Rethinking Physics for the Life Science Students | Edward F. Redish UMD 2020/12/02

From Federica Bianco September 14, 2021

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Cross-disciplinary instruction is common in STEM programs. But scientific disciplines create distinct cultures – conventions, goals, expectations, and epistemologies – and these differences can lead to serious challenges for an instructor teaching out of her discipline. In this talk, I discuss what we learned through creating NEXUS/Physics: a deep redesign of introductory physics for life science students. Life science students show particularly strong resistance to reasoning with symbolic math. Our research helped us understand that learning to use math in physics involved skills those students had not learned in math classes and that we were not teaching to them in physics. I'll discuss one approach to remedy the situation and to help our students overcome a resistance to thinking with math.

Wednesday, December 2

4:00PM

Tags: physicsphysics educationpedagogy

Department Name: Physics and Astronomy
Appears In: DPA colloquia

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