is the fraction of students per year who drop a course after starting it. This statistic is important both as a measure of the difficulty or relevance of the course compared to others at a university, and as one indication of the success of measures taken to improve teaching. The drop-out rate of students from the first-year university physics course at Trent University increased from about 8% in the 1980s to over 20% in 1999, primarily under the same instructor, with the exception of the Ontario “double-cohort” years 2003–2004 and 2004–2005 when it plummeted to about 9% before rebounding in 2005–2006. A similar decrease in this rate for the double-cohort years has been observed at Brock University and the University of Guelph, and so was probably widespread. It is speculated that the main cause of the decrease for these two years was an improved work ethic of the double-cohort students. Possible causes of the steady increase in the drop-out rate from the 1980s to the present are discussed including high-school courses taken; gender balance; and grade inflation. The last of these combined with a dramatic increase in the percentage of high-school students continuing their education, appears to have resulted in weaker and less motivated students being admitted to university. Results are also given of a survey of recent first-year Trent University physics students for possible reasons for dropping out of the course: students who have not taken the final-year high-school physics course, do not live in residence, or do not work together on their assignments are much more likely to drop the course. PACS No.: 01.40.gb

Do You Prefer to Have the Text or a Sheet with Your Physics Exams?

Many high school and introductory college physics instructors ponder the choice between “open text” exams versus “facts and formulae sheet” exams. Other alternatives are closed book/closed notes exams or an instructor-prepared sheet of facts and relevant formulas. There is no agreement on merit. Rehfuss1 strongly opposes allowing students to use formula sheets while taking physics exams despite acknowledging that such use is common practice. Cone2 responded to Rehfuss by defending the use of such sheets and outlining the benefits of a “cheat sheet.” Debate over the use of a “cheat sheet” or other resources during exams is not limited to the physics community. Skidmore and Aagaard3 studied the relationship between testing conditions and student test scores for students in teacher education. Two decades earlier Boniface,4 Dorsal and Cundiff,5 and Hindman6 published papers on the use of texts and/or sheets during examinations in psychology and education. Others, such as Pullen et al.7 focused on studying the discarded cheat sheets themselves. Humorously, in October 2005 The New York Times8 reported an unusual museum exhibit of “cheat sheets” and the different ways students had cheated at a particular university.

Phenomenographic study of students’ problem solving approaches in physics

This paper describes ongoing research investigating student approaches to quantitative and qualitative problem solving in physics. This empirical study was conducted using a phenomenographic approach to analyze data from individual semistructured problem solving interviews with 22 introductory college physics students. The main result of the study is a hierarchical set of categories that describe the students' problem solving approaches in the context of introductory physics.

Naïve Students’ Conceptual Development and Beliefs: The Need for Multiple Analyses to Determine what Contributes to Student Success in a University Introductory Physics Course

This research involved naive physics learners who were interested in majoring in science or engineering. In a semester-long quasi-experimental study, open-ended pretests and weekly interviews were used to analyse the progressive development of students’ conceptions relating to sound and wave motion. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to elucidate: (1) how their conceptions developed from everyday conceptions to unclear scientific conceptions to scientific conceptions, and (2) their beliefs of physics knowledge. Despite efforts to enable these students to learn physics, the findings showed that only two out of ten students developed acceptable physics conceptions during the course that would enable them to pursue the subject to a higher level. Also, students’ conceptual development was found to be related to their cognitive understanding and to epistemological beliefs of physics. Therefore, to facilitate naive physics learners’ success in a general physics course, in addition to the acquisition of content knowledge, explicit emphasis needs to be placed on the nature of physics knowledge.

Acting like a physicist: Student approach study to experimental design

National studies of science education have unanimously concluded that preparing our students for the demands of the 21st century workplace is one of the major goals. This paper describes a study of student activities in introductory college physics labs, which were designed to help students acquire abilities that are valuable in the workplace. In these labs [called Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) labs], students design their own experiments. Our previous studies have shown that students in these labs acquire scientific abilities such as the ability to design an experiment to solve a problem, the ability to collect and analyze data, the ability to evaluate assumptions and uncertainties, and the ability to communicate. These studies mostly concentrated on analyzing students' writing, evaluated by specially designed scientific ability rubrics. Recently, we started to study whether the ISLE labs make students not only write like scientists but also engage in discussions and act like scientists while doing the labs. For example, do students plan an experiment, validate assumptions, evaluate results, and revise the experiment if necessary? A brief report of some of our findings that came from monitoring students' activity during ISLE and nondesign labs was presented in the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings. We found differences in student behavior and discussions that indicated that ISLE labs do in fact encourage a scientistlike approach to experimental design and promote high-quality discussions. This paper presents a full description of the study.

