Physics Education for Students: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Expansive framing, which positions students as participants in larger conversations that span time, place, people and disciplines, can be a valuable approach for designing curricula and learning experiences, to help students learn physics through an interdisciplinary approach. This chapter reports on the efforts to use expansive framing as a guiding principle while transforming and revitalizing an introductory physics laboratory class. This chapter, describes student experiences with two central elements of the lab course that are strongly influenced by the concept of expansive framing and related to interdisciplinary learning. First, we sought to incorporate and emphasize experiences related to the students’ real-world and professional experiences, such as connections between biology and physics, that will be interesting for the health-science majors who take the lab. Second, we sought to promote discussions between students and their graduate student instructors about the epistemology of experimental physics, which we refer to as the nature of science, which is an important interdisciplinary goal for the lab class. We explore the need, design, and implementation of these two elements of the lab course by analyzing student interviews and coursework. Consequently, we propose that using expansive framing for the design of student learning should be considered a best practice for implementing introductory college physics laboratory courses when seeking to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to student learning.

Modern educational standards impose high requirements on the qualification of higher education graduates majoring in engineering and technical areas. The development of professional competencies is carried out both through students’ educational activities and scientific research work. Research activities allow students to acquire the skills necessary to perform scientific research, develop independence and initiative, intensify students’ cognitive activity, and contribute to creative thinking of a future engineer.

The authors of the article, being university lecturers in physics, mathematics, and English, share the experience of involving first-and second-year students of the Institute of Physics and Technology in research work through out-of-class activities. At the beginning of studies, students go through a period of adaptation to university environment; they have different levels of initial training and lack experimental skills. Nevertheless, during this period of study it is very important to give a student the opportunity to get a “feel” for science, so that a student has a chance to try and solve a task independently, even if it is not difficult enough, and, thus, to experience the joy of learning. Students’ enthusiasm for learning should be taken into consideration as an important factor for the development of research skills. Teaching staff members need to take into account students’ interests, give them the opportunity to develop their abilities, so that first- and second-year students could determine their own individual learning paths, despite the different levels of initial training in the subject and degrees of motivation. One way to solve this complicated problem is to involve students actively in learning.

Student's research work should be a comprehensive, goal-oriented and a methodically justified system, in which the complexity of the tasks being solved is consistently increasing. The authors believe that the development of students’ research skills should be carried out both within the class hours and out-of-class studies through the following activities. In-class activities include performing mini-research projects, analyzing and processing results during laboratory work, preparing scientific reports for seminar presentations, involving students to perform a physics demonstration experiment in lectures. During extracurricular time, as part of out-of-class independent studies, students are encouraged to participate in a wide range of additional activities: conducting research for interdisciplinary projects, preparing a research report in a foreign lanuage as well, and creating working models of devices that demonstrate physical phenomena and processes. Such tasks make it possible to expand the scope of students' active learning activities, broaden students’ scientific horizons, and form the skills of a researcher.

As a result of ongoing work to involve first- and second-year students in research activities, the number of students participating in student scientific conferences and those awarded scholarships for successful participation in scientific research has increased. Student involvement in the educational process makes them an active part of it, enhances their personal capabilities, contributing to the formation of the required competencies, creating an atmosphere of development of scientific and creative potential, and laying the foundations for future research work in later years of study.

In the face of the “European Green Deal”, our continent needs young cohorts of self-responsible citizens steering the globe towards responsible sustainability.

This article reflects two didactic approaches for strengthening self-responsibility in students: the approach “3 x 7 = 21” and the approach “jet principle”. Both rely on dialogue and confrontation of learners with their peers – often a more stringent educational agent that contact with teachers.

The very simple method “3 x 7 = 21” sets learners into 3 phases of iterative complexity: single achievements, groups of 3 and groups of 7 while they iteratively exchange their views on complex interdisciplinary subjects.

The more elaborated method “jet principle” leads learners into framework conditions which they actually formed during their previous steps: analogous to a jet turbine, the border conditions of subsequent learning stages are the result of energetic applications of confrontations during earlier stages.

Both methods are suitable for advanced physics students in any transdisciplinary setting.

In the face of globalization, the question arises which didactic and educational strategy based on self-responsibility is best suited for dissemination of a science-based humanitarian culture.

This chapter reflects one pedagogic approach to strengthen self-responsibility within students, namely the approach “Surfing Global Change” (SGC,© G. Ahamer) which relies on dialogue while confronting learners with their peers – a much-needed training event when it comes to real-live professional situations.

This article portrays the 5-level rule structure and offers graphic implementation and moreover some results on emerging social dynamics within student groups.

This method is suitable for advanced physics students in any transdisciplinary setting.

The interpretation of spectra, particularly in the optical band, is a conceptual and historical link between classical and modern physics. It is an empiric proof of the atomic structure of matter and an experimental instrument to investigate phenomena involving interactions between light and matter. On a disciplinary plan regarding physics, it is a fundamental contribution; unfortunately, the road to embed optical spectroscopy in a coherent educational pattern is still long.

From a research perspective, the Physics Education Research Unit from Udine University focused on the design of an educational path on spectroscopy for high school students, with the aim of involving them in interpretative challenges, both theoretical and experimental, in order to recognize the connection between the microscopic energetic structure for matter and the emission of radiation, with particular emphasis in the optical band.

The Model of Educational Reconstruction framed the design of the educational path. Based on limited but significant literature on the interpretation of optical spectra by university and secondary school students, we designed different intervention modules in which interpretative issues are problematized using Inquiry-Based Learning strategies. Using Design-Based Research methodologies, seven different experimentations were carried out, monitoring learning outcomes of 208 students aged 17-18 by empirical research methods.

In this work the contents of an academic lecture addressed to first year Physics students on a system of coupled oscillators is presented. More specifically, the physical system dealt is constituted by two oscillating masses interacting through a connecting spring. At first, the theory describing the system dynamics is presented by putting into evidence how the diagonalization process allows to reduce the coupled oscillation equations to formally simpler, but physically equivalent, expressions which make reference to uncoupled oscillations and how the new chosen coordinates do not refer to the positions of the real masses but describe collective properties of the system, namely its normal modes. To facilitate the comprehension of the analytical procedure, an experiment addressed to characterize the system normal mode frequencies is proposed. On this purpose, for analysing the oscillation amplitude as a function of time, a comparison between Fourier Transform and Wavelet Transform is presented. What it emerges is that, differently from what occurs for Fourier Transform which provides a value of the motion average frequency, the Wavelet Transform allows to simultaneously execute a time–frequency analysis.