Abstract:

Multiple choice questions are a common valuable teaching and evaluation tool in large-enrolment introductory physics classes across North-American universities. However, they do not provide students with the opportunity to formulate or construct their own ideas. Our goal was to create classroom activities that reduce the reliance on multiple choice questions, while providing students with the additional opportunities to collaborate on more open-ended scenarios and, preferably, with some real-life content. The project was inspired by our earlier work in which the collaborative class discussions, based on open-ended scenarios, were proposed as an alternative to the in-class use of multiple-choice questions [1]. A suite of the instructional materials in the form of case studies were created for use in a large-enrollment introductory physics classes for science students. These scenarios targeted fundamental concepts of the introductory physics curriculum and focused on common students’ conceptual difficulties known from the decades of Physics Education Research (PER). The paper will focus on a case study that explores a real-life example of air resistance: an analysis of a record-setting jump from the stratosphere completed by the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner on October 14, 2012. Baumgartner rose to an altitude of 39,045 meters, in a helium balloon, where he fell to Earth from the stratosphere. He managed to break the world records for the highest “freefall” and the highest manned balloon flight. He also became the first person to break the sound barrier in “freefall”, reaching a maximum speed of 1,357.6 km/h while falling through the near vacuum of the stratosphere. The video recording and the data from the fall are available as open source. The students were provided the set of data of the speed versus time and were asked a series of questions about the flight requiring them to analyze the data.

We are interested in finding the answers for the following research questions:
- Does providing the students with opportunities to collaborate on analyzing realistic physics scenarios and formulating their own ideas increase students’ engagement, and foster active learning?
- Does using these open-ended scenarios and activities as a basis for students’ collaborative in-class discussions improve students’ conceptual understanding beyond what is achievable while relying only on multiple choice questions and standard end-of-chapter problems?

This is still a work in progress. More research is needed to make definite conclusions. However, it is already clear that the case studies based on real-life scenarios can captivate student imagination and increase the engagement with the material.

References:
[1] C. Kalman, M. Milner-Bolotin and T. Antimirova, Comparison of the Effectiveness of Collaborative Groups and Peer Instruction in a Large Introductory Physics Course for Science Majors, Canadian Journal of Physics. 88(5) (2010) 325-332.

Keywords:

Case studies, air resistance, introductory physics.