A Study of the Development of the Paradigms in Physics Program

Creating a coherent narrative for the course.

Near the end of the course, this faculty member identified the biggest challenge in designing the course to be creating a coherent narrative:

. . . creating the narrative of the class, so that it foreshadows as well as is reflective in terms of time back in to what we've already done, to create something coherent that works across the whole ten weeks . . . if I had to say what's the big challenge, it's that. To create something that as a whole really works well and that what you learn in the first week helps you in the ninth week and what you learn in the first week makes you excited to stay on in the course till the ninth week and everything in between kind of works like that as well.

The faculty member commented upon the reflective process involved in creating such a narrative compared with simply choosing sections to cover in a textbook:

So just an appreciation of how much reflection is needed to make sure it's going to fit together . . . It's quite time consuming to try to look at it from a lot of different angles before you present it to the students to see what the repercussions are going to be if you try to teach it in a certain way . . . I certainly during this quarter have every once in awhile thought to myself, if I had just picked a textbook and followed the text book! These issues of how does it all fit together? Am I reusing the same symbols too many times? All of those things get taken care of if you pick a textbook.

In planning what to do next, about midway in the course, this faculty member reflected upon the need to stay focused on the theme of the course and the critical role physics plays in addressing contemporary challenges, rather than simply moving through specific topics inherited from the modern physics course that had been eliminated:

I had to do some thinking about how to plan the trajectory through the next few weeks and when I'm going to deal with electrons and quantum states being bound, examples of boundary conditions on differential equations, and I've decided to not do that right now because . . .we have everything we need to do blackbody radiation and absorption of light by CO2, which are the ingredients that will go into the climate model for the Earth so I want to keep driving things based on the challenges, the contemporary challenges, and to keep those at the forefront and only do the quantum wave states when I really have a reason to link them to a (contemporary) challenge.

Figuring out how to build on fundamentals while exploring complex relevant applications was, however, both challenging and enjoyable:

Cutting and pasting material together into a narrative that made sense, where it would build upon itself, so that I could make it easier to understand, so the last few weeks where things get more complicated would build upon things that came before, figuring out the right sequence but avoiding the inevitable boredom that might come if you do all the fundamentals in the first five weeks and all the applications in the second five weeks, trying to keep an even distribution of exciting examples while building on fundamentals was a fun challenge for me and I enjoyed it a lot.

Appendix D presents a table that lists the sequence of the topics taught during this first version of the course.

Gathering and synthesizing relevant information from diverse sources.

The initial challenge involved gathering and synthesizing relevant information from many places such as books, YouTube videos, and other Internet resources:

The material that is going into the class is coming from lots of different places so synthesizing material from three or more books is challenging . . . trying to get the labs and demonstrations figured out for the class. It would be fantastic if somebody made a little YouTube for every demonstration I'm going to give; then I could just watch that YouTube performance . . . The idea of doing this with active engagement, I haven't come across the resource that would have the things that I want, maybe it exists . . . And then to go with active engagement, concept questions, so there's probably a reserve; I should ask (a colleague) about that, if there's an online repertoire . . . I guess the challenge in general is bringing a lot of disparate things together.

The published resources included Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast by David Archer, Modern Physics by Kenneth Krane, Sustainable Energy-Without the Hot Air by David JC MacKay, and Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller.

This faculty member also wanted to find data available on the Internet to use during class activities and in homework assignments to “use them to make sense of the world.”

There's lots of data available on the Internet and they (the students) already have a lot of the tools they need to synthesize it and bring it together to make sense and compare things. So, for example, they can download sunlight intensity data, look it up in kilowatt hours and compare that to energy usage; just having those tools to be able to synthesize what's in the world around you, in the same way that we did with the hydroelectric power, a few little bits of data that are easily grabbed off the Internet, you manipulate them and use them to make sense of the world.

In addition, this faculty member sought to tailor “a little bit to the population” and so was looking for “things that are related to Oregon.” The opening task, for example, involved an order of magnitude calculation about how much hydroelectric power Oregon can expect from the Columbia River.

