Publication Date

5-1-2015

Document Type

Conference Poster

First Advisor

Eads, Michael

Degree Name

B.A. (Bachelor of Arts)

Legacy Department

Department of Physics

Abstract

The current study will focus on the impact of a calculus and physics Themed Learning Community (TLC) in order to compare to non-TLC sections on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), which tests student’s conceptual understanding of physics. TLCs offer classes with the same major, smaller size, and in conjunction with two or three related classes. For example, TLC calculus and TLC physics will have same students to create the connection. The focus of this study is on the physics program in the TLC. The demographic data, such as ACT score, age, major and academic year, will be collected from fall 2014 General Physics I. This research will compare the FCI result for every freshman who is majoring in Engineering in TLC and non-TLC to see if the TLC has a significant impact on the students’ learning of physics. The experiment will be performed as follows: I will choose the comparison group, who are freshmen, engineering majors, from both TLC and non-TLC students. Choosing those students are a necessary step because only engineering major freshman can join the TLC; it will also prevent any bias due to different ages and majors. The next step will be to investigate the pre- and post-test of FCI from both TLC and non-TLC students. The final step is to normalize the data and plot the point to see the distribution of FCI score. As a result the normalized score showed that TLC students performed significantly better than Non-TLC students.

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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