New innovative approach in teaching calculus based
general physics:
Textbook: Matter and Interactions I and II by Ruth Chabay
and Bruce Sherwood
Article on BEMA: A comparison between the new approach and the traditional approach
Universities participated in this report
Abstract:
The performance
of over 2000 students in introductory calculus-based electromagnetism (E&M)
courses at four large research universities was measured
using the Brief Electricity and Magnetism
Assessment (BEMA). Two different curricula were used at these
universities: a traditional E&M
curriculum and the Matter & Interactions (M&I)
curriculum. At each university, post-instruction
BEMA test
averages were significantly higher for the M&I curriculum than for the
traditional
curriculum. The differences in post-test averages cannot be
explained by differences in variables
such as pre-instruction BEMA scores, grade point
average, or SAT scores. BEMA performance on
categories of items organized by subtopic was also compared at
one of the universities; M&I averages
were significantly higher in each topic. The results
suggest that the M&I curriculum is more effective
than the traditional curriculum at teaching E&M
concepts to students, possibly because the learning
progression in M&I reorganizes and augments the traditional
sequence of topics, for example, by
increasing early emphasis on the vector field concept and by
emphasizing the effects of fields on
matter at the microscopic level.
Test
instrument: Password protected. Instructors if you are interested in viewing the
test, please contact: chiu@physics.utexas.edu
Sample final exams for classes based on the new approach