A class where qualitative discussions, coming weeks before computationally complicated practice, helps students problem solving abilities

Psychologists have long known that an expert in a field not only knows significantly more individual facts/skills than a novice but also has these facts/skills organized into a mental hierarchy that links the individual facts (at the bottom of the hierarchy) together with larger more-encompassing ideas (at the top of the hierarchy). In the Spring quarter of 2012, UC Davis offered 4 sections (about 180 students each) of the first quarter of introductory physics, Physics 9A, covering Newtonian mechanics. One of these sections is a treatment group and had the entire 10-week quarters set of ideas introduced, largely qualitatively, in the first 6 weeks followed by the 4 weeks where students learn to use those ideas to solve the algebraically complicated problems that physicists prize. The other three sections were organized as usual. The treatment group and one of the other sections were taught by the author and were identical (same homework, discussion, lecture, and lab) except for the organization of the content. After controlling for GPA as well as Force Concept Inventory pretest scores, the treatment group was found, with better than 99% confidence, to score higher on the final exam. Some curricular details of the treatment class are discussed in this paper.

Improving students problem-solving ability as well as conceptual understanding without sacrificing the physics content of a class

Four sections of introductory physics for physical scientists and engineers (about 180 students each) are compared. One section, treatment group, was organized so that students worked to learn the classical ideas connecting forces and motion over the first 6 weeks of the 10 week quarter and then used the final 4 weeks to apply those principles to algebraically complicated problems. The other sections learned ideas at essentially the same time as calculations over the entire 10 weeks of the quarter. The treatment group and one of the control sections were taught by the same instructor, had identical curricular materials and this instructor was blind to the comparison measure, the final exam. After controlling for GPA as well as for incoming conceptual understanding, the treatment group was found (with greater than 99% confidence) to perform better on the final exam than the control group taught by the same instructor and, by a similar measure, the treatment group performed significantly better than any other section. The treatment group also had higher conceptual learning gains and so should be better prepared for later learning.