Materials from Tutorials in Introductory Physics, originally designed and implemented by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, were used in modified form as interactive lectures under conditions significantly different from those suggested by the curriculum developers. Student learning was assessed using tasks drawn from the physics education research literature. Use of tutorials in the interactive lecture format yielded gains in student understanding comparable to those obtained through the canonical tutorial implementation at the University of Washington, suggesting that student engagement with the intellectual steps laid out in the tutorials, rather than the specific strategies used in facilitating such engagement, plays the central role in promoting student learning. We describe the implementation details and assessment of student learning for two different tutorials: one focused on mechanical waves, used at North Dakota State University, and one on Galilean relativity, used at Western Washington University. Also discussed are factors that may limit the generalizability of the results.
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In the authors' extensive experience administering the tutorials at UW, lecture instructors did not attend tutorial sections and rarely referred to the tutorial during the lecture. In addition, due to scheduling constraints, the tutorial topic did not always match the topic being covered in lecture.
© 2014 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2014
American Association of Physics Teachers
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