Journal
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
Volume 77, Issue 7, Pages 629-642Publisher
AMER INST PHYSICS
DOI: 10.1119/1.3119150
Keywords
algebra; physics education
Funding
- U. S. National Science Foundation [REC-00-87519, REC-04-40113]
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The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group has done a five-year project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics, which primarily serves life-science majors. We refocused the class on helping the students learn to think scientifically-to build coherence, think in terms of mechanisms, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed the course to tap into students' productive conceptual and epistemological resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular materials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned all written homework and examinations and administered pre-post conceptual and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of the traditional losses.
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