Improved Student Performance in Electricity and Magnetism Following Prior MAPS Instruction in Mechanics Documents

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Improved Student Performance In Electricity And Magnetism Following Prior MAPS Instruction In Mechanics 

written by Saif Rayyan, Andrew Pawl, Analia Barrantes, Raluca E. Teodorescu, and David E. Pritchard

We examine the performance of a group of students in Introductory Electricity and Magnetism following a ReView course in Introductory Mechanics focusing on problem solving employing the Modeling Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS) pedagogy[1]. The group consists of students who received a D in the fall Mechanics course (8.01) and were given the chance to attend the ReView course and take a final retest. Improvement to a passing grade was qualification for the Electricity and Magnetism course (8.02) in the spring. The ReView course was conducted twice - during January 2009 and January 2010. As a control, we took a group of students with similar z-scores in 8.01 in Fall 2007 that were not offered the ReView course. We show that the ReView students perform ~0.7 standard deviations better than the control group (p~0.002) and ~ 0.5 standard deviations better than what is expected based on their performance in 8.01(p ~0.001).

Published August 24, 2010
Last Modified November 3, 2010

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