Near the end of the term, this faculty member reflected upon ways the Internet had afforded learning, not only for the students, but also for the faculty member in designing the new course:

I've been really pleased with how the Internet has supported me when I'm trying to learn about photosynthesis or tie in some area of physics with which I'm only partially familiar with, that I've been able to quickly pull together the details I need; it's always challenging to digest for the students and put it in the right language but the amount of information on the Internet was super helpful in that regard.

During class sessions, this faculty member frequently accessed relevant websites to display various aspects of a topic visually.

Matching the level of instruction appropriately to students' capabilities.

Another initial challenge was matching the level of instruction to the capabilities of the students. This involved, for example, identifying and using familiar notation, keeping a clear concise focus while developing a topic, and accommodating the wide variety of students' backgrounds and perspectives.

This faculty member recognized the need to become aware of what students already knew such as the notation used in the introductory courses:

Knowing what to expect from sophomore students who are about to start the class and trying to use notation that will connect with what they learn in 211 (first term of the introductory physics course)

Taking care not to get “lost in the weeds” when choosing what information to present:

My outline of the class is based on what I want the students to be able to do, for example, calculate the work, or the energy, that goes into a cycle of a heat engine, and when you start deconstructing what students will have to do in order to perform that, you find out how many parts there are and I think the challenge will be as these things get deconstructed, do I get lost in the weeds, teaching them the details of how to do it and losing sight of why we're trying to do it?

This challenge of maintaining a clear focus while exposing students to useful and interesting topics was a recurring issue mentioned later in the term:

I guess the other challenge was . . . it's easy to get off on lots of different tangents; I found myself working very hard to be as concise as possible and cover the essentials as briefly as possible for my goals, which are to be able to do the calculations related to sustainable energy, energy efficiency, and climate. I guess there's sort of a dual goal, because when I have the opportunity I want to be able to point out things like differential equations, so finding that balance was tricky.

This faculty member also was aware of likely differences in expectations by students interested in the physics applications emphasized in this course and by students preferring a more abstract mathematical approach:

The questions I was getting on it (the homework) were the types of questions I was expecting. I think what I'm reading into the class, or from past experience, is that there will be people who are really happy with the applied physics, the angle that I'm taking, but there will be other people who are not happy with it, they want cosmology or they want things as abstract and “take away all the details of the world” and just live in a sort of abstract space so there's this range of personalities and I haven't had much feedback from the people who might be on the other end of that range; I've had feedback from people who like what I'm doing but it's currently a mystery about how it goes down with the other types of personalities.

In addition to differences in preference for applied versus abstract approaches, the students differed in their basic physics knowledge:

Then navigating the beginning of electromagnetic radiation today, some students knew it already, and some students I don't think knew it much of it at all and I think that challenge has been coming up again and again; there's quite a variety of backgrounds.

These differences in knowledge and comfort with abstract formulations affected decisions about what level of model to present about topics such as blackbody radiation:

I was wrestling with how to best teach the blackbody spectrum and the issue that I think is an interesting one about connecting the students' physical intuition with the blackbody spectrum is that if you start straight in to saying ‘let’s imagine a cavity and the electromagnetic modes in that cavity coming to a thermal equilibrium and applying some Bose-Einstein statistics to those cavity modes,' it all becomes very abstract, You're not actually talking about an object radiating, you're talking about the properties of a cavity, and so that derivation gives you this beautiful result which is independent of any material but I feel it lacks something concrete, where is the light actually coming from?

Instead of starting with the abstract model of blackbody radiation, this faculty member chose to begin the discussion with a simpler model that was easier to envision:

So I chose to start with the oscillating charges picture, which doesn't give you a fundamental formula for a black body; it gives you what I would call thermal radiation but it's not black body radiation, because you can tweak that spectrum by having more oscillators at one frequency than another and so now I have to tell the students all the weaknesses in this model that I gave them and explain to them why we want a model that is independent of the material So I hope it works, that I'm building up to the more rigorous independent-of- which-material model by starting with sort of a toy model, to show them where it's coming from.

