Interactive Quizzes and IQ-questions (http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~itiq/iq/iqpreface.html)

Inspired by the Peer Instruction approach of Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard and the local implementation of Professor Mike Downer, in the past three years I have been teaching Engineering Physics using an interactive approach. I intersperse interactive quiz (IQ) sessions in a lecture. To ensure the quality of these sessions, I have developed a collection of questions for these sessions. They are typically "bite-size" questions, which help me to check to what extent students are following the lecture. I also use them to highlight the lecture material and to accentuate nuances in the homework problems. So after attending each class, students feel that they have "gotten" something from the lecture. At least they have learned a handful of IQ questions.

The IQ questions are non-calculator based problems. They are typically,

• conceptual questions,
• questions on signs, trends, and ratios,
• questions with simple numbers, which require the back-of-the-enevelope type of calculations, where the use of a calculator is unnecessary,
• questions related to algebraic expressions, etc.

A large number of these questions follow a two-part format. The first part is typically easy and the second part, which is referred to as the "extra", is slightly harder. In this manner I can keep those faster-working students busy during the whole IQ session. Our present collection of IQ questions contains more questions than those which I use in the IQ sessions. Some of these questions have been used as lecture transparencies. Since the IQ questions used are on the Web, when an IQ transparency is shown on the screen, students only need to jot down this question number. This enables them to pay more attention to the explanation, instead of busily taking notes.

Many students have told me that they like these IQ questions as a study tool in learning physics. Once they have read the textbook and work through the IQ questions, they find that doing homework is a relatively easy task. When students asked me for homework hints, I would often ask them to work on a specific IQ question or a set of IQ questions.

In early years, I used an IQ-log to keep track of the IQ questions covered in my class. To see the Physics303K IQ-log for Fall '97, please click here. A glance at this log would give the reader some idea how the IQ approach has been implemented. The present IQ-library consists of IQ questions from two sources: the set of questions we have developed and questions from the Peer Instruction book by Mazur.

Acknowledgment: My gratitude to our assistants Wenjun Li, Chad Bagwell, Natasha Wood and Bo Hu for their excellent contributions to our project of putting iq-questions on the Web. We thank Scott Stebleton for simplifying the downloading process. Special thanks to our former chairman Austin Gleeson , our present chairman Ken Gentle and departmental staffs for their support, and also to the College of Natural Science for the the ITAC grant which partially supported this project.

C. Chiu, 8/20/2000