Developing and Assessing Curriculum on the Physics of Medical Instruments

Christensen, Warren M.; Johnson, James; Ness, Grace R. Van; Mylott, Elliot; Dunlap, Justin Charles; Anderson, Elizabeth A.; Widenhorn, Ralf

doi:10.1187/cbe.12-09-0142

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…It is also necessary to attend to how knowledge is structured in and among the disciplines by instructors and by students. A number of other physics courses [34][35][36][37] and curricula [38,39] have incorporated strong connections to biology content, and research on some of these courses has evaluated students' conceptual understanding and attitudes (often through assessments developed for conventional physics courses). Still, research that explicitly addresses how students connect ideas from multiple disciplines in those courses is limited.…”

Section: Setting For the Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ reasoning about “high-energy bonds” and ATP: A vision of interdisciplinary education

Dreyfus

Sawtelle

Turpen

et al. 2014

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res.

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As interdisciplinary courses are developed, instructors and researchers have to grapple with questions of how students should make connections across disciplines. We explore the issue of interdisciplinary reconciliation (IDR): how students reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas from different disciplines. While IDR has elements in common with other frameworks for the reconciliation of ideas across contexts, it differs in that each disciplinary idea is considered canonically correct within its own discipline. The setting for the research is an introductory physics course for biology majors that seeks to build greater interdisciplinary coherence and therefore includes biologically relevant topics such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and chemical bond energy. In our case-study data, students grapple with the apparent contradiction between the energy released when the phosphate bond in ATP is broken and the idea that an energy input is required to break a bond. We see students justifying context-dependent modeling choices, showing nuance in articulating how system choices may be related to disciplinary problems of interest. This represents a desired end point of IDR, in which students can build coherent connections between concepts from different disciplines while understanding each concept in its own disciplinary context. Our case study also illustrates elements of the instructional environment that play roles in the process of IDR.

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Section: Setting For the Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ reasoning about “high-energy bonds” and ATP: A vision of interdisciplinary education

Dreyfus

Sawtelle

Turpen

et al. 2014

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The course featured medical doctors and specialists coming to class to talk about the use of physics in their specific medical practice or in the use of a particular medical device. The response from students was positive, and there were promising outcomes from the course that can be found in published literature [9,10].…”

Section: A Biomedical Physics Coursementioning

confidence: 91%

“…The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a rubric that can inform educators and curriculum developers as to the extent of the biological authenticity or superficiality in a particular IPLS unit or course. Toward this end, a first-order rubric was developed around a single curriculum with which the authors were most familiar, the Biomedical Physics Course at Portland State University [9,10]. Given the differences that exist across IPLS curricula, it seemed wise to refine this rubric before consideration of additional IPLS curricula.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Rubric for Improved Understanding of IPLS Curricula

Christensen¹,

Coakley²,

Brainard³

et al. 2019

2018 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

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In recent years, there has been a growing interest in shifting some of the basic presentation of the algebrabased physics curriculum in situations where it serves students with a background and/or major in the Life Sciences. Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) courses are becoming more common however the courses are often created entirely separate from one another with very different goals and aims, making assessment of these courses very difficult, and necessarily individualistic. This paper presents the development of a rubric for categorizing specific aspects of an IPLS curriculum in such a way that would allow certain comparisons across curricula. Roughly speaking, it categorizes the context of specific questions as being physics or biology related, and then further categorizes the actual content and information necessary to answer the question as being related to physics or biology, thus allowing users to determine the proportion of questions are that are superficially biological. An application of the rubric to existing course material is presented.

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“…In response to these calls, physics faculty have developed multiple different innovative approaches to IPLS courses that reflect different prioritizations of stakeholders' needs and values [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, there is little consensus on how these courses should be taught and what learning goals should be prioritized.…”

Section: Introductory Physics For Life Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instructors’ justifications regarding curricular design: Assumptions about life sciences students and their role in physics courses

Chessey¹,

Madsen²,

Turpen³

2020

2019 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

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To understand how physics faculty design and teach their Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) courses, we analyzed interviews with faculty to learn about their ideas about their students. We focused specifically on the narratives faculty use to reason about their students as future professionals and how that related to their learning goals for such courses. We found that faculty reason about their students' needs when describing curricular design decisions in a range of ways, including with a strong sense of personal responsibility towards students' preparation, justification about what students have an interest in or will need in the future, and imagined relations between the faculty's self and professionals in the students' field of study. To better support physics faculty in teaching interdisciplinary physics courses, we aim to help faculty become more aware of their stances toward their students. This analysis suggests ways of broadening the narratives that faculty use to understand their life science students.

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Developing and Assessing Curriculum on the Physics of Medical Instruments

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Students’ reasoning about “high-energy bonds” and ATP: A vision of interdisciplinary education

Students’ reasoning about “high-energy bonds” and ATP: A vision of interdisciplinary education

Development of a Rubric for Improved Understanding of IPLS Curricula

Instructors’ justifications regarding curricular design: Assumptions about life sciences students and their role in physics courses

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