Such a conceptual development of the topic risked frustrating those students preferring abstract approaches.

I expect there will be some students who are frustrated that I'm not just giving them the formula in the first place and here's a whole day of class where maybe they'll never read those notes again and they'll never care about them but I'm hoping that enough students feel that there's value in having physical pictures of what's going on

One source of the large variation in student backgrounds was the inclusion of some students who were already enrolled in the junior-level paradigms in physics courses. This faculty member thought that although there would be some overlap, such students could appreciate the applications of physics that this course emphasizes:

I think there are times where the paradigms students are feeling that the pace is slow . . . I think from my experience teaching the paradigms is that there is a lot of material that I'm going over, where it comes to the applications of the physics that they haven't heard in the paradigms, so it's slow for them when I'm talking about one of the fundamental things they've seen in the paradigms but I think that's a fairly small fraction of the total time of the class.

Because transfer students would be enrolling in this course as juniors, there likely would continue to be a wide spread of backgrounds until local community colleges could begin offering a version of such a course. Some of the paradigms students seemed to assume the role of facilitators in their small groups and one possibility would be to actively coach such more advanced students to do so.

Creating new homework sets that emphasize “thinking like a physicist”.

Designing the homework was a major effort, aiming at the appropriate level, timing the content to match the pace of topics discussed in class, crafting the problems to develop student understanding, using the homework to strengthen experimental as well as problem-solving skills, creating homework problems with motivating contexts from everyday life or intriguing situations, and cautioning students to work on problems themselves before consulting colleagues and model solutions.

I have been happy that the homework question level seems to be appropriate. Writing new homework sets is a big component of the class in itself, just making sure they're integrated with the lectures. I guess I've been paying a lot of attention to making sure I've covered enough material; the homework's due on Friday and at the latest I'm covering material on Wednesday, keeping those in sync is challenging. I'm happy with how it's going so far.

In contrast to typical end-of-chapter textbook problems with well-specified variables, this faculty member designed homework problems that required more than simply manipulating numbers:

In the homework, I guess even in the midterm, I thought about what would students do if they just took the units, like I've got a number in meters and I've given them a heat conductivity in some other unit and I asked them for a heat flow, flux, what would happen if they just mashed those numbers together to get something in the right units? Would they get the answer right? And I think most of the questions I asked they would not get the answer right, if they just mashed the numbers together without understanding. In the midterm that was a little more challenging because the problems had to be short as well as avoiding this issue of following recipes. In the homeworks, they could be longer and often I wouldn't give them all the numbers so they couldn't just take numbers and mash them together. So I guess that was my strategy to check for understanding.

Deciding which aspects of a problem to make more open-ended required careful thought. The students seemed to recognize that the homework problems required more than simply manipulating equations:

Students have been using office hours and coming with good questions. I talked to one of the students, asked him if the homeworks for this class are taking a reasonable amount of time, not too short, not too long, compared to other classes and he thought that was true but he does feel like he is writing more sentences in his answers than in a typical physics class; it's not just a list of numbers and equations

The students varied, however, in their adjustment to working on such open-ended content rich problems. One who was struggling with the more open-ended real world problems in the homework, came to office hours and asked “how do I solve these? What's the recipe?”

and I didn't know what to say. . .Since then I came across a quote by Feynman, I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly, but he says “how can people learn without understanding? It seems like there are people who do something else, like they're learning by rote or by memorization but not by understanding, and how could you do that? How does it work if you're not learning by understanding?” So in retrospect, I guess, my answer is that you solve these problems by understanding, so I think a lot of the students in the class are on board with that, or at least after a couple of weeks they are; I don't know if I've got everybody on board so that remains an outstanding challenge to articulate that idea to everybody.

Evidence of a shift from seeking a recipe toward developing deeper understanding to work a homework problem seemed apparent in the types of questions some students began asking during office hours:

My feeling is that that did happen. The types of questions I was getting in office hours were kind of shifting, like “I just want to understand how this works and then I'll go figure it out.” To have that type of question more was maybe wishful thinking but I think that was happening.

