Instructor's Guide: A Reform-Oriented Introductory Physics Textbook
Instructor's Guide: A Reform-Oriented Introductory Physics Textbook
Instructor's Guide: A Reform-Oriented Introductory Physics Textbook
Contents
1 Newtonian Physics
0 Introduction and Review 1 Scaling and Order-of-Magnitude Estimates Motion in One Dimension 2 Velocity and Relative Motion 3 Acceleration and Free Fall 4 Force and Motion 5 Analysis of Forces Motion in Three Dimensions 6 Newtons Laws in Three Dimensions 7 Vectors 8 Vectors and Motion 9 Circular Motion 10 Gravity
2 Conservation Laws
1 2 3 4 5 Conservation of Energy Simplifying the Energy Zoo Work: The Transfer of Mechanical Energy Conservation of Momentum Conservation of Angular Momentum
5 Optics
1 2 3 4 5 The Ray Model of Light Images by Reection, Part I Images by Reection, Part II Refraction and Images Wave Optics
quizzes are absolutely necessary as well. I also require my students to ask me a question on each quiz paper about something they didnt understand in the reading. Although it is time-consuming to write out the answers, I have found that this dramatically increased the percentage of students who read the book and also caused the better students to read it much more carefully. (2) Always start with discussion questions that seem ridiculously easy, and then move on to more dicult ones as seems appropriate. It is not hard to judge the relative diculty of the questions in advance, but the absolute level can be harder to determine. Often the questions that seem insultingly simple are surprisingly dicult. Nothing is lost by starting with easy questions, and it builds the students condence. (3) It is vitally important to provide some clear method of feedback so that incorrect ideas are detected quickly and the whole class ends up understanding the concept correctly. This happens naturally if you do the questions as a dialog between you and the students, but if they are working in small groups you will need to provide some mechanism. When my students are doing small group work, I encourage them to write down their answers, so that I can look over their shoulders and see what theyre thinking. It can also be helpful to ask a particular student to repeat her explanation to the whole class.
Getting psyched
Attention to some psychological and social factors can also help to make the method more successful. Experience (refs (7) and (8), and my own anecdotal evidence) seems to show that it is poison for active learning if one grades on a curve in the full sense of the word, so that a certain percentage of students is guaranteed to fail and no more than a certain percentage can get As and Bs. Classic grading on a curve has the eect of setting the students against one another, which is antithetical to the cooperative nature of the active learning activities. This does not mean that one must use the traditional scale on which 90% is an A, 80% is a B, etc., but it does mean that the standards should be absolute rather than relative. Its also important to get the students out of the traditional theater-style seating arrangement. This is needed in order to make the students focus on one another instead of on the sage on the stage. I usually teach in the same room where the students have lab, so I just have the students get into their lab groups, at their lab benches. Another method is to have them arrange their desks in groups of four, butted together like a pinwheel. Many instructors who use active learning techniques assign participation grades because they feel that otherwise students will not be motivated to do anything. In my experience it has been sucient simply to (1) provide incentives (reading quizzes) for doing the reading beforehand, (2) provide incentives to show up to class (written work of some kind collected at nearly every meeting), (3) pay attention to social and psychological factors, and (4) most importantly, to make sure that the level of diculty of the activities is not too hard.
At this stage, most students will accept an equation such as x = (1/2)at2 without having the faintest idea that doubling the time interval results in four times the value of x. Exercise 3A can be helpful.
one method should have little trouble doing the other, and instructors who like Knights system can simply tell the students to work the relevant homework problems that way. Since analyzing forces is so dicult for students, it is not a good idea to assign all the homework problems in this chapter at once. It takes time to build prociency in this vital skill. Students are virtually never willing to believe that friction is independent of surface area in a context such as car tires. Exercise 5A is a quick way to address this diculty.
Chapter 7 - Vectors
(recommended days in class: 2) Vector terminology, notation, and techniques are introduced. The discussion focuses on r (displacement ) vectors. You and I visualize certain geometric gures when we add vectors analytically, but the connection between the picture and the sines and cosines is not obvious to students. For this reason, I nd it helpful to have them perform a graphical addition at their desks using rulers and protractors. If you havent tried this in your classroom, you may be amazed at the amount of diculty they have.
