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

解决问题的艺术要求一个人首先识别问题，对其进行分类，然后用各种概念来解决问题。不幸的是，入门的科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）课程包含大量的材料，这些课程的讲师经常忽略较小的细节，以提高课程的覆盖范围。然后，学生们倾向于把知识分成许多小块，这些小块必须整合起来才能解决问题。关于整合过程的实质性指导很少被提及，使学生没有能力从新手提升到专家解决问题，从而有效地执行手头的任务，降低了学生的能力，削弱了他们的信心。本项目通过采样不同的物理来源，创建了一个基本步骤和基本步骤的循环模式的目录，这些步骤是在解决入门级电、磁和光学问题中发现的。该目录正在通过讲座、研讨会和同行评议出版物广泛传播，为教师提供了一种工具，以查明学生的知识，他们如何整合所学知识，以及教育工作在哪里出错。这一过程有望使人口更具科学素养。该目录还被用于构建软件和问题库，其中包含代表每个步骤的问题，以及适合本科生的复杂程度的步骤组合。软件和程序的发展允许将该技术扩展到更多的研究领域。正在制作DVD分发版，其中包括定制软件和问题库，允许教师为整个课程创建作业和评估集。此外，教师可以根据教师认为学生应该能够完成的步骤的详细描述和步骤组合的最大复杂性来开发定制的概念清单。该软件提供对评估结果的分析，并向教师提供有关学生在每个覆盖步骤上的能力的详细报告，学生整合解决步骤所需知识的程度，他们对新颖但相关的情况做出正确反应的程度，以及处理更高层次复杂性的能力。参与的教师可以很容易地将评估结果上传到项目中，在那里他们可以用来进一步完善模型，并更好地理解一般的物理教育。

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.