Physicists and educators have developed a curriculum for college-level students that shows promise in helping students in introductory physics classes further practice and develop their calculus skills.

Now, a team of physicists and educators at the University of Kansas has developed a curriculum for college-level students that shows promise in helping students in introductory physics classes further practice and develop their calculus skills, especially those who test lower in core math abilities. They term the approach «energy-first.»

Their findings appear in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Physics Education Research.

«It’s almost always the case that in introductory physics courses students are first taught mechanics in the context of forces. Later in the course, they are shown that they can also apply the concept of energy to solve most of the problems they already learned to solve with forces,» said co-author Christopher Fischer, engineering physics director and associate chair of physics & astronomy at KU. «We decided instead we want to teach energy first — because, number one, we think it’s a more generally applicable way of thinking about physics. Number two, it also allows us to achieve our secondary goal of providing the students with more opportunities to use and practice their calculus skills.»

From fall 2015 to spring of this year, Fischer and his KU colleagues monitored students and performed testing in two introductory physics classes at KU taken mostly by students pursuing degrees in the physical sciences and engineering. For one, they devised an «energy-first» curriculum. For the other, they kept to a more traditional approach that taught students about forces before teaching them about energy.

The presence of two different physics courses using different curricula naturally provided an opportunity for the researchers to compare the outcomes of students in the two courses.

Story Source: Materials provided by University of Kansas. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.