After the in-class lab discussed below, this faculty member pondered whether to include in the homework some aspects of handling experimental data that seemed to need attention such as uncertainty calculations:

I guess the other thing I struggled with this week was, either I can assign another experimental lab and give them more practice with experimental skills or maybe I can get some of that achieved by writing questions in my homework that are “imagine you just took these data, these are the numbers you got, calculate a standard deviation, figure out an uncertainty, what does that mean later in your calculation, as it propagates, and how does it compare to what you'd expect from a ruler that you can't measure less than two millimeters, or something, and get them to do those fractional uncertainties, you're dividing two numbers that both have 2\% uncertainty, the uncertainty grows to 4\%, understanding some of those rules, so that's my plan right now, before even thinking about giving them a whole another hands-on lab to give them some questions that will get them thinking about”how do you handle experimental data?"

Near the end of the course, this faculty member reflected upon the process of designing the last set of homework questions:

I guess something that I haven't talked about on the recording too much is the trying to craft good homework problems and I thought that was a fun process last week coming up with, this is basically the last long homework that they're going to turn in, is due on Friday this week so crafting those last questions, I got help from the textbook about climate change, that obviously inspired some of the lecture today, for one of the questions, and then one of the questions comes out of modern physics, it's more of a typical physics question, do an integration, do a differentiation, find peaks, find total powers,

This faculty member put a lot of effort into creating questions with motivating contexts from everyday life or intriguing situations:

but then there are two other questions, one is about how a thermos works; (the postdoc) had a good idea of comparing a thermos that uses a vacuum space where the transfer of heat is only through blackbody radiation and a thermos that uses a mechanical insulator and thermal contact and heat flows through a different mechanism so I think that's going to be a nice comparison for them to do, and then the other question is about astronauts going off into space; the space ship keeps them pretty well warm from the sun until they go into the shadow of the moon and it starts cooling off really fast, so now they're having to bring back in the heat capacity that they learned earlier to help them figure out how quickly it's going to cool when the power coming in that was warming the space ship is now switched off and now it's only cooling and I hope I haven't cranked up the complexity too much for them I guess I'm saying pulling a list of questions out a standard textbook might not be enough to get the students engaged in them, putting effort into writing homework questions I think pays off, that's my hypothesis.

Creating the weekly homework was such an intensive experience that this faculty member thought it would not be feasible to produce a new set each year; a long-term challenge would be maintaining the homework's effectiveness if future students choose to access the model solutions that had been provided this year:

Something I'm worried about is how model answers get into the environment and pollute future generations of students; I'm not going to have the energy to write whole new problems sets every quarter so this set of students will be the only ones who will be perhaps uncontaminated. It will be interesting to see if students are so desperate and overworked that they resort to finding the model answers from pervious years and the understanding starts to go down but I hope that doesn't happen. The midterms I never gave model answers but the homeworks all have model answers to go with them. I think at the start of next term, I just have to acknowledge that those banks of information exist, and you don't actually get much of your grade based on the homework and if you don't do the homework yourself then you're going to do badly on the midterm and final.

Although the department encourages working on homework together, students also are alerted to the importance of developing the deep understanding they will need, particularly in getting started on their own, in solving problems during an exam.

Preparing and integrating laboratory experiences within the course.

This faculty member also spent a lot of time and effort preparing for a major laboratory experience, measuring Planck's constant, that previously had been part of the modern physics course. Rather than occurring in a separate room at a separate time, this laboratory experience was to happen in the scale-up classroom during two regular 50-minute class sessions. This required designing a feasible version for more students than had been enrolled in the modern physics course, gathering and transporting equipment to the regular classroom, and deciding how to structure the experience so that students had opportunities to be thoughtful and creative within this context.

