Thomas Moore
Department of Physics
Pomona College
Claremont, California
tmoore@pomona.edu
Six Ideas That Shaped Physics is a fundamentally new approach to the
one-year calculus-based introductory physics class. This project grew
out of the Introductory University Physics Project (IUPP), a
seven-year, multi-million-dollar NSF-funded project to reexamine the
content and pedagogy of the one-year calculus-based course as we
approach the 21st century, spur the development of alternative
curricula, and test and evaluate the most promising of those
curricula. I will outline the history and aims of the IUPP and discuss
how the Six Ideas development project emerged out of the IUPP.
The Six Ideas course was designed from the beginning to reflect three guiding principles affirmed by the IUPP steering committee early in the project: (1) the pace of the course should be reduced, (2) the course should more strongly emphasize 20th-century physics, and (3) the course should have a ``story-line'' that helps guide and motivate students. In addition to these IUPP principles, I wanted the course to (4) reflect and use the best of what we have learned in the past decade or so about effective physics pedagogy, and (5) be different without being radical. I will spend some time discussing the design of the Six Ideas course and how it addresses these five goals.
The development of the Six Ideas course was a wonderful excuse and opportunity to experiment with a variety of approaches to the course and evaluate the results. In the course of the eight years that I have been working on the course, I have had both successes and failures. I will explore a number of things that we learned about (1) how the way that students are evaluated can be very important in determining their attitudes and behaviors, (2) how to make the course easier for professors to use effectively, (3) how to get (at least most) students to read ahead of time and come to class, (4) how to design problems for homework and class discussion, (5) how to make even a large class more interactive and reduce the time the students spend passively listening, (6) how to use computers (and how not to use them), (7) what topics students seem to find most engaging, (8) what kinds of labs are most fun, (9) how to keep constituencies happy, and so on. I will also discuss some remaining unsolved problems.
We have evaluated the effectiveness of the Six Ideas using Hestenes' and Halloun's Force Concept Inventory (FCI) test, offering the test once near the beginning and again at the end of the first semester to evaluate the improvement in students' ability to apply basic Newtonian concepts to everyday situations. I will report on results from the 1996-1997 school year that show normalized gains that are comparable to the best reform curricula in the U.S. and are significantly better (in the statistical sense) than the gains achieved by students in traditional courses across the U.S. I will also argue that this gain probably is not due to any kind of Hawthorne effect.
Finally, I will discuss our plans for the immediate future and various ways that you can get more information about the project.