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Calculus-Based Physics Without Lectures
Abstract
Every fall several hundred thousand students enroll in calculus-based “engineering” physics courses throughout the United States. Informal statistics tell us that over half of them will fail to complete the sequence of introductory courses. These students complain that physics is hard and boring. The most compelling student critique of traditional introductory physics and chemistry courses comes from college graduates in the humanities who were engaged by Sheila Tobias to take introductory science for credit. These students paint a devastating portrait of introductory courses as uninteresting, time consuming, narrowly fixated on the procedures of textbook problem solving, devoid of peer cooperation, lacking in student involvement during lectures, crammed with too much material, and biased away from conceptual understanding.
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Cited by
Handelsman, J., Ebert-May, D., Beichner, R., Bruns, P., Chang, A., DeHaan, R., Gentile, J., Lauffer, S., Stewart, J., Tilghman, S. M., et al. (2004) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1096022 · Cited by 928
Singer, S., & Smith, K. A. (2013) · Journal of Engineering Education · doi:10.1002/jee.20030 · Cited by 835
Finkelstein, N. D., Adams, W. K., Keller, C. J., Kohl, P. B., Perkins, K. K., Podolefsky, N. S., Reid, S., & LeMaster, R. (2005) · Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research · doi:10.1103/physrevstper.1.010103 · Cited by 645
Synthesis of discipline-based education research in physics
Docktor, J. L., & Mestre, J. P. (2014) · Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research · doi:10.1103/physrevstper.10.020119 · Cited by 549
Helping physics students learn how to learn
Elby, A. (2001) · American Journal of Physics · doi:10.1119/1.1377283 · Cited by 351
Metadata
- Authors
- Laws, P. W.
- Venue
- Physics Today
- Publisher
- AIP Publishing
- Published
- 1991-12-01
- Volume
- 44
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 24-31
- ISSN
- 0031-9228 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-0699
- OpenAlex
- W1983897650
- Cited by
- 249
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 16.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
