TOPP: Taxonomy of Physics Problems, Improving Student Understanding in Introductory Physics

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Physics (13) The art of problem solving requires a person first to identify a problem, classify it, then attack it with an variety of concepts. Unfortunately introductory science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses contain vast amounts of material, and instructors of these courses often leave out the lesser details to promote course coverage. Students then tend to cluster knowledge into many small segments that must be integrated in an effort to solve a problem. Substantial instruction on the integration process is seldom addressed, leaving students without the ability to advance from novice to expert problem solving and thus effectively perform the task at hand, reducing a student's capability and diminishing confidence. Broader Impact This project is creating a catalogue of the basic steps and recurrent patterns of basic steps found in the solution of introductory electricity, magnetism, and optics problems by sampling diverse physics sources. The catalogue is being disseminated broadly through talks, workshops, and peer-reviewed publications, providing instructors with a tool to pinpoint what students know, how well they integrate what they know, and where education efforts have gone awry. This process is expected to result in a more scientifically literate population. Intellectual Merit The catalogue is also being used to build software and a problem base containing problems that represent each step and combinations of the steps at the complexity level appropriate for undergraduates. The development of the software and procedures allows the extension of the technology to many more areas of study. A DVD distribution is being constructed that includes custom software and the problem base that allows an instructor to create assignments and evaluation sets for an entire course. In addition, an instructor can develop customized concept inventories based on a detailed description of steps the instructor feels the students should be able to do and the maximum complexity of a combination of steps. The software provides analysis of the results of the evaluations and provides an instructor with detailed reports on the competency of the student on each covered step, the degree to which the students integrate the knowledge required to address the steps, the degree to which they respond correctly to novel but related situations, and the ability to deal with higher levels of complexity. The participating instructors can easily upload the results of the evaluations to the project, where they can be used to refine the model further and to understand better physics education in general.