Reinventing college physics for biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum

By Edward F. Redish, David M. Hammer. 2008

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group has done a five-year project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics, which primarily serves life-science majors. We refocused the class on helping the students learn to think scientifically—to build coherence, think in terms of mechanisms, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed the course to tap into students’ productive conceptual and epistemological resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular materials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned all written homework and examinations and administered pre-post conceptual and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on pre-post conceptua...

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22d0d44498021cb9c3088f0d3435c80dd60f5b53

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, background): “There is some current interest in reforming the introductory course for biology and premedicine students [371].”
(Re)Framing Educational Possibility: Attending to Power and Equity in Shaping Access to and within Learning Opportunities (2013, background): “…around perceptions of physics as either a set of facts owned by an outside authority and distributed to the students by the teacher through classroom tasks, or as a body of ideas and problems to be addressed creatively and jointly by teachers and students [Redish, 2004; Redish & Hammer, 2009].”
How students blend conceptual and formal mathematical reasoning in solving physics problems (2011, methodology): “Our second instructional example comes from the algebra-based introductory physics course described by Redish and Hammer (2009).”
Beyond Epistemological Deficits: Dynamic explanations of engineering students’ difficulties with mathematical sense-making (2011, background): “Examples of ‘resource‐tapping’ curricula exist (Hammer & Elby, 2003 ; Redish & Hammer, 2009 ), and more scholarly effort should be spent toward designing curriculum and assessment that attends to both the conceptual and the epistemological aspects of students’ reasoning.”