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Invited talk to be presented at AAPT Summer National Meeting, Portland OR, July 2013.
Designing an Interdisciplinary Physics Course to Support Scientific Reasoning Skills
V. Sawtelle, C. Turpen, & J. Gouvea
Our course in Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) majors at the University of Maryland works to bridge the disciplines of biology and physics with a primary focus on developing students' scientific reasoning skills. These include developing students' abilities (1) to know when and how to use different concepts, (2) to make and justify modeling decisions, and (3) to make implicit assumptions visible. Our interdisciplinary course provides students an opportunity to examine how these decisions may differ depending on canonical disciplinary aims and interests. Our focus on developing reasoning skills requires shifting course topics to focus on core ideas that span disciplines as well as foregrounding typically tacit disciplinary assumptions. In this talk we present concrete examples from our IPLS course to give a sense of what it looks like to implement a vision focused on these reasoning skills in an interdisciplinary classroom.
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