Although a lab measuring Planck's constant had been part of the modern physics course, this faculty member chose to initiate several modifications:

. . . in that format we haven't done that experiment before. It involved me doing the experiment at least one iteration of the experiment on the table here myself, trying it out and deciding that I've got to change this and this and this and then doing it all again and then getting kits built for twelve to fifteen groups, sourcing the stuff

The modifications included giving students some opportunities to be thoughtful and creative:

It was a scramble to just make everything to work for the lab and I was thinking about how much information to give them versus how much I wanted them to discover on their own and be creative, that's the fun of doing an experiment is having some creative part in it . . . so I think the balance came out ok, we spent the total of one hour and thirty five minutes, was maybe the total time they spent on the lab over the course of two days, and I hope we got a decent balance, because I certainly didn't tell them everything to do, a lot of groups found out on their own.

Some students did not finish within the class sessions so the faculty member and the post-doc assisting in the class provided extra time outside of class for those who needed it:

A lot of people used some extra time on Tuesday to complete the lab, so (the post-doc) and I were available to give them the lab experiment kits; it was basically people who felt like they hadn't finished. There were probably people who could have come back to redo and could have benefited from that as well but it was nice to create that slack time, so that rather than having class time where only half the class needs it, to have some slack time outside of class.

Another aspect of integrating laboratory experiences within the class session involves monitoring and assisting students as needed. Many small groups worked well together but not all:

So reflecting on how the lab went, some of the groups worked the way I hoped they would in terms of everybody got their hands into the experiment and contributed their own ideas and their ideas were good and other groups, I saw one group in particular where there were two girls and one guy and the stereotypical roles (the guy did the work?) yep and the girls acted disinterested and I couldn't tell if it was true or just because of the roles that had been taken or what it was, so next time I would really like to say “driver” and “navigator” roles, in the way that (a colleague) does with his programming courses or maybe there are other ideas as well but if those roles are assigned and then systematically changed during the lab time.

During a later interview, the faculty member continued to ponder this issue and elaborated on driver and navigator roles:

We've already talked about the challenge in the hands-on experiment getting all three members of the group to actually touch the equipment and feel like they had had experience using the equipment so that's been on my mind, that's one of my goals, that everybody has experience working with the breadboard and putting the circuit together, so next year I'll implement the idea of . . .working in the navigator and driver format, that somebody who feels weak and unconfident putting together the circuit, will have a navigator right over their shoulder saying now do this, now do that; it won't slow them down that much but it will make a huge difference for the person who is getting to use their hands.

The faculty member had been disappointed in the students' treatment of uncertainties in analyzing their data and distinguished between a laboratory experience testing a hypothesis with one just exploring how things are related to each other:

I thought it was useful to be aware of what I call errors and what I call uncertainty, I need to be very clear in my own mind what I want to get across, because there is quite a complicated web of how things are interrelated and it depends a little bit on when you're doing a physics experiment, what you choose to do depends a lot on how you frame the question and what your goals are and if you're trying to test a hypothesis or are you just exploring and finding out how are these things related to each other. It was good for me to realize that I hadn't been very clear with the students exactly, that I wanted them to test the hypothesis that \(E = hc/\lambda\text{.}\)

Discussing what was happening in the new course at an Upper Division Curriculum Committee meeting helped this faculty member think about how to prepare the students better for this lab during the next version of the course:

I think the main thing that I realized from the meeting was that if I can articulate to the students what I think this experiment can achieve and if earlier in the class I have given them some practice with uncertainty analysis, that it can go so much more smoothly. Basically. . .taking each student difficulty and seeing where it can be addressed earlier in the class before we get to the lab so that when they actually do the lab they have all of the tools that they need. . . so I feel like this year was to be experimental, let's give them nothing, and now I feel like I have a much clearer picture, these are the things I need to give them.

In a later interview, this faculty member reiterated the plan to improve the students' experience by preparing and practicing some skills ahead of time:

Now that I know that I can anticipate what the challenges will be in the lab, how the students will find the lab challenging, I can add more preparation to the weeks before the lab so that the lab comes out better, their experience with the lab; they're practicing skills that they've seen before rather than doing them for the first time, that's something that I didn't get right for the first time.