Diminishing the Gap Between University and High School Research Programs: Computational Physics

There are many schools (grades K-12) around the country that offer some sort of science research option for students to pursue. Often this option is a local science fair, where students do smaller projects that are then presented at poster sessions. Many times the top local projects can advance to some type of regional and, possibly, state science fair. However, the projects students tend to do for a fair are “lower-level” research; that is, a project where the answer is at least known by the teacher and is often a lab activity from a standard experiment booklet. If there is a smaller subset of students who are more interested and motivated in science and who would like to take on more of a challenge with their research project, to the point where there is some element of originality and a truly unknown result being investigated (particularly in high school), most teachers do not have the means, or at least do not believe they have the means, of allowing them to do so unless there is a possibility of working in a university or professional laboratory outside of school. This more advanced level of research could be defined as the type that yields papers for major national science competitions.1 While the widespread belief among many high school teachers is that high-end research requires professional facilities, it is not always necessary to work outside of school in order to have a strong physics research program,2 especially when the research is computer based. This article offers suggestions for and examples of computational research projects for high school students, as well as students in introductory college physics classes.

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.

Gender differences in introductory university physics performance: The influence of high school physics preparation and affective factors

AbstractThe attrition of females studying physics after high school is a growing concern to the science education community. Most undergraduate science programs require introductory physics coursework. Thus, success in introductory physics is usually necessary for students to progress to higher levels of science study. Success also influences attitudes; if females are well prepared, feel confident, and do well in introductory physics, they may be inclined to study physics further. This quantitative study using a hierarchical linear model focused on determining factors from high school physics preparation (content, pedagogy, and assessment) and the affective domain that predicted female and male performance in introductory university physics. The data analyzed came from 1973 introductory university physics surveys that included variables used as controls for student demographic and academic background characteristics. The results highlight high school physics and affective experiences that differentially predicted female and male performance. These experiences include learning requirements, long‐written problems, cumulative tests/quizzes, father's encouragement, and family's belief that science leads to a better career. There were also factors that had a similar effect on female and male performance among which mathematics preparation was the overall strongest predictor of university physics performance. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 91:847–876, 2007

Teaching Physics Using Appropriate Technology Projects

Appropriate technologies able to be easily and economically constructed from readily available materials by local craftspeople have a central role in the alleviation of poverty in the developing world. However, research and development of these technologies are generally apportioned relatively modest support by the developed world's institutions, in part because the operation of many of these appropriate technologies is dependent on relatively well-understood science accessible even to introductory college physics students. This paper describes a project-based assignment used to capitalize on this opportunity to motivate students to learn physics by offering them a chance to make concrete contributions to the optimization of appropriate technologies for sustainable development.

An Elementary Model of the Earth's Magnetic Field

This article is intended as a guide for teaching geomagnetism in a high school or university introductory physics class. Many students find this subject fascinating. Instructors, however, often have a difficult time introducing this topic at an elementary level. Suggestions will be made on how to accomplish this using three electricity and magnetism problems commonly encountered in an introductory class.

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.

Traditional and Block Scheduling for College Science Preparation: A Comparison of College Science Success of Students Who Report Different High School Scheduling Plans

This study compares frequencies of instructional practices across differing scheduling plans (Traditional and Block plans), and explores the association between high school scheduling plans and college science preparation, using introductory college science grades as the outcome measure. More than 7000 students enrolled in introductory college biology, chemistry, and physics were surveyed. No large difference was found when comparing the use of frequencies of instructional practices across scheduling plans. Regression models investigating associations between scheduling plans and college grades found significant, but small differences in predicted college grades for Traditional, 4:4, and Unique Block students; however, the analysis found two negative interactions on college grades linking alternate Block (AB) with HS science achievement and AB block with peer tutoring. Overall, the results indicate that Block scheduling plans do not appear to provide an advantage to students in terms of college preparation in science.

Jeff and the Raccoon

Leamnson1 suggests that storytelling is a way to get students interested in learning. About a week before my first-semester introductory college physics class started a unit on linear momentum, one of my students, Jeff, struck a raccoon on the highway. His colorful telling of this story before class got the interest of most of the room. A body shop then gave Jeff a repair cost of $1472 for the damage sustained from hitting the raccoon. Jeff wanted to know how his car could sustain so much damage just by hitting a raccoon. A teaching moment had arrived.

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.

Demonstrating Beats with Springs and a Cart

The topic of beats is often discussed with reference to sound in high school or introductory college physics. Beats are easy to hear but a demonstration of a mechanical analog is rarely, if ever, presented. This paper describes a straightforward demonstration to produce low-frequency beats in a mechanical system. In this system, students can observe beats and the means by which they are created. This demonstration can also be adapted to the student laboratory where quantitative measurements are possible.

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.