Sources of student engagement in Introductory Physics for Life Sciences

We explore the sources of student engagement with curricular content in an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course at Swarthmore College. Do IPLS students find some life-science contexts more interesting than others, and, if so, what are the sources of these differences? We draw on three sources of student data to answer this question: (1) quantitative survey data illustrating how interested students were in particular contexts from the curriculum, (2) qualitative survey data in which students describe the source of their interest in these particular contexts, and (3) interview data in which students reflect on the contexts that were and were not of interest to them. We find that examples that make interdisciplinary connections with students’ other coursework in biology and chemistry, and examples that make connections to what students perceive to be the “real world,” are particularly effective at fostering interest. More generally, students describe being deeply engaged with contexts that foster a sense of coherence or have personal meaning to them. We identify various “engagement pathways” by which different life-science students engage with IPLS content, and suggest that a curriculum needs to be flexible enough to facilitate these different pathways.

Figure 1

Interest and engagement can enhance students’ attention, effort, and conceptual learning (bottom arrow). At the same time, positive affective experiences stemming from particular aspects of the IPLS curriculum can be ends in and of themselves (top arrow).

Figure 2

Students ranked their levels of interest in key biological contexts on a five-point Likert scale. Average results and standard errors are shown for the IPLS course (years 1–4, $N=194$ responses).

Figure 3

The percentages of “rich and nuanced positive student responses” coded into each of the five categories of Table 3 are displayed. Data are shown for the IPLS course (years 1–4, $N=175$ responses).

Figure 4

The students we interviewed described becoming more highly engaged with IPLS curricular content for a variety of reasons. Students described high levels of interest in contexts that fostered a sense of coherence (left-hand side) or a sense of personal meaning (right-hand side). The most prominent “engagement pathways” (black arrows) are shown, and labeled by the factor that is key in facilitating increased engagement relative to the student’s initial, pre-IPLS state. The pre-IPLS state is represented by the middle red oval from which all the pathways emerge, and the meaning of each factor is unpacked below.