Although the integrated lab was challenging to prepare and do, this faculty member valued the shared understandings and sense of engagement it fostered:

I feel now when I talk about diffraction, they have a real grasp of it, and it's not abstract any more, and I feel like the students are more engaged than they were before the lab; I think it helped getting people engaged . . .I think for a lot of the rest of the course, (this) is going to be something that we can come back to and all agree on in our discussions, a reference point that we all share. I don't think it's something, it was a new thing for a lot of people.

In reflecting upon the lab near the end of the term, the faculty member articulated several advantages of integrating laboratory experiences within a lecture setting:

I think if the lab is done at a separate time in a different room, you have the temptation to let the two things get out of sync; the lecture can get out of sync with the lab, and you don't feel so bad about it but when it's in the lecture, it's really obvious that you're out of sync Having the lab in the lecture hall does give the opportunity to have a recap, the last five to ten minutes of the lab day can be spent everybody together talking about what they just did and often in some lab environments, the professor probably could go down to the old lab and give a lecture but often not all the students are going to be there at once and so the chance to address everybody and to prime everybody, to have some influence on what they're thinking about and what the expectations are for what they're going to do with the lab, it's a lot harder to control that if you do it separately.

This course thus initiates the students into a common practice in the paradigms in physics courses junior year, integrating labs as integral parts of the courses, so that the faculty member and all of the students talk about what happens in a lab and interpret what their findings mean, at the appropriate moment within the curriculum.

Designing intriguing demonstrations.

Although designing the course was a lot of work, this faculty member felt rewarded when students seemed to learn:

Every time a student says that was a great demo, or you can just see light bulbs going off in their heads, I feel like “Oh, something really went well just now!” And that happened frequently enough to keep me excited about the course.

The session introducing quantized energy level diagrams, for example, started with a student blowing taps on a bugle while an iphone app recorded the audio frequency spectrum, which was then projected on the screen on the wall:

I think pulling out the iphone app and using the frequency spectrum as a function of time to see that the frequencies coming out of the bugle were quantized was a really helpful visual I think to make a connection between what you know from your ears, that you can put that down on paper, in a level diagram, so I hope that helps people when they look at level diagrams now, it has more meaning so I was trying to address the challenge of trying to make level diagrams less mysterious, that they can be applied to more everyday phenomena as well.

This faculty member put a lot of thought and creative effort in devising such demonstrations.

Fostering student engagement during class sessions.

Although committed to the paradigms in physics policy of using interactive engagement strategies, this faculty member previously had taught paradigms courses only after other faculty members had established a conversational style in which the students felt comfortable speaking in class:

When I was teaching . . . in paradigms, I would come after (a colleague) and (another colleague) had set the climate of the class in a more conversational style and I found the students much more willing to speak and so I didn't have to put any effort into making the conversations happen in the way that (a student in the course) . . . is always willing to say what's on his mind and what's bugging him; Imagine having a whole class where everybody's comfortable and you don't have to do any work in terms of generating a conversation! and so this is my first time contacting students, pre-(colleague), pre-(another colleague). . .in the future, I've been thinking when I want more conversation, how am I going to do it?

Sometimes the students were responsive, however:

The students have been very good at talking with each other and collaborating, I'm happy with that, and any questions I've posed to the class related to issues like sustainable energy they're very responsive in thinking about it.

Planning for such collaborative experiences was intentional and systematic:

A rule of thumb that's working well for me, even if I want to push through a lot of material in one day, to stop myself and make sure there's at least ten minutes of either a demonstration, something that breaks up the traditional lecture, ideally you're doing a calculation or working in a small group, so to make sure I've picked something out for each day that's going to break that traditional lecture and I guess never to go more than one lecture without coming back to why it's related to one of the great challenges I'm trying to address, and I think I remember to do that.

Sometimes the time devoted to active engagement was limited however:

I was pretty happy with how the flow of things went, maybe a challenge was to have enough time to have more active engagement and have them do something in every class, certainly we had time for at least five minutes in each class but it wasn't a lot of time.

