Talk:Physics for beginners/Introduction

Transfer from MOM introductions

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Most college-level conceptual physics textbooks seem be either a beefed-up high school course or a watered down versions of a course intended for pre-med or other STEM programs that require little or no calculus. We need a more philosophical "Physics for Poets" approach for college students seeking to satisfy a general education science course. Let's find out if students like this book by Matthew Raspanti.

I propose that this short book be supplemented by a traditional yet simple approach to the mathematical rigor of physics with something like Physics Classroom. And, we need some hands-on labs as a third component of the course.

This MOM version of PfB might serve another purpose. This calculation shows that a proposed reform that will reduce the cost of higher education by 1% for 1 year has an expected value of $10 million, even if it has only a 1% chance of succeeding. I concede that the true-false and fact-based nature of these quizzes are of low quality. This defect can be repaired by offering this activity to everybody at zero cost, and using it as part of an "undergraduate prelim" that could be used for a number of courses, in what I call the "flipped semester". We compensate for the weakness of these quizzes as an assessment tool in a number of ways:

Prelims are pass-fail, and this fact should dissuade the high performing students from devoting too much time on these low quality quizzes. In order to accomplish the promised cost reductions, each college or department could set standards. The online package needs to allow students to practice online at ZERO cost so that the can predict their grade when they show up for a low cost prelim.
Low performing students also need to be treated well. A simple solution is to offer a 15 week course with the understanding that students can "test out" of the first 7 weeks. But more elaborate solutions are also available. For example, each instructor could offer alternative paths to get into the advanced course, such as a well written essay, or better yet, meaningful contributions to the bank of exam questions for this course.
Since the nature of the exam and the standards are made publicly available, some students could earn cash by coaching other students so they could pass this "undergraduate prelim" for a given course, with the understanding that the university could offer the briefer course at a lower cost to the student. A skeptic may wonder why a university would implement such revenue reducing reforms. The answer is simple: Students will be attracted to universities that behave this way. We should not be afraid of the chaos of an economy that consists of students buying and selling expertise in passing these prelims. Everybody knows that the best economic systems tend to be decentralized.

Physics for Beginners is also available in PDF form on Wikiversity via the following links:

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These quizzes take you through each of the 20 chapters in short steps.

This is what educators call a "low quality" quiz, for two reasons: (1) The questions do not make you think, and (2) most sentences are either true or false, depending on how they are interpreted, and or, one's opinion. A simple way to use this quiz in the classroom is to not grade the questions, but use it to inform students on how quickly they are reading the book and how much they seem to be grasping, compared with the rest of the class. If a student's grade is too high, the instructor might even coach the student to be careful not to work too hard on this particular component of the course!

People like to make up fancy names when the nature of a familiar thing has changed. You call this a "quiz" or a "test", but I prefer to call it an "instrument". The word "test" is revealing: It suggests that the instructor is testing whether the student has learned the material. When such a "test" is placed in the public domain for all too see, that "test" no longer serves it's original intended purpose. To be honest, I don't really know how this publicly available "instrument" should be used. I am building it because my experience is that even before the internet, all "secret" test questions eventually become public.

For more thoughts on this, please visit these two Wikiversity pages:

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