Life Sciences Notes

Preface

The origin of the course to which these notes were attached

The Physics 1 (Life Science) course was tailored to students from the faculties of Medicine, Veterinary Science, Agriculture and Dentistry. It was also intended to be the course of interest to two groups of Science students: those with much stronger interests in the biological rather than the physical sciences and those who had enrolled in the subject with a poor or non-existent high-school background. The course was primarily algebra rather than calculus based but, more than that, it was planned to be a course about ideas and concepts rather than manipulation and number crunching.

The course was first presented in 1973 and continued for over twenty years.

The structure of the course

The course was made up of six units (Mechanics, Thermal Physics, Electricity, Optics, Atomic and Nuclear, Fluids). Each unit was made up of eight segments. Each segment had a thirty-minute videotape presentation and a parcel of notes. The parcel of notes had a set of objectives, a discussion of material germane to the videotape material and a set of questions and problems. ("Answers" to these questions and problems were also provided.) The notes were bound together and sold to the students, unit by unit. Three one-hour lecture-periods were assigned to the course each week. Two of these periods contained a screening of the videotape. Academics responsible for each group of students were encouraged to use the remaining half-hour of these two periods and all of the third period to discuss the physics contained in the tapes of that week. Some did, some didn't.

During the twenty years of the course many minor and some major changes took place. Perhaps the most drastic of these was the reformulation of the Atoms and Nuclei unit as note-based rather than video-oriented.

Is the availability of these notes on the web of benefit to student learning?

Standard textbooks and the Physics 1 (Life Science) notes presented here suffer from the same fault. They TELL things to the students, to the readers, to the listeners, but rarely provide the opportunity to ask the students to think in advance on what might happen and to predict before they passively observe. By now the Physics Education Research community has established that students don't learn, don't get understanding of concepts by listening or reading, by being TOLD. We need an emphasis on student-learning rather than teacher-telling.

There is material available that promotes learning but, for the most part, it is being ignored. The text(s) by Chabey and Sherwood, the tutorial books coming out of McDermott's group a re but two important examples. Please seriously consider:

(1) using such materials rather than another set of "telling" material;

(2) stopping to listen to students instead of telling them things;

(3) setting up a course structure and assessment system that results in students understanding ten things rather than being told about a hundred things;

(4) getting all academics involved in teaching to read, to think about and to discuss Arons' books at regular intervals.