Invited talk to be presented at PTEE2000 "Physics Teaching in Engineering Education", Budapest 13 - 17 June 2000.

Link to full paper (pdf-format)

Link to slides of talk (pdf-format)

IMPROVING ENGINEERING PHYSICS TEACHING
- LEARNING FROM PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH*

Jonte Bernhard
ITN, Campus Norrköping, Linköping University,
S-60174 Norrköping, Sweden
Phone +46 11 363318, Fax +46 11 363270
E-mail: jonbe@itn.liu.se Homepage: http://www.itn.liu.se/~jonbe

KEYWORDS: Physics Education Research

About ten years ago I started to include some "simple" conceptual questions in the exams of the physics courses I taught. These questions could be answered by qualitative reasoning and no calculations were needed. The results were first quite surprising to me: Most students performed very poorly on the conceptual questions which most physicists would consider as to be almost "to easy", while they some-times solved "difficult" multiple-step quantitative problems better than I expected.

My observation of the conceptual difficulties of my students agrees very well with the results of Recent Physics education research [1]: Most students, even at the university level, do not learn basic concepts as a result of standard transmissive instruction and often graduates with unaltered misconceptions and deep misunderstandings. By rote use of formulas students can solve standard quantitative problems without having a functional understanding of the concepts involved. Connections among concepts, formal representations, and the real world are often lacking after traditional instruction. Some types of conceptual difficulties are very hard to overcome. The reasons for this is that the students are coming to us with 20 years of real-world experience and have built strong mental models (preconceptions). They are not blank slates and an established mental model is very difficult to change. It is not uncommon for the "new" knowledge to be added to the "old" knowledge without altering the "old" conceptions, leading to what is called "cognitive schizophrenia".

In my talk I will give an overview of some different physics curricula, based on physics education research, which have proved to be effective in fostering a good functional understanding of physics. It is interesting to note that this can be done in many different ways: Some have reformed their lectures, some their recitations section and other their labs. The most radical changes involve the integration of lecture, recitations and labs into one integrated "studio" setting. The common denominator of these curricula is that they encourage active learning and peer co-operation and that they take students preconceptions into account.

REFERENCES

1. L C McDermott and E F Redish "Resource Letter PER-1: Physics Education Research", Am J Physics, 67, 755-767 (1999)

* Financial support from the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, Council for Renewal of Undergraduate Education, is gratefully acknowledged