• If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Designing an Interdisciplinary Physics Course to Support Scientific Reasoning Skills

Page history last edited by Chandra Turpen 11 years ago

BERG > Project NEXUS UMCP > Papers and Presentations

 

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.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.