The challenge of teaching physics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010132
Universities in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales typically offer three-year bachelor’s degrees devoted to a single subject (Scotland has a separate system). When I did my bachelor’s at Imperial College London, I studied physics, the mathematics one needs to be a physicist, and nothing else—apart from a bit of computing and a single course on modern literature and drama.
The broader, longer US bachelor’s degree exposes students to more subjects and makes it easier for them to switch majors. On the other hand, despite its shorter duration, the narrower British bachelor’s degree gives students a deeper grounding in a single subject. One of my fellow editors at Physics Today, an American, shocked me when he said he earned his bachelor’s in physics without ever taking a single course in condensed matter.
Those tradeoffs between the UK and US systems are fairly clear, but there’s another, subtler one that concerns teaching. My physics class at Imperial numbered about 175 students. Even if some of us struggled with Laguerre polynomials and other abstruse topics, we all wanted to learn physics.
At universities in the US and in other countries that follow the US system, a physics class—especially an introductory class—could contain students who aren’t physics majors and who don’t have a passion for, or even an interest in, physics. Teaching physics is challenging enough. Teaching it to reluctant students is even more challenging.
Which is why I continue to be impressed by the efforts of the American Association of Physics Teachers and other elements of the US physics community to find ways to teach physics more effectively.
Last week AAPT held the latest of its new faculty workshops, which, according to the program’s website , are designed “to help new faculty at research and four-year institutions understand how to become more effective educators and support their quest to gain tenure.” The photo shows this year’s participants.
Because of the pressure to establish their credentials in research or other scholarly activities, new faculty may be tempted to postpone or ignore the development of teaching proficiency. They may receive direct or subtle messages suggesting that only a focus on research will result in career advancement, and there is often a lack of mentors or role models who demonstrate dedication and enthusiasm for teaching.
The latest example to cross my desk of physicists who care about the teaching of physics—and doing something about it—was a preprint by Benjamin Dreyfus, Edward Redish, and Jessica Watkins of the University of Maryland. The preprint’s title, “Students’ Views of Macroscopic and Microscopic Energy in Physics and Biology,” hints at the preprint’s motivating purpose, which appears in the third paragraph of the introduction:
At the University of Maryland we are piloting a new physics sequence for biology majors in 2011–12 with a goal of achieving stronger integration of physics with biology. A major goal in developing this course is to investigate how energy concepts can be taught in a way that unifies the way energy is used in physics, biology, and chemistry, and that transcends the disciplinary barriers.
Dreyfus, Redish, and Watkins aren’t alone in their dedication to improving the teaching of physics to nonmajors—for which we should all be thankful. In March the American Institute of Physics held a symposium for the officers of its 10 member societies and 25 affiliated societies. One of the speakers was Jon Miller, who directs the University of Michigan’s International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy.
From Miller’s presentation I learned two surprising and related facts. First, the principal source of Americans’ scientific literacy is not the popular press, TV, or other media, but the science courses they take in college. Second, Americans are more scientifically literate than the citizens of all but one European country, Sweden.
