TRAINING PHYSICS STUDENT’S INTUITION THROUGH DAILY-LIFE RELATED EXPERIMENTS

We report on the impact of performing simple experiments on the learning process of first year undergraduate students of a Physics course.These students are enrolled in the Physics, Electronic Engineering and Mathematics degrees and the Double degree in Physics and Electronic Engineering at the Science and Technology Faculty at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). We have designed simple experiments for some topics of the General Physics course, which are performed during the lectures before starting a new topic. Previously, the students must answer a survey via the Kahoot application which allows us to check the prior knowledge and preconceived ideas that they may have on the topic. This survey contains questions related to the outcome of the experiment. Surprisingly, most of the times their intuition fails, and only then do students start wondering what the physics behind the experiment is, triggering their motivation towards the topic they are about to study. Eventually, after studying the topic, the students should be able to correctly predict and explain the outcome of the experiment. We check this point by adding a related question in the mid-term exam. This allows us to present a quantitative evaluation of the impact of this strategy, comparing the amount of correct answers and the probability of choosing one answer at random before the experiment and in the exam. Most of the students find these non intuitive experiments very useful as they trigger the necessity of understanding the physical phenomenon underlying the correct answer. Results confirm this statement showing a higher amount of students that answer correctly at the end of the process. The analysis of the significance of these results according to a random model based on the binomial distribution shows that the improvement found can not be attributed to chance. As illustrative examples, we will present an experiment on the motion of rigid bodies and another one on electrostatics.

Acknowledgement:
Funded by Vicerrectorado de Innovación, Compromiso Social y Acción Cultural of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU through SAE/HELAZ (Grant n. 10, 2017-2018).