Chapter 10 - Gravity
(recommended days in class: 2)
Many misconceptions about force and motion will surface again in this new context, and many of the discussion questions are focused on using the new context to take another swipe at the incorrect ideas. Apparent weightlessness can be demonstrated by dropping a leaking water bottle into a bucket, and also by swinging a bucket in an overhead circle, then asking the students to predict what will happen if the bucket isnt going fast enough over the top. The shell theorem is dicult conceptually for students. I have found exercise 10A helpful in this regard.
behind your back while you crank, announcing each change out loud. Ask them to gure out how you knew when the bulb was lit. Next demonstrate how one generator can cause another to spin like a motor, and then propose a perpetual motion machine in the generator lights a lightbulb, but as a special bonus, it also operates a second generator. Bring plenty of spare bulbs, but they dont burn out as frequently if you make sure not to light them for more than a second or two.
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Chapter 1 - Vibrations
(recommended days in class: 1) 11
Students often have a great deal of diculty with the concepts of amplitude, period, frequency, and k. The may describe both frequency and amplitude as how fast it goes, and may not be able to give a verbal description of k at all. Exercise 1A can help to cure these problems through concrete experience.
Chapter 2 - Resonance
(recommended days in class: 1) The chapter leads o with a description of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, and watching the video is an unforgettable experience for a student. The physics of the event, however, was rather complex: a positive-feedback cycle involving patterns of turbulent air ow above and below the bridge. It is better to start with simpler examples before showing the video. A very simple and eective demonstration is to strike a pendulum with a hammer and various frequencies and observe the results below, at, and above resonance.
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A helpful demonstration is to provide three unmarked sources alpha, beta, and gamma and a counter, and ask the students to determine which source is which.
Chapter 6 - Electromagnetism
(recommended days in class: 1) Magnetic forces can be demonstrated using a bar magnet and an old computer monitor, preferably one that has a degaussing button. Beware of ruining an expensive color tube this way! After showing, for example, that an upright
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bar magnet attracts the beam of electrons from the right side, the students are suprised to see that it repels them from the left side; this is because they intuitively expect the bar magnet to act as a monopole. It is necessary to mark the screen with a piece of masking tape to make the slight shift in the image visible. This is perhaps the chapter that departs most radically from the coverage of the traditional book. Amperes law and the Biot-Savart law are omitted, and induction is described only qualitatively. The lab manual, available through the www.lightandmatter.com web page, contains a laboratory exercise in which students make qualitative and semiquantitative observations of induced electric elds.
Book 5: Optics
Terminology and order of topics
Students are alerted to the standard terms concave and convex, but the text uses the words inbending and outbending, which are more relevant since a lens can have one convex face and one concave one, etc. (Diverging and converging are also problematic, since they logically refer to properties of a bundle of rays, not of the lens or mirror.) Sign conventions are eschewed in favor of setting up equations with plus and minus signs determined by graphical reasoning using ray diagrams. The student is however alerted to the use of sign conventions and the interpretation of positive and negative focal lengths. Although curved mirrors are less frequently encountered than lenses in real life, I start with curved mirrors because the ray diagrams are easier to draw, and this gives the student a ghting chance to build a conceptual understanding before encountering all the equations.
Exercise 3A can be used. Many students have a surprisingly hard time drawing the specular reections correctly; if the incoming ray gets closer to the normal, they may draw ther outgoing ray farther from the normal! It helps if you explicitly tell them to draw in the normal. (Working spontaneously, they may draw in the tangent to the surface, which is harder to see because it coincides so closely with the mirrors surface.)
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References
(1) Hewitt, Conceptual Physics (2) Knight, Physics: A Contemporary Perspective, preliminary edition, Addison Wesley, 1997. (3) Arons, Teaching Introductory Physics, Wiley, 1996. ISBN 0-471-13707-3. (4) McDermott, Tutorials in Introductory Physics, Prentice Hall. (5) McDermott, Physics by Inquiry, Wiley. (6) Anne G. Young, Project STAR Survey: How Much Do You Know About the Nature of Light?, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Anne G. Young, Physics - Bldg. 8, Rochester Institute of Technology, POB 9887, Rochester, NY 14623-0887. 17
(7) Sheila Tobias, Theyre Not Dumb, Theyre Dierent. (8) Eric Mazur, Peer Instruction: A Users Manual. (9) An article describing Spotter will appear in The Physics Teacher in September 2003. Digital reprints are available at http://www.lightandmatter.com/spotter/spotter.html.
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