Two active learning physics courses were taught and compared. The “concepts first” course was organized to teach only concepts in the first part of the class, the ultimate goal being to increase students' problem-solving abilities much later in the class. The other course was taught in the same quarter by the same instructor using the same curricular materials, but covered material in the standard (chapter-by-chapter) order. After accounting for incoming student characteristics, students from the concepts-first course scored significantly better in two outcome measures: their grade on the final exam and the grade received in their subsequent physics course. Moreover, in the concepts-first class course, students from groups underrepresented in physics had final exam scores and class grades that were indistinguishable from other students. Finally, students who took at least one concepts-first course in introductory physics were found to have significantly higher rates of graduation with a STEM major than students from this cohort who did not.
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As usual, the answers on the 5-point Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree) were condensed to agree, neutral, and disagree answers.
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FCI gains were initially calculated in this student-level way so that we could analyze these gains. If we used a class-level normalized gain (Ref. 23), then the whole class gains would be 0.38 for AL&CF, 0.34 for ALOnly, and 0.25 for NoAL and the UndRpMns gains would be 0.41 for AL&CF, 0.32 for ALOnly, and 0.21 for NoAL.
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Not surprisingly, final exam grades for underrepresented minority groups are similarly statistically indistinguishable from the rest of the class if and only if the course is AL&CF.
25.
The author has twice taught the “watered down” version (8 weeks of concepts and 2 weeks of problem solving) of this Concepts First 9A class. The results show that the transfer effects are still present (to be published) but that the grade-gap for underrepresented groups is about 1/2 (rather than the 1/8 in the present paper) of the grade-gap for the standard lecture sections. It may be that the problem solving time needs to be large enough (e.g., four weeks rather than two) to be important to the students and to not overlap their final exam preparation time.
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