Section 3.1 Motivation for making changes.
¶In 1996, three faculty members successfully applied for funding from the National Science Foundation to redesign the upper-level physics curriculum. The principal investigator (PI) for the project described the immediate motivation for making changes:
...the engineering college made an offer that our engineering physics undergraduates could join their co-op program but that program was a five year program and the students were away in spring of their third and fourth years so they did their co-op spring and summer of years three and four. Our old curriculum had in both the junior and senior years year-long sequences so we couldn't fit the requirement if we kept our year-long sequences.
In addition to noting this pragmatic goal to increase flexibility in the course sequences in order to accommodate students interested in the co-op program, the PI expressed a strong commitment to addressing the needs of all students:
I think my strongest belief at that time, and probably still is, it is our moral responsibility to take the students we have and move them all forward as best we can. Particularly at a state university that means acknowledging that lots of our students may not come in with the kind of background education that I certainly had, and that we have to make the curriculum accessible to as many students as possible...
Meeting the needs of students transferring from community colleges was of particular concern as well as finding ways to soften the ‘brick wall’ that most students seemed to be encountering as they transitioned from the introductory physics courses into the upper-level courses for majors. One of the co-PIs described the origin of this term as follows:
We surveyed the students as part of this process of putting paradigms together, and one phrase that one of the students used stuck with us; he referred to the ‘brick wall’ that came in the junior year and we picked up on that, that the students found that going through the introductory courses was one thing and then they entered the junior year and effectively...they were required to be quite sophisticated thinkers from day one and we didn't really change those expectations at all through the following two years...
In discussing what to do, the PIs formed the goal to increase the demands of the upper courses much more gradually.