The speaker is a Lead Physics instructor from Clackamas Community College. The main research ideas from the speaker not only help underperforming students do better performance in general physics courses, but also give instructors chances to prepare better for general physics. The reason to focus on this research is to give basic concepts to students, who do not have any background knowledge in physics in order to succeed as they move forward to general physics or other related fields.
The motivation for the speaker to start the research is to reduce the course fail rate in a 200-level general physics course. After analyzing the statistics data, the speaker found out some students did not have high school physics in the past. Therefore, students who fared poorly might need to know what skills they need to develop before they get enrolled in a general physics course. For example, getting used to a different method for solving problems. Evaluate the decisions they made when solving problems. The flow of thinking is to have a plan before doing the studying, then adjust at the end. This problem solving strategy is included: understand the problems by drawing the picture, devise a plan to identify the physics, carry out the plan and not just plug in the numbers into formulas, and look back to check if the answer makes sense. This method is a really useful format for solving problems, especially finding out the challenge steps in how to make a plan. Once the students from a 100-level preparatory course get the general physics concepts with engineering-minded ideas they should be ready to take the 200-level course.
The second piece of the seminar is to talk about what general physics content will be needed when college students decide to major in sciences or engineering departments. By sending out surveys and analyzing the feedback data from different professors, the speaker knows what must be covered in the 200-level general physics course. The weak parts from students include vector integral, coefficient of restitutions, rotational dynamic, and phase transitions. These gave the speaker an idea to redesign the course by decreasing emphasis and increasing some topics in the weak part to improve student success in the near future.
In this seminar, we learn that problems solving skills, strategic thinking, and extending thinking are all important pieces for being ready to take a general physics course. As a teaching assistant in the physics department, this seminar helps me to look back at what I did not think about in the past, and what I should improve in the future.
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