PHY 101: Introduction to the Physical World

This post describes my PHY 101 course, which is a General Education science course for non-science majors. I taught this course using a very traditional lecture approach (with PowerPoint!) for a few years, then started incorporating a few in-class group assignments. But I have become increasingly disenchanted with lecturing as a result of reading the Physics Education Research Literature and experimenting with active learning methods. So in the Summer of 2005 I redesigned my course from the ground up. Most of the active-learning materials available for a liberal arts physics course focus on practical aspects of physics, like electronics and optics. As a more philosophically-inclined physicist I wanted to teach my students about quantum mechanics and special relativity (as well as basic mechanics, etc.). So I created a series of 23 hands-on group activities to go along with 10 laboratory exercises. These activities use inexpensive materials and a variety of interactive computer simulations. The entire course is now activity-based. Students are given a worksheet that guides them through the activity or laboratory exercise, and they spend essentially all of their class time working in groups to complete the activity. I use online reading quizzes to ensure that students come to class having read the text, and I use homework from the textbook (Hobson's Physics: Concepts and Connections) to make sure they follow up on the ideas introduced in the activities. My tests are somewhat traditional, but heavily weighted toward conceptual questions (though still with some calculation required).

My first trial of this new method was in Spring 2006. Things went pretty well, but I was dissatisfied on two counts. First, my teaching evaluations were less than stellar (not bad, but not what I had come to expect). Second, and more important, I administered the EBAPS survey to my students at the beginning and end of the courses and saw no noticeable change. The EBAPS is designed to measure student attitudes about the nature of science and learning science. Although I am convinced that my activities did a reasonably good job of teaching my students physics concepts, these activities did little to change their perceptions of how science works.

For Spring 2007 I revamped several of the activities (cutting Special Relativity, sigh, but adding more on the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics). I also started the semester with two lectures (yes, lectures) on the Philosophy of Science and then incorporated questions in many of the activities that asked students to reflect on the experiments they had performed from a philosophical perspective. In addition, students were required to conduct an experiment of their own devising and report the results to the class as well as research a potentially pseudoscientific topic and present an evaluation of the topic to the class. The results were fantastic. Outstanding student evaluations and significant gains on the EBAPS in two categories (Nature of Scientific Knowledge and Evolving Knowledge) and no losses in the others. For Spring 2008 I plan to beef up the activities on the Second Law, but otherwise I will probably stay the course.

I recently gave a presentation on this class at a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. You can find out more about the class by visiting the web page I created to supplement that presentation. If you want to know more, please send me an email or just ask a question by leaving a comment.