A Study on Remedial Education in Physics for Premedical Students

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We have carried out remedial education of students who did not study physics at high school since 1982. The students were about 50 every year. Outlines of our new program are as follows : Students learn basic knowledge and concepts in physics through exercises required numerical calculations ; and then they are evaluated the results of learning by brief examinations. In the program, mark cards are used to give advice to each student more effectively. We developed some techniques for utilizing mark cards in the class.In the class, we showed the distribution of answers in the brief examination to the students and attempted to give some advice to every student. However, we have not mastered the problem of finding the way to give sufficiently personal advice for each student. We often asked the students if the exercise was difficult for them ; and then the difficulty was compared with the percentage of correct answer. This procedure was easy since we used mark cards. We have found that the comparison is available to improve making exercises and teaching with them. This is a new method to improve the teaching.We compared the results of the brief examination in two years to check the reliability of the scholastic ability measurement by using the mark cards. Consequently, we found that the results were the same whether the mark cards were used or not. This fact leads to the conclusion that we can evaluate student's scholastic ability by using the mark cards.The average score of the brief examination of each student reflects how the student is studying hard in the class. The correlation coefficient of the score with results of the other subject concerning physics was about 0.7. It is concluded that the present program is effective to remedy the lack of background in physics.