Thus this faculty member planned class sessions to be a combination of coherent presentations of information with small group activities in which students interacted with one another but recognized the challenge of increasing the time when such interactions occurred.

Communicating clear guidelines for a term paper assignment.

This faculty member chose to include writing a term paper as a major assignment and put a lot of thought into communicating clearly what was expected:

I guess the other thing that's been on my mind this week is making sure that the students get guided toward a good topic for their projects . . . I got a few students coming to talk with me about what their paper will be about, their term paper, and they're definitely, somehow the telepathy is working, they're getting on the same wave length as me in terms of what it is that I'm looking for in the project, at least for the students who have come to talk to me, I feel like they're really getting a much better sense of what I'm looking for

This faculty member wanted each student to choose a topic of interest and to examine it from multiple perspectives, relating the topic pragmatically to a contemporary challenge as well as explicating the details of the physics:

. . . to look at a challenge from multiple perspectives, like a contemporary challenge; one of the people I talked to today was asking about fusion, how he could relate that to plasmas and hydrodynamics of plasmas . . . so getting the sense that you can look at this process of fusion from the perspective of a physicist, trying to know the details of it, but also from the perspective of the person who is asking “is this going to solve a societal challenge and how does the physics connect to the challenge?” so at the end of the day, the cost of doing this and in terms of how much money it will cost to build the equipment or the final efficiency that we might expect to get, those things that might not, that a physicist might overlook and just say I've got my blinders on and I'm just doing the physics of how this works, so to be able to look at it from both those perspectives and do both justice in a single piece of writing

Most of the students seemed to accept such an assignment but this faculty member also worried about those who had not checked in about their topics:

I had a show of hands, maybe 60, 70\% of students felt like they're comfortable with their topic and there are some students who have been really proactive about coming to talk to me and say, “what do you think of this idea?” – typically the students who are concerned about keeping their grade high, that would be one reason, or students who are really interested in a topic that's kind of on the edge of whether or not it's appropriate so I'm really happy to have those discussions, that's been interesting, so I hope there's not 20\% of the class that I kind of lose between the cracks that don't come and sort of engage with me and discuss it. I want to keep encouraging them and give feedback before they put a lot of time into the project

This assignment turned out well in that the students seemed to understand the intent of making connections to both the physics and the world:

I'm enjoying reading the term papers, those were turned in on Monday, and I've read maybe 10 or 12 and so far I'm really excited about what I'm reading; I'm learning things myself; I felt that they got the, what's the word, understood my purpose, understood the intent of the project, to be doing both some physics but also seeing how it relates to the world, the fact that they were buying in to that premise of you were going to do both things at the same time and write about it in an accessible way.

The faculty member had specified the importance of defining and graphing variables, justifying any equations, discussing causal mechanisms, and providing relevant diagrams:

First of all for the paper to be from the point of view of the physicist, or at least using and applying physics, that it should be discussing the relationship between variables that you can quantify, so it is possible to draw an x-y graph with two variables that are measurable, that it is going to include an equation and it is going to include a discussion of where that equation comes from, what's causing that mathematical relationship . . .I did emphasize that a physicsy kind of paper would have diagrams that show mechanistically what's going on and I was really happy to see the diagrams that I saw. I saw some really nice figures and graphs, so I'm really glad that I kept emphasizing that you're going to have to do some of these yourselves, some nice hand drawn examples; in several papers there's weaknesses where the mathematics doesn't, there's a mistake in the math leading to a mistake in the conclusion, I'm not excited about that, I'm more excited that the intent and the purpose were there. The effort that went into being really clear about what my expectations were with the term paper and trying to get everybody on the same page as to why we're doing it and what we want to get out of it, I feel is paying off now that I'm reading them and reading the kinds of things I was hoping to read.

The students also seemed to appreciate this assignment. On a questionnaire at the end of the course, they rated various aspects of the course from 1 (not interesting) to 5 (interesting) and from 1 (not useful) to 5 (useful). The mean rating for “learning about a topic of your choice and writing a paper about it” was \(4.5\pm0.8\) for both “interesting” and “useful.”