written by Michael E. Loverude

Many upper-division physics courses have as goals that students should 'think like a physicist.'  While this is often not defined, most would agree that thinking like a physicist includes quantitative reasoning skills:  considering limiting cases, dimensional analysis, and using approximations.  However, there is often relatively little curricular support for these practices and many instructors do not assess them explicitly.  As part of a project to investigate student learning in math methods, we have developed a number of written questions testing these skills.  Although there are limitations to assessing these skills with written questions, they can provide insight to the extent to which students can apply a given skill when prompted, even if they do not help understand how and when students choose to activate these skills.

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Last Modified December 16, 2015

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