NSF Award
1431292
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) points out that the first two years in college are the most critical for recruitment and retention of students in STEM fields and advocates widespread adoption of empirically validated practices to address concerns. A concern is that the medical field has and continues to evolve rapidly and physics education has not kept abreast of these changes. Introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) courses are outdated and pre-medical education is perceived to be neither coherent nor well-structured. There is currently little research-validated teaching material available for undergraduate medical physics courses emphasizing the key physics concepts underlying clinical and biomedical research equipment. There is general agreement that the science content in the current curriculum needs revision in order to improve the education of future healthcare professionals on relevant science competencies, skills, and learning habits.<br/><br/>This project is timely and nicely complements other national efforts designed to create and share effective models for teaching interdisciplinary science. Project NEXUS (National Experiment in Undergraduate Science Education) a four year project, funded by HHMI in which four universities together will create a curriculum that connects biology with physics, mathematics and chemistry. A session at the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)Annual Meeting entitled "Physics in a Biological Context" included a summary of "Three Opportunities to Explore the Intersection of Biology and Physics: Research and Education" together with a report from an NSF funded March 2014 AAPT Conference on Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences(IPLS), which resulted in recommendations on many topics related to IPLS courses including enhancing IPLS courses with research-based instructional strategies. A 2014 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education was focused on "The Complex Intersection of Biology and Physics."<br/><br/>In response to these challenges,the project team from Portland State University,the Oregon Health and Science University and North Dakota State University will in this 3-year project,develop research-validated multimedia materials for introductory physics for life sciences (IPLS) courses to be offered to life science majors and pre-health students. Ten multimedia modules on the biomedical applications of physics will be developed. These modules will demonstrates how physicians and biomedical researchers integrate fundamental physics concepts into the current medical technologies they utilize in their profession. Special attention will be paid to developing materials that can assist physics instructors in learning unfamiliar biomedical topics. Alternative approaches identified by physics education research will be utilized to lead to better learning outcomes, including: flipped classroom instruction, peer lead team learning and interactive lecture demonstrations. The proposed course will include these innovations and provide an approach to physics that is designed to be useful to students in their later careers.<br/><br/>A pivotal research component of this project will be the assessment of the effectiveness of the material. Extensive formative and summative assessment will be completed to measure impacts on student learning with in-class assessment tools. Formative assessment will be informed by the frequent and ongoing monitoring of student learning that provides rapid feedback to students on their performance. Online free lecture questions will be designed as formative assessments to provide feedback for the instructor about their students' understanding of biomedical and physics content of the expert videos. The course assessment involves several main activities that include the analysis of log data using the smartPhysics Framework (spF), pre-post-knowledge tests of individual modules and the complete Physics in Medicine course, a self-reflection assignment for students, classroom observations and videotaped exit interviews. The effect of instruction on attitudes in all introductory general physics courses and Physics in Medicine will be investigated using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), student surveys and videotaped focus group interviews. Revisions to materials after each implementation will ensure effectiveness and research-validated content at the end of the funding. Two intentional feedback loops providing data about the course materials will be built into the project. The first will be an expert review of the course modules by advisory board members. The second will be the suite of assessment activities built into and being developed for the project. The evaluator will utilize information from the knowledge pre-post tests, log data, memory, matrices, and minute papers to evaluate how students are tracking on course objectives and what areas of improvement are necessary. Each of these feedback loops will require monitoring of both timeliness and quality of feedback. The evaluator will work with the project leadership to improve feedback mechanisms and other aspects of the project plan as needed, in response to formative evaluation findings. Assessment materials are a key product and will be shared together with instructional materials with the education community.
