Section 3.3 Overall vision.
¶Physics faculty members participated individually and collectively in many conversations about content over a long period of time. Eventually the physics faculty voted unanimously at a meeting to undertake the major revision described below. In an article entitled “Paradigms in Physics: A new upper-division curriculum,” published in the American Journal of Physics, Manogue, Siemens, Tate, Browne, Niess, and Wolfer (2001), described the overall vision agreed upon for the Paradigms in Physics Program as follows:
We aim to improve students' comprehension by cultivating their analytical and problem-solving skills, to provide bridges between the content of different subdisciplines, and to offer a more varied and flexible learning experience (p. 978).
Rather than consisting of a set of separate courses organized around subject matter topics, the junior and senior years were to become distinctly different in nature:
The junior-year curriculum involves a sequence of case studies of paradigmatic physical situations and conceptual examples, some involving two or more subdisciplines. We thus equip students with concrete examples on which to base an abstract deductive framework. The senior year consists of more advanced courses, each of which consolidates an individual physics subdiscipline, in addition to electives offering introductions to some major areas of current research. (p. 978).
They described the basic principles guiding their choice of topics for the junior year courses as:
First, we chose simple examples, with only enough complexity to adequately develop the needed concepts. Second, we chose central concepts and examples which lie at the heart of physics – concepts which professional physicists use often. Third, we chose examples and concepts common to more than one of the traditional subdisciplines of physics or to an important area of application or research. Finally, we sought to include enough subject matter from each subdiscipline to provide a sufficient basis for the senior courses (p. 980).
The physics faculty agreed upon the coherent vision expressed above through the planning process discussed next.