WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: A Research-Based Transformation of Purdue.s Modern Mechanics Course

SPEAKER: Professor Rebecca Lindell,

TIME: Wednesday January 27, 2016 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Purdue's introductory calculus-based physics course, Modern Mechanics, utilizes the Matter and Interaction curriculum by Chabay and Sherwood (Chabay and Sherwood, ). Incorporating the results of modern physics, this text presents an alternative approach to presenting the physics content, specifically utilizing the fundamental principles of momentum, energy and angular momentum combined with the properties of statistical mechanics to explain physical phenomena. In addition, students learn how to visualize physics using computational modeling. We have spent the last three year researching ways to transform how we teach this course by utilizing many of the approaches developed by Physics Education Research (PER) and other education researchers. A specific focus of this redesign was making this course more interactive and integrated. In this talk I will present the learning theory behind our research-based model for this transformed course, the results of our implementations to date, as well as solutions to the four key issues that must be addressed by any transformed course: Development, Implementation, Evaluation and Sustainability.