{"id":2399,"date":"2008-03-20T10:32:10","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T10:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/20\/uncomfortable-questions-physic\/"},"modified":"2008-03-20T10:32:10","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T10:32:10","slug":"uncomfortable-questions-physic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/20\/uncomfortable-questions-physic\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncomfortable Questions: Physics Curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johan Larson asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a good one, but it’s a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I’d like to change locally, but I’m not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say how much of what I see is a problem with physics education in general, and how much is due to local quirks (our trimester calendar being the biggest such issue) that don’t generalize well.<\/p>\n

That said, my feeling is that most of the problems we have are with the introductory classes. I went to an American Association of Physics Teachers workshop on calculus-based intro physics a few years back, and one factoid mentioned there really stuck: Only about three percent of students who take introductory physics ever take another class in the subject. That’s pretty dismal.<\/p>\n

My general suggestion regarding reform of introductory physics classes is that the goal should be to make them look less like high school physics.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a huge problem with the introductory mechancis classes that I’ve taught here, and it hits the best students the hardest. The standard curriculum for introductory college physics is pretty much indistinguishable from a good high school class: you do kinematics, then Newton’s Laws, then energy, then momentum, and so on.<\/p>\n

The class looks extremely familiar to any student who has had a good high school class, and as a result, many of the best students just… shut down. They’ve seen the basic material before, and they did well with it the first time around, so they can just coast through the first two-thirds of the class without really needing to engage their brains. This later comes back to bite them in the ass, when we finally do hit material that’s new to them, because they’ve let their study habits atrophy, and so some really bright kids will crash and burn when we hit vector angular momentum, as they’ve gotten out of the habit of doing the reading and homework.<\/p>\n

Most of the students in our introductory classes come in thinking that they’re going to be engineering majors, and the just-like-high-school approach doesn’t encourage them to change their minds. The engineering departments run an intro class that’s based around projects and real problem-solving, while we’re hitting them with block-on-an-inclined-plane problems that they’ve seen before. It helps solidify their impression of physics as some boring drudgery that you need to get through in order to do the cool engineering stuff.<\/p>\n

I don’t have a single reformed curriculum that I strongly prefer, but I’m in favor of just about anything that would shake things up. We’re trying that this year, using the Matter and Interactions<\/a> curriculum developed by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood, which starts off with the relativistic expression for momentum as the first equation in the book, and uses a lot of numerical simulations in VPython to teach intro mechanics. I’ll be teaching E&M out of that starting a week from Monday, and it’ll be an intersting change of pace.<\/p>\n

I’ve also gotten a lot of good stuff out of the Six Ideas that Shaped Physics<\/a> books by Thomas Moore. These are based around a handful (plus one) of simple central organizing principles– “Conservation Laws Constrain Interactions,” “Electric and Magnetic Fields are Unified”– and use those as a framework for presenting the usual topics in a different way. It’s a less radical departure than Matter & Interactions, but it’s still not at all like the typical high school class.<\/p>\n

In both of these cases, the material is presented in a manner that’s much closer to the way practicing physicists think about physics. The Matter & Interactions curriculum maps very easily onto numerical approaches to physics theories, while Six Ideas highlights the centrality of conservation laws and unification of forces. They both offer richer, more engaging approaches to the material, that give an earlier hint as to why somebody would consider physics for a major or a career.<\/p>\n

And, most importantly, they’re different enough from the usual approach that even students with a strong background won’t feel like they’ve seen it all before. It forces them to engage with the material a little more, if only to see how to re-arrange the concepts that they learned in high school to better suit the new presentation. That should keep the better students a little more involved, and might help to show them that physics is more than just memorizing lists of equations.<\/p>\n

When you get past the introductory level, the best approach really depends on the department and its resources. Particularly at a liberal arts college, where students generally have outside requirements that limit the number of courses they can take in the major, you won’t necessarily be able to teach the same breadth of topics as a major research university, and you need to make some choices. When I was at Williams, for example, they had a large concentration of faculty doing research with lasers, and they made the most of that by working optics all through the currciulum. This played to the strengths of the department, and I think I have a better feel for a lot of quantum-optical phenomena as a result.<\/p>\n

Of course, there’s always a trade-off with this sort of decision– in this case, they didn’t have anybody to teach nuclear and particle physics, so my knowledge of those areas remains very hazy to this day. But that’s ok– the world needs atomic and laser physicists as much if not more than particle physicists. There are other schools where they teach nuclear physics throughout the curriculum, and never really deal with optics at all.<\/p>\n

The introductory classes are the closest thing to a standard curriculum across all schools, so they’re the place for general reform. And as far as I’m concerned, just about any reform is good, as long as it doesn’t look like high school physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johan Larson asks: How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major? This is a good one, but it’s a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I’d like to change locally, but I’m not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say… Continue reading Uncomfortable Questions: Physics Curriculum<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}