Resource Letter PhD-2: Physics Demonstrations expanded version

One of the important discussions that have taken place in the Physics Education Research community has been over the issue of how to evaluate the effectiveness of the testing procedures. One such tool is the Force Concept Inventory, a multiple-choice test that has been used for a number of years to evaluate students’ understanding of Newton’s laws. The following set of papers provides some background regarding the discussion of this issue.

52. 
    http://modeling.asu.edu/R&E/FCI.PDF, “Force Concept Inventory,” David Hestenes, Malcolm Wells, and Gregg Swackhamer, Phys. Teach. 30, 141-158 (1992). An early article describing research supporting the Force Concept Inventory. (A)
    
53. 
    “What does the Force Concept Inventory Actually Measure?,” Douglas Huffman and Patricia Heller, Phys. Teach. 33, 138-143 (1995). This article suggests that analysis of the Force Concept Inventory may be more complicated than Hestenes, Wells, and Swackhamer suggest. (A)
    
54. 
    http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/InterFCI.pdf, “Interpreting the Force Concept Inventory: A response to Huffman and Heller,: David Hestenes and Ibrahim Halloun, Phys. Teach. 33, 502 (1995). Hestenes and Halloun take issue with the criticism of Huffman and Heller. (A)
    
55. 
    http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/journal/hestenes-tpt95b.pdf, “Interpreting the Force Concept Inventory: A Reply to Hestenes and Halloun,” Patricia Heller and Douglas Huffman, Phys. Teach. 33, 503-511 (1995). This is the answer by Huffman and Heller to the responses by Hestenes and Halloun to the original Huffman and Heller article above. (A)
    
56. 
    http://www.physics.umd.edu/perg/dissertations/Saul/Chapter4.PDF, “Beyond problem solving: Evaluating introductory physics courses through the hidden curriculum,” UMD PERG PhD Dissertation: Jeffery M. Saul (1998). Chapter 4 of the thesis, Multiple Choice Concept Tests: The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) presents an analysis of the arguments regarding the concerns about the Force Concept Inventory. (A)
    
57. 
    http://homepages.wmich.edu/~chenders/Publications/TPT2002.pdf, “Common Concerns About the Force Concept Inventory,” Charles Henderson, Phys. Teach. 40, 542-547 (2002). Discusses some of the issues that remained after almost ten years of use of the Force Concept Inventory. (A)
    
58. 
    http://www.ufgop.org/pdf/fci-force-concept-inventory/, fci force concept inventory, contains a number of links to FCI related publications, as well as a link to the actual FCI questions and answers. A physics teacher can obtain these files, but must first be identified as legitimate. (A)
    

A provocative teaching technique is to purposefully create incorrect models or simulations and ask students to find the errors, either through the physics or the programming. The following examples illustrate this technique.

59. 
    “Teaching Physics (and Some Computation) Using Intentionally Incorrect Simulations,” Anne J. Cox, William F. Junkin, III, Wolfgang Christian, Mario Belloni, and Francisco Esquembre, Phys. Teach. 49, 273-276 (2011). From the abstract: “[W]e have developed a series of simulations that are intentionally incorrect, where the task is for students to find and correct the errors.” These simulations deal with electric fields. (A)
    
60. 
    http://www.compadre.org/OSP/items/detail.cfm?ID=9964, Electric Field: What is Wrong? Package, Anne Cox, Wolfgang Christian, and Francisco Esquembre. (The Open Source Physics Project is supported by NSF DUE-0442581).
    
61. 
    http://www.physics.umd.edu/lecdem/outreach/QOTW/arch1/q002.htm, Question of the Week # 2: Racing Balls, Richard E. Berg, University of Maryland Physics Lecture-Demonstration Facility. This link has been inserted here to call attention to one of the most interesting of the interactive demonstrations. Among groups of high school students, university students, physics majors, physics graduate students, and physics professors, the percentages who guess the correct result for the outcome of this experiment is about the same, with the predictions approximately well distributed among the possible outcomes. See the next entry. (E,I,A)
    
62. 
    http://groups.physics.umn.edu/physed/People/Tom%20Koch/2_tracks/, Two-tracks animations, from Tom Thaden Koch, Ph. D. thesis: “A Coordination Class Analysis of College Students' Judgments about Animated Motion.” For this project, students reviewed computer animations that show (by purposefully using incorrect programming) each of the three possible solutions to the racing balls problem, and the results, along with the logic obtained from interviews with the students, are discussed. From the animations, any of the three possible solutions may seem reasonable even to many experienced physicists!! (Follow the series of links from the link “animations” to the end to see the two-track, flat track animations.) This is a clear illustration of issues that can arise with use of computer modeling in lieu of actual demonstrations. (A)
    

I give special thanks to PIRA and to several of the individual members who were very helpful in providing information important to this document, as well as Professor Joe Redish (University of Maryland) for his insightful comments regarding physics education research. I also thank the reviewers, particularly Wolfgang Rueckner (Harvard University) and Dale Stille (University of Iowa) for their helpful suggestions. Most importantly, I thank Keith Warren (North Carolina State University) and Brad Shue (now at the University of Cincinnati) for a very thoughtful and detailed conversation at the 1995 AAPT Summer Meeting, during which they told me about the new interconnection of computers known as the World Wide Web, and how it could be used to propagate pictures and information about physics demonstrations. This discussion inspired me to create the physics demonstration web site at the University of Maryland in 1996.