College Physics Course Research Articles

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.

The effect of formative assessment in Brazilian university physics courses

Most postsecondary physics courses in Brazil offer no meaningful formative assessment opportunities. We implemented online homework with immediate feedback in two courses, one with traditional learners at a public university, and one with non-traditional learners at a private university. In addition, at the public university, clickers were used in lecture. While surveys showed broad acceptance of these techniques by the students and the belief that they helped in learning, grades did not significantly improve - instead, we observed a narrowing of the grade distribution toward mid-range grades at the public university, and no difference at the private university. Our study also identifies a number of logistical and organizational hurdles that need to be overcome before a hopefully more successful implementation of these techniques should be attempted.

Teaching the common aspects in mechanical, electromagnetic and quantum waves at interfaces and waveguides

We discuss common features in mechanical, electromagnetic and quantum systems, supporting identical results for the transmission and reflection coefficients of waves arriving perpendicularly at a plane interface. Also, we briefly discuss the origin of special notions such as refractive index in quantum mechanics, massive photons in wave guides and an elementary connection of results for a plane interface to experiments in graphene where the Klein paradox could be tested. The paper is intended for undergraduate level, and a basic knowledge of waves, relativity and quantum physics is required. Its educational purpose is to provide an integrated discussion of waves in order to fit the teaching to the requirement of a shorter sequence of university physics courses.

A Study on Linking High-school Physics and Perfect Teaching Reformation of College Physics

For the students who have just entered colleges, learning university physics would be a challenge. This paper discusses how to make students who have just finished senior high school physics won’t feel difficult in learning university physics and how to guide and cultivate the students’ interest in the study of physics so to stimulate the students’ initiative to explore physics. The paper also attaches importance to the combination of high school physics and conducting teaching reform in college physical courses providing an effective way to solve the above question. This paper discusses the necessity of teaching reform in college physics teaching and the use of material and methods based on consideration of joining senior high school physics, attempting to find a breaking through the traditional single direction teaching mode, which can cultivate talents to analyze and solve problems with innovative quality.

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.

Facilitation of Formative Assessments using Clickers in a University Physics Course

Introduction Faculty in the science education community are being charged to replace traditional methods of teaching in the large lecture hall with more learner-centered, student-engaged, interactive strategies informed by what is now known about how many students learn (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). While the traditional methods of teaching have long been associated with disconnecting the students from both the instructor and course material, causing students to assume more passive role in the process, encouraging memorization over conceptual understanding of course material, and treating students as if they learn course material at the same time and in the same way, these methods are common in many of today's lecture halls (Mintzes & Leonard, 2006; Sunal, Wright, & Day, 2004). In better preparing students for the skills needed for success in the 21st century (Floden, Gallagher, Wong, & Roseman, 1995; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2010), using new technologies during instruction that are interactive have shown to assist faculty in creating active environments whereby students learn by doing, receive feedback during the trajectory, construct new knowledge and improve skills, and continually refine their understandings of course material (Bereiter & Scardamalai, 1993; Hmelo & Williams, 1998; Mintzes & Leonard, 2006). While supporting research has shown increased student achievement and improved behavioral outcomes for students who are actively engaged with the course content and increased dialogue and interaction with the instructor and peers (Crouch & Mazur, 2001; Mintzes & Leonard, 2006; Slater, Prather, & Zeilik, 2006), a key instructional implication from the research on is that students need multiple opportunities to think deeply and purposefully about the content and to gain feedback on their learning (Ueckert & Gess-Newsome, 2006, p. 147). Options available to instructors that have been used to engage students and promote an active environment in the large lecture hall are Audience Paced Feedback, Classroom Communication Systems, Personal Response Systems, Electronic Voting Systems, Student Response Systems, Audience Response Systems, voting-machines, and zappers (MacArthur & Jones, 2008). Each of these systems has also been referred to as 'clickers' (Duncan, 2005; MacArthur & Jones, 2008). In the most fundamental sense, clickers are radio-frequency, battery powered, hand-held devices that are part of an electronic polling system. The predominant research about the clicker use has been shown to promote student discussion, increase engagement and feedback, and improve attitudes toward science (Cutts, 2004: Draper & Brown, 2004; Duncan, 2005; Latessa & Mouw, 2005). However, an extensive 2009 review of the literature revealed paucity of empirical peer-reviewed evidence to support the claims that the technique can be used to improve student achievement (Mayer, et al., 2009). Although several research efforts report positive effects of clicker use on students' achievement (Addison, Wright, & Milner, 2009; Hoffman & Goodwin, 2006; Kennedy & Cutts, 2005; Watkins & Sabella, 2008), the empirical evidence suggested by Mayer et al. (2009) that is needed to corroborate existing results and substantiate any claims for using clickers requires additional studies. This study aims to provide evidence from university physics classes. Review of Related Literature General Clicker Device Features and Uses In general, clicker devices have keypad (alpha, numeric, or alpha/numeric buttons) resembling television remote control device or small electronic calculator. Using presentation software, the instructor poses question (multiple choice or true-false formats). Students respond by selecting their answer choice and using the corresponding button on their devices. …

Waves, whales, and cosmic neutrinos

Waves appear early in most university physics courses. Richard Feynman introduced them halfway through the first volume of his Lectures on Physics. And if I remember correctly, my first term at Imperial College, London, included a course on waves given by a plasma physicist named H. J. Pain.

