"Adapting to a changing world: Teaching challenges and learning opportunities in large introductory physics courses"

 

 

ABSTRACT:  

 

Undergraduate physics education provides students with unique skills and ways of thinking of profound value to themselves and to society. Increasingly there are systemic tensions on large and small scales, which threaten the familiar college environment in which physics is currently taught, and U.S. physics departments will either adapt and improve or fade. Current teaching practices in large physics courses do not serve most students well.  Substantial improvements in undergraduate physics education can be made with existing knowledge and resources in a variety of contexts; encouraging and preserving this requires a symphony of efforts by many different participants, and improving it requires ongoing assessment, research and development.  In fall 2013 we undertook a massive assessment of first and second year courses for engineering students in physics and chemistry at Rutgers.  In this talk I will present some of the results, and reflect on their implications in the context of recently published National Research Council reports (1,2,3).  I will focus on the characteristics of a course in which students are particularity successful, which happens to have a relatively large percentage of underrepresented minority and female students.
 

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1.  National Research Council. Adapting to a Changing World--Challenges and Opportunities in Undergraduate Physics Education . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.
2.  National Research Council. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014.
3.  National Research Council. Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2012.