Section 2.2 Offering two new sophomore courses designed to increase students' sophistication in developing physics knowledge, advanced mathematical techniques, writing ability, and sense-making skills
¶The two new sophomore courses had been well received. Enrollment increased in Physics 315, Physics of Contemporary Challenges, from 38 students during Winter 2017 to 64 during Winter 2019, and for Physics 335, Techniques of Theoretical Mechanics, from 29 students during Spring 2017 to 54 during Spring 2019.
The faculty member designing and teaching the new Physics 315 course was adapting aspects of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to exploring the physics of contemporary challenges such as power generation, energy efficiency, and global warming. Homework assignments and a term paper emphasized making quantitative estimates in such real world contexts. The faculty member reflected:
I really enjoy reading the papers...So one of the things I wanted them to take away from doing that paper is rather than having every homework question written for them and laid out on the page, where pretty much all the information they would need is there on the page, is to have them create their own question and solve it, so I think I could frame the project as this is your chance to write a homework question, to make it in a rich context, applicable to the real world, gather together the information that needs to be on the page to pose the question, and then to write a solution to the question; I'm thinking about order of magnitude calculations.
The students seemed to understand this unusually complex intent and most had been able to create such documents well. Another faculty member provided some anecdotal feedback about this course:
I do hear from students a little bit about 315 and 335…and I've heard good things actually about both of them in one place or another. Amusingly I did the honors college Summer Read; students read a book and then I meet with a bunch of them and we talk about it. We read one of Randall Munroe's books, What If?, is what it's called, and one of the students in that group explained that the things in the book, that he could already see how the book was created because he had taken Physics 315 and he knew how to estimate things, which was really encouraging to hear.
The faculty member designing and teaching the new Physics 335 course placed an unusual emphasis on explicit development of sense-making skills with the intent of increasing the success of less prepared students. Monitoring outcomes was part of one of the faculty member's formal physics education research projects, approved by the university's Institutional Review Board:
(A graduate student) has done a set of interviews with students who took 335 the first time it was offered, to follow up with them about how they continue to use sensing making in their lives, and the feedback that we've been getting is that they find the course valuable; they use the strategies in subsequent physics courses, and sometimes in other parts of their life; the people who took 335 before the paradigms said it was a nice introduction into it and people who took 335 at the same time as the paradigms said that they wished they had taken it earlier.
The success of these new courses prompted the decision to shift the order of the junior-level paradigms in physics courses as described in section 4.5 below.