Sustaining The Progress To Improve Physics Education

One of the problems we face in teaching introductory physics courses at the college level is that about 2/3 of students never had physics prior coming to college. Thus, many students find it very difficult to learn physics for the first time at the relatively fast-paced teaching of college physics courses. Sometimes the drop/failure/withdrawal rate at West Virginia University is as high as 65% (~2/3) for the introductory physics courses taken mostly by pre-engineering students. Obviously, there is a strong connection between the students’ physics backgrounds and the success rate of passing physics. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, we created an intervention course for a small group of students who did poorly in the first test in one of the physics courses. This intervention course ran concurrently with the regular physics course, but started at the fourth week of class after the first test. Students who received our intervention showed significant improvement in the subsequent physics tests.1 The recruitment of the students and the supervision of the course were the result of a unique collaboration between the College of Engineering and the Physics Department. After the expiration of the NSF grant, the intervention course was cancelled due to the lack of funds. The labs associated with physics classes, however, give us the opportunity to continue the advancement of physics learning after the ending of the NSF grant.

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.

The Electron Runaround: Understanding Electric Circuit Basics Through a Classroom Activity

Several misconceptions abound among college students taking their first general physics course, and to some extent pre-engineering physics students, regarding the physics and applications of electric circuits. Analogies used in textbooks, such as those that liken an electric circuit to a piped closed loop of water driven by a water pump, do not completely resolve these misconceptions. Mazur1 and Knight,2 in particular, separately note that such misconceptions include the notion that electric current on either side of a light bulb in a circuit can be different. Other difficulties and confusions involve understanding why the current in a parallel circuit exceeds the current in a series circuit with the same components, and include the role of the battery (where students may assume wrongly that a dry cell battery is a fixed-current rather than a fixed-voltage device). A simple classroom activity that students can play as a game can resolve these misconceptions, providing an intellectual as well as a hands-on understanding. This paper describes the “Electron Runaround,” first developed by the author to teach extremely bright 8-year-old home-schooled children the basics of electric circuits and subsequently altered (according to the required level of instruction) and used for various college physics courses.

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.

Realizing Vygotsky's program concerning language and thought: tracking knowing (ideas, conceptions, beliefs) in real time

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is used as a fixed representational means to achieve the interpsychological representation. Carefully conducted design experiments show, however, that knowing and learning are distributed – and therefore contingent processes – across different temporal, spatial, and social scales, which raises questions about the nature of the knowledge exhibited in various situations and forms. In this paper, I problematize the question of what spoken language specifically – and communicative acts more generally – tell us about knowing, learning, and development. I propose a different way of theorizing and analyzing what people think in action, and the ideas and concepts they mobilize. I articulate a set of propositions about knowing, which I exemplify in a careful look at a randomly chosen lecture episode from a university physics course.

Influence of high school physical education on university students’ physical activity

The purpose of this study was to use the Lifelong Physical Activity (LLPA) framework to examine the influence of high school physical education (PE) on university students’ level of physical activity (PA). Participants included 365 undergraduate students from the Rocky Mountain West of the USA enrolled in a university physical activity course. Data collection was comprised of a questionnaire and six gender-segregated follow-up focus group interviews consisting of three to six students in each group ( n =16 males; n =11 females). Results revealed misalignment between curricular PA opportunities in high school programs and current modalities of PA. For females, lack of learning and discomfort in participating during high school PE lessons were significant pedagogical negative predictors of current levels of PA. For males, the high school PE experience had a minimal influence on current levels and modalities of PA. High school physical educators need to engage in more inclusive curriculum offerings and pedagogical practices that better prepare students for the lifespan stage transition from late adolescence to young adulthood.

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.

Students know what physicists believe, but they don’t agree: A study using the CLASS survey

We measured what students perceive physicists to believe about physics and solving physics problems and how those perceptions differ from the students' personal beliefs. In this study, we used a modified version of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey which asked students to respond to each statement with both their personal belief and the response they thought a physicist would give. Students from three different types of university introductory physics courses were studied. Students who have not yet taken physics in college have a surprisingly accurate idea of what physicists believe about physics no matter what their high school background and what physics courses they choose to take in college. These ideas are largely unaffected by their college physics instruction. In contrast, students' personal beliefs about physics differ with varying high school physics backgrounds and college physics courses in which they enroll, and these beliefs are affected by college physics instruction. Women have a larger difference between their reported personal beliefs and their perceptions of physicists' beliefs than do men.

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.

Validity and reliability of the force and motion conceptual evaluation

The assessment of learning has become a key component in program evaluation, grant proposals, and education research. Assessment requires valid and reliable instruments. The Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) is one of several multiple-choice tests used to evaluate the learning of force and motion concepts. Although many physics education researchers accept its validity and reliability, validity and reliability estimates based on typical statistical analyses of data have not been established. This study used FMCE post-test results for approximately 150 students in a first-semester college physics course to estimate reliability and content validity. The results indicate that the FMCE is a valuable instrument for measuring student learning.

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

David V. Tiedeman: Engineer of Career Construction

Tiedeman (1919–2004) designed the blueprint for equipping and building career construction theory. After making significant contributions to the statistical analysis of occupational behavior, he shifted to a constructivist epistemology for comprehending careers as the imposition of direction on vocational behavior. The cornerstones of his theoretical edifice unite the concepts that career emerges from self‐organization, purposeful action bridges discontinuity, and decisions evolve through differentiation and integration. His counseling methods help clients reorganize self to better pursue purpose at work and in leisure. Tiedeman's model and methods remain instructive and inspiring to the contemporary theory and practice of career construction.

Drawing and displaying the trajectories of some pendulums

This paper presents a way to deal with the trajectories of some pendulums, such as thesimple pendulum, the conical pendulum, and the Foucault pendulum. With asimulator designed by us for displaying the behaviour of the Foucault pendulum, it issimple and convenient to obtain such a trajectory on a piece of paper; this isuseful and helpful for students and teachers engaged in college physics courses.