Identification of threshold concepts involved in early electronics: Some new methods and results

This manuscript reports the threshold concepts identified over a two-year study in early circuits and electronics courses. Some novel methods have been used to improve confidence in the identification process. We also identify some concepts, potentially threshold, that ought to have been mastered in high-school physics courses but that are often absent from student repertoires. Weak understanding of these underlying concepts may be a confusing factor for researchers in their search for threshold concepts as well as an additional source of trouble for students of electronics

The Mathematics of Information Science

This paper describes a course, The Mathematics of Information Science, which was taught at Towson University in Spring 1998, 1999, and 2000. This course is the junior level interdisciplinary course of the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation program. The effectiveness of the course in teaching problem solving techniques and abstract mathematical ideas is documented. The students constructed their own knowledge from laboratory experiences involving digital logic circuits. They were subsequently challenged to abstract this knowledge and to find ways to solve progressively more difficult problems using these digital logic circuits. The mathematics of encoding and decoding information constituted the major mathematical content of the course. This course is shown to be effective in introducing prospective elementary and middle school teachers to abstract mathematical ideas and problem solving techniques

High-Tech Tools for Teaching Physics: the Physics Education Technology Project

This article appeared in the Journal of Online Teaching and Learning September 15, 2006.This paper introduces a new suite of computer simulations from the Physics Education Technology (PhET) project, identifies features of these educational tools, and demonstrates their utility. We compare the use of PhET simulations to the use of more traditional educational resources in lecture, laboratory, recitation and informal settings of introductory college physics. In each case we demonstrate that simulations are as productive, or more productive, for developing student conceptual understanding as real equipment, reading resources, or chalk-talk lectures. We further identify six key characteristic features of these simulations that begin to delineate why these are productive tools. The simulations: support an interactive approach, employ dynamic feedback, follow a constructivist approach, provide a creative workplace, make explicit otherwise inaccessible models or phenomena, and constrain students productively

An electronics Threshold-Concept Inventory: Assessment in the face of the dependency of concepts

The Theory of Threshold Concepts (TCs), first articulated by Land and Meyer in 2003, provides educators in many disciplines with a tool to identify those special ideas that both define the characteristic ways of thinking of expert practitioners, and cause the greatest learning difficulties for students. Concept inventories are popular assessment tools, epitomized by the widely-accepted Force Concept Inventory of Hestenes et al., introduced circa 1992. It is a natural marriage to bring these two thrusts together to produce “Threshold-Concept Inventories”. We report ongoing work to develop and verify such a TC-inspired inventory assessment tool in the field of electronics and simple circuit theory. We identify the difficulty in the development of questions targeted at assessing understanding of single threshold concepts and present results in support of a strategy to deal with this

An error based mathematical module to enhance learning in signals and systems

During the last years, the lecturers at the Circuits and Systems Engineering Department at the E.U.I.T. de Telecomunicación at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid are observing more and more serious mathematical errors in the different exams and exercises taken by the students. Although some of these mistakes can be considered unacceptable in engineering disciplines, it is possible for a student to pass the final exam regardless of these mistakes. In this scenario, and aware that results were getting worse and worse year after year, it was considered convenient, and almost indispensable, to develop math exercises that students must practice if they want to progress following a continuous and formative assessment method along their engineering studies. The first part of this work is to analyze basic mathematical errors in final exam exercises of the course “Signals and Systems”. We present and illustrate the most relevant errors detected during the last two years final exams of that course. The information obtained permits us to identify the main lacks, difficulties and defaults of the students. The second part of this work is to develop a training module in order to the students can practice as many times as they want with simple exercises dealing with the topics where frequent errors are detected. After practicing they must pass an initial test to make sure that students have acquired the adequate basic mathematical background and skills to progress successfully in the mentioned course. The questions and exercises have been written using different formats, most of them to be compatible with Moodle platform requirements