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The necessity of students’ engagement with the subject matter for successful learning is welldocumented in education research in general, and in physics education research in particular. This study examines the merits of two different programs designed to improve student learning through enhanced student engagement with the material. The target populations of the two programs are different: One is the group of students taking a physical science class as part of the general curriculum required of non-science, non-engineering majors; the other is the group of students, mostly in engineering disciplines, who must take the calculus-based introductory physics sequence as part of their majors’ core curriculum. The physical science class is required for non-science majors due to the importance of having a science-literate public. To improve this group’s engagement with the subject matter, Physics in Films approaches the subject in the context of scenes taken from popular Hollywood films. Students’ learning in the class is evaluated by comparison between performance on pre- and post-tests. The students are also polled on their confidence in their answers on both tests, as an improved belief in their own knowledge is one of the goals of the class. For the calculus-based physics group, a large issue is retention within the major. Many students change to non-science majors before the completion of their degree. An improved understanding of the material in the introductory physics sequence should help alleviate this problem. The Physics Suite is a multi-part introductory physics curriculum based on physics education research. It has been shown to be effective in several studies when used in its entirety. Here, portions of the curriculum have been used in select sections of the introductory physics classes. Their effectiveness, both individually and in conjunction, is studied. Students’ mastery of concepts is evaluated using pre- and post-tests, and effects on class performance and retention within the major are examined. Input from both groups of students in the study was obtained through interviews and surveys.

Thesis (Sc.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1979. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND SCIENCE / Bibliography: p. 424-432. / Sc.D.

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This study examined traditional instruction and problem-based learning (PBL) approaches to teaching and the extent to which they foster the development of desirable cognitive processes, including metacognition, critical thinking, physical intuition, and problem solving among undergraduate physics students. The study also examined students' approaches to learning and their perceived role as physics students. The research took place in the context of advanced courses of electromagnetism at a Canadian research university. The cognitive science, expertise, physics and science education, instructional psychology, and discourse processes literature provided the framework and background to conceptualize and structure this study. A within-stage mixed-model design was used and a number of instruments, including a survey, observation grids, and problem sets were developed specifically for this study. A special one-week long problem-based learning (PBL) intervention was also designed. Interviews with the instructors participating in the study provided complementary data. / Findings include evidence that students in general engage in metacognitive processes in the organization of their personal study time. However, this potential, including the development of other cognitive processes, might not be stimulated as much as it could in the traditional lecture instructional context. The PBL approach was deemed as more empowering for the students. An unexpected finding came from the realisation that a simple exposure to a structured exercise of problem-solving (pre-test) was sufficient to produce superior planning and solving strategies on a second exposure (post-test) even for the students who had not been exposed to any special treatment. Maturation was ruled out as a potential threat to the validity of this finding. Another promising finding appears to be that the problem-based learning (PBL) intervention tends to foster the development of cognitive competencies, particularly physical intuition, even if it was only implemented for a short period of time. Other findings relate to the nature of the cognitive actions and activities that the students engage in when learning to solve electromagnetism problems in a PBL environment for the first time and the tutoring actions that guide students in this context.

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Knowledge of how different vocation-oriented groups of students respond to the classroom environment is a serious concern of an instructor in a first year college physics course -- especially those who accept the responsibility of facilitating the resolution of vocational choice determination. Knowledge about the nature of the instructor's class -- in terms of how they respond to various aspects of the teaching-learning situation -- has interpretative value in making decisions about special instructional provisions for the groups. This thesis was an attempt to provide information about the nature of the differences between vocation-oriented groups of students, in terms of selected dependent variables, important to the instructor of a first year college physics course. The data for the study was gathered from one class of a Physics 110 course offered at the University of British Columbia. Students in the class were divided into three groups based on vocational choice. Each of these groups were further subdivided in terms of the amount of high-school physics experience. Nineteen dependent variables were classified into three categories: (a) Antecedent -- Variables which provided information on a student's general academic ability, and his competence in Science subjects at the high-school level, (b) Cognitive -- Variables which provided information on student achievement during the year in Physics 110, and (c) Affective -- Variables providing information about a student's attitude towards concepts related to science in general and physics in particular. The data gathered was analysed first by a one-way multivariate analysis of variance. This analysis showed that there was a statistical significant difference between vocation-oriented group centroids on the dependent variables taken all at a time. The analysis was carried further to determine the nature of these group differences through a discriminant analysis. The discriminant analysis produced two significant discriminant functions which provided information on the variables that contributed most to differentiating between the groups along each function. The overall conclusion that was suggested is that only those students who were required to take just one year of college physics were clearly distinguished from the other vocation oriented groups. The major distinction between these groups being academic ability. Years of schooling in a subject area was also an important distinguishing factor for instructional purposes, but this factor did not discriminate between the various vocation-oriented groups. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

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The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems. However, many students taking introductory physics courses fail to acquire a command of the concepts, methods and tools presented in these courses. The reforms proposed by this thesis focus on altering the content of introductory courses rather than content delivery methods as most reforms do. This thesis explores how the performance on a widely used test of conceptual understanding in mechanics compares between students taking a course with updated and modified content and students taking a traditional course. Better performance by traditional students was found to stem from their additional practice on the types of items which appeared on the test. The results of this work brought into question the role of the introductory physics course for non-majors. One aspect of this new role is the teaching of new methods such as computation (the use of a computer to solve numerically, simulate and visualize physical problems). This thesis explores the potential benefits for students who learn computation as part of physics course. After students worked through a suite of computational homework problems, many were able to model a new physical situation with which they had no experience. The failure of some students to model this new situation might have stemmed from their unfavorable attitudes towards learning computation. In this thesis, we present the development of a new tool for characterizing students' attitudes. Preliminary measurements indicated significant differences between successful and unsuccessful students.

This study has the following general objectives: first, to present in detail the techniques that the author has developed and used in designed the course and the final materials produced for am introductory physics course in Mechanics; second, to state and examine the important blended ingredients used to get a new strategy for teaching-learning in which and individualized pace together with a group interaction is used; third, to analyze a combination of structural and operational course where concept, structure formation, and problem solving are emphasized.