Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

9-30-2024

Published In

2024 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

Abstract

At Swarthmore College, we began developing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) course nearly 20 years ago. The electricity, magnetism and optics semester was launched in 2008 and both semesters have been offered regularly since Fall 2015. Two primary goals of this curriculum are (1) to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and biomedical contexts, and (2) for students to come to view physics as relevant to the life sciences. To evaluate whether these goals are achieved, we conducted a longitudinal interdisciplinary study assessing students' abilities to use what they learned from IPLS in later biology and chemistry courses, as well as students' long-term attitudes toward physics. We found that IPLS students were more likely than non-IPLS students to reason quantitatively and mechanistically about particular biophysical phenomena, even up to two years after leaving the IPLS course, and were significantly more successful at building a physical model that combined ideas in a manner novel to them. We also found that positive changes in IPLS students' attitudes about the relevance of physics to the life sciences persisted for at least two years after the course ended. The specific methods and findings of this study have been reported elsewhere. In this paper, we describe how our IPLS curriculum leverages the rich network of interdepartmental faculty relationships at small institutions to support students to recognize the connections between physics and their other science classes, and describe how the opportunities for close relationships between students and faculty made possible a decade of research into the curriculum outcomes. By identifying and tracking student trajectories over time and across disciplines, we were able to identify student reasoning and attitudes that were specifically associated with prior or concurrent enrollment in IPLS.

Editor(s)

Q. X. Ryan, A. Pawl, and J. P. Zwolak

Conference

Physics Education Research Conference 2024

Conference Dates

July 10–11, 2024

Conference Location

Boston, MA

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

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