Students' Understanding of Direct Current Resistive Electrical Circuits

Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic examinations in electric circuits. Two versions of a diagnostic instrument called Determining and Interpreting Resistive Electric circuits Concepts Tests (DIRECT) were developed, each consisting of 29 questions. The information provided by the exam provides classroom instructors a means with which to evaluate the progress and conceptual difficulties of their students and their instructional methods. It can be used to evaluate curricular packages and/or other supplemental materials for their effectiveness in overcoming students' conceptual difficulties. The analyses indicate that students, especially females, tend to hold multiple misconceptions, even after instruction. During interviews, the idea that the battery is a constant source of current was used most often in answering the questions. Students tended to focus on current in solving the problems and to confuse terms, often assigning the properties of current to voltage and/or resistance. Results indicated that students do not have a clear understanding of the underlying mechanisms of electric circuit phenomena. On the other hand, students were able to translate easily from a "realistic" representation of a circuit to the corresponding schematic diagram.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physics - Physics Education Research Supplement. No known publication date as ye

Oscillator Damped by a Constant-Magnitude Friction Force

Although a simple spring/mass system damped by a friction force of constant magnitude shares many of the characteristics of the simple and damped harmonic oscillators, its solution is not presented in most texts. Closed form solutions for the turning and stopping points can be found using an energy-based approach. A dynamical approach leads to a closed form solution for the position of the mass as a function of time. The main result is that the amplitude of the oscillator damped by a constant magnitude friction force decreases by a constant amount each swing and the motion dies out after a finite time. We present these two solutions and suggest ways that the system can be used in the classroom

Traditionally taught students learn; actively engaged students remember

A common narrative in physics education research is that students taught in lecture-based classes learn less than those taught with activity-based reformed methods. We show this narrative is simplistic and misses important dynamics of student learning. In particular, we find students of both methods show equal short-term learning gains on a conceptual question dealing with electric potential. For traditionally taught students, this learning rapidly decays on a time scale of weeks, vanishing by the time of the typical end-of-term post-test. For students in reform-based classes, however, the knowledge is retained and may even be enhanced by subsequent instruction. This difference explains the many previous pre- and post-test studies that have found minimal learning gains in lecture-based courses. Our findings suggest a more nuanced model of student learning, one that is sensitive to time-dependent effects such as forgetting and interference. In addition, the findings suggest that lecture-based courses, by incorporating aspects designed to reinforce student understanding of previously covered topics, might approach the long-term learning found in research-based pedagogies

Sixteen years of Collaborative Learning through Active Sense-making in Physics (CLASP) at UC Davis

This paper describes our large reformed introductory physics course at UC Davis, which bioscience students have been taking since 1996. The central feature of this course is a focus on sense-making by the students during the five hours per week discussion/labs in which the students take part in activities emphasizing peer-peer discussions, argumentation, and presentations of ideas. The course differs in many fundamental ways from traditionally taught introductory physics courses. After discussing the unique features of CLASP and its implementation at UC Davis, various student outcome measures are presented showing increased performance by students who took the CLASP course compared to students who took a traditionally taught introductory physics course. Measures we use include upper-division GPAs, MCAT scores, FCI gains, and MPEX-II scores.Comment: Also submitted to American Journal of Physic

The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) Project

How do you keep a large class of undergraduates actively learning? Can students practice communication and teamwork skills in a large class? How do you boost the performance of underrepresented groups? The S tudent- Centered A ctivities for L arge E nrollment U ndergraduate P rograms (SCALE-UP ) Project has addressed these concerns. Materials developed by the project are now in use by more than 1/3 of all science, math, and engineering majors nationwide. Physics and chemistry classes are currently in operation, with biology, engineering, and oceanography adaptations in progress. Hundreds of hours of classroom video and audio recordings, transcripts of numerous interviews and focus groups, data from conceptual learning assessments (using widely-recognized instruments in a pretest/posttest protocol), and collected portfolios of student work are part of our rigorous assessment effort. We have data comparing 16,000+ students. Our findings can be summarized as the following: Ability to solve problems is improved Conceptual understanding is increased Attitudes are improved Failure rates are drastically reduced, especially for women and minorities Performance in later courses is enhanced In this talk I will discuss the classroom environment, describe some of the activities, and review the findings of studies of learning in various SCALE-UP settings

Considering Perception and Cognition in the Design of an Instructional Software Package

An instructional multimedia software package was developed for use by students taking introductory physics courses. Studies have indicated that many of these students possess a set of common misunderstandings of graphs describing the motion of objects. The software described here was constructed as a student tool which would specifically address these difficulties. The impact of educational psychology, cognitive science, and human factors research on software design and user interface development are described. This work was supported by NSF grant MDR-9154127 with additional support from the RasterOps Corporation, Sony Corporation of America, and Apple Computer, Inc. Considering Perception and Cognition in the Design of an Instructional Software Package Introduction This paper describes the influence of educational psychology, cognitive science, and human factors research in the development of an instructional software package for use by introductory physics students. Certain previo..