Physics 207 at Cornell

Physics 207-208 is a two-semester, calculus-based introductory sequence.

Physics 207 is taken by all those interested in or required to take physics that are not physics majors or engineers. Roughly 50% are biological science majors, and 60% are premed/pre-vet. The remaining students come from across the university, including Biology and Society, Psychology, Chemistry, Crop and Soil Sciences, Human Development, Nutrition, Geological Science, Environmental Science, Atmospheric Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics and English. They are thus far more diverse in every way than the students enrolled in our major and engineering introductory sequences, and have been the most challenging students to reach and teach. Course evaluations have historically lagged 1 to 1.5 points out of 5 below that of our major and engineering sequences, even though the Physics Department has assigned many of its most talented and dedicated lecturers to 207-208.

In response to these challenges, Physics 207 has evolved over the last 15 years to become one of the richest introductory physics courses in the US. The major components of the course are outlined below. Some aspects of the course philosophy are described in powerpoint presentations, available on email request.

1. Pre-course web-based evaluation and tutorial in elementary scientific mathematics. This tool, still under development, tests and provides students with tutorial support in all of the mathematics they will need for Physics 207. We call this "elementary scientific mathematics", because it includes most of the basic skills that scientists and engineers routinely use to analyze data and solve problems. Click here to see a list of topics covered.

2. Pre-lecture PowerPoint slide shows. Inspired by the trivia slide shows and previews in movie theatres, these loop continuously as the students arrive in the pre-lecture period. They contain course announcements, study tips, questions relevant to the lecture, physics trivia and puzzles, news, and cartoons. Click here to see a sample show (one of forty).

3. Fully interactive lectures with polling/peer instruction, demonstrations and PowerPoint applications. Lectures begin with a review of previous material, and then outline the key new ideas. These ideas are fleshed out with a series of multiple-choice questions, to which the students respond using a hard-wired electronic polling system in continuous use since 1972. The applications of these ideas in a broad range of contexts are discussed in PowerPoint slide shows at the end of lecture.

4. In-lecture multiple-choice questions. Printed questions are handed out at the start of each week, allowing students to work ahead and to write their answers directly on the question sheets. Some questions provide the lead-in or follow-up to demonstrations. Skills emphasized include graphical interpretation of data, proportional reasoning, and dimensional analysis. These questions draw on common misconceptions identified in previous year's exams, and in the physics education literature. Some of the nearly 200 problems are left as exercises for the students. Click here to see a sample of questions for one week.

5. Extensive use of lecture demonstrations. Like most large physics departments, Cornell has a large collection of demonstrations. Go to http://www.physics.cornell.edu/lecdemo, and use the username/password combination lecdemo/fizzydems. In 207 we focus on those that are simple to understand and that illustrate phenomena from everyday life, and use polling to get students involved.

6. In-lecture PowerPoint slide shows illustrating the applications of physics. Of all the components of the course, this is probably the most important in changing how our diverse clientele views physics, reflected in an enrollment increase from 180 to 320 and an almost complete elimination of comments like "I hate physics" and "Why do I have to learn this stuff?" from end-of-semester evaluations. We present applications from a very broad range of areas, including those drawn from textbooks the students use in their other courses and from medical textbooks. We use a light touch so that we can cover many applications per lecture and give students a sense of the broad applicability of the ideas we discuss. Our current collection includes well over 100 applications. Click here to see a partial list of topics.

7. Weekly homework assignments. These supplement the in-lecture questions, which tend to be straightforward, one-idea questions, with more challenging and context-rich questions. These are graded based on effort only, one point per problem seriously attempted. Click here to see an example.

8. Cooperative learning problems. Students work in teams of 2 or 3 during recitation on these problems, and then are selected to describe their answer to their peers. Click here to see an example.

9. Weekly labs that are fully integrated with lectures. Motivated by PER research and based in part on the Vernier tools and Excel, these labs develop a variety of quantitative and analytic skills, such as graphing, numerical integration and differentiation, and the use of semilog and log-log plots to extract time constants and power law exponents. Roughly half the labs use computer-based data acquistion, and two-thirds involve some form of spreadsheet analysis. Students don't keep a formal lab book Instead, they turn in their data attached to a "yellow sheet", which guides them through the analysis and asks additional questions to test their understanding. Students must complete and turn in a pre-lab question sheet at the start of each lab, to ensure that they've at least skimmed the lab manual.

10. Weekly quizzes, given in recitation, that test understanding of the previous week's in-lecture questions, homework assignment, coop problems and lab questions.