3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Does it stick? Long-term outcomes for biology majors from introductory physics optimized for the life sciences
Catherine Crouch, Swarthmore College
This talk will present the design and structure of our reformed introductory physics course for life science majors (IPLS), together with key IPLS course outcomes, both short-term outcomes measured at the end of the course and long-term outcomes measured 1-2 years later, including as part of the senior biology capstone. We find that student attitudes to learning physics and student appreciation of the relevance of physics for biology improve, and those improved outcomes persist at least a year after the course ends. We also find that at the end of the course, IPLS students display a greater ability to analyze a biological problem in a manner that requires combining ideas from the course in a novel manner, compared to life science students who took the introductory physics course for engineers. In the senior biology capstone course, students who took IPLS demonstrated both stronger quantitative reasoning than their peers who did not take IPLS, and the ability to use specific physics ideas and mathematics learned in IPLS, as much as 2-3 years after completing the course. Finally, the talk will reflect on the goals, methods, opportunities, and challenges involved in carrying out such an education research project, which was led collaboratively by two physics education researchers and a biologist with experience in biology education research. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.