Abstract
[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In developing and modifying a course called Intuitive Quantum Physics for nonscience majors, several social and theoretical commitments informed our design decisions. We believed that the goal of a general education course should not be acquiring content knowledge alone, but more generally developing an approach to thinking scientifically. Thus, our course was designed to promote a deeper understanding of the nature of science through careful attention to students’ personal epistemologies. We emphasized everyday situations, be they social activities or personal experiences, as analogies to be used during instruction. We used these everyday events to help students make sense of quantum physics, choosing the topic exactly because it seems otherwise counterintuitive. Through this work, we hoped to help students make connections between complex topics (in this case in science) and their everyday experiences.
- Received 8 July 2019
- Accepted 24 October 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020159
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
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This article appears in the following collection:
Curriculum Development: Theory into Design
A special collection on theory and design of curriculum.