Physics Problems to Tutor Generic Expertise

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a physics education project designed to help students learn ?generic expert skills? including sense-making of the answer (scaling and ratios, special and limiting cases, dimensions and units, exploiting symmetry, and especially estimation), as well as understanding that physics comes from a few principles. The project is based on three principles: a survey showing that professors very much want to teach these things, the use of online problems with embedded tutoring to help students learn, and plans to disseminate both the problems and a diagnostic test created from them to 200,000 students per year (which requires only one mouse click by their instructor). The plan is to distribute both the diagnostic test and the library of problems that tutor expertise in two ways: over the web to teachers (public domain) and through a commercial product (Mastering Physics) that currently reaches about 100,000 introductory physics students annually, but is expected to double this in the coming few years.