Tag: 361

Physics 390T is now Physics 361

At the December 6th meeting of the UMass Faculty Senate, the experimental course Physics 390T was approved and became Physics 361. The feedback from this course was uniformly positive with several other departments in the College of Natural Sciences reaching out to get more information with an eye to starting a similar version of such a course for themselves.

Congratulations to Brokk Toggerson on this accomplishment.

If you would like to read more about the new Physics 361, you can read more about an Introduction to Physics Education for Physics Majors here.

UMass-Amherst Goes to AAPT SM18!

Jake Shechter presenting at AAPT SM18
Jake Shechter presenting at AAPT SM18

Brokk Toggerson, Chris Ertl, David Nguyen, and Jake Shechter are currently presenting their work at the AAPT Summer 2018 Meeting in Washington, DC.

Chris Ertl, is presenting on the fully-online labs he has been developing for the online versions of Physics 131 and 132.

Brokk Toggerson is presenting a poster on Physics 131, a poster on P132, and a presentation on P390T.

Jake Shecter is presenting on Physics 691 on Graduate TA Training and Professionalization.

Getting students to solve problems effectively

I just gave the second midterm in my P132 course covering physical/wave optics and electrostatics with a few questions on the previous material of quantum mechanics and geometric optics. One of the comments I often see when I ask students to reflect on their preparation is along the lines of, “I did all the extra practice problems but still did poorly on the exam.” When I ask these students one-on-one about their study habits, it seems that often,  while they do try every problem, their procedure when they get stuck is inefficient.

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