A Few Barriers and Facilitators to Learning Physics
Jeff Phillips Loyola Marymount University
SCAAPT Fall Meeting November 8, 2008

I will describe some of the factors that correlate with number of the concepts, which were not already known at the beginning of the course, are learned, i.e. normalized gain.  Students’ previous knowledge, skills and values all impact their ability to learn physics.  In the research done at LMU we have seen that some students essentially learn no new concepts because of their shortcomings.  To assist these students we, and others, are developing materials that help students develop the necessary skills and values.  I will present some preliminary findings from the Thinking in Physics project¹.

Central questions of the project

• Why do some students show lower normalized gains than the others?

• Is there a way to identify those students who might be at risk before the semester?

• What can we do differently to help those students?

(This talk, and others on related research, can be found at http://myweb.lmu.edu/jphillips/PER.)

1. Thinking in Physics is funded by the National Science Foundation