Effective Practices
Determine how the courses in your program or department can best serve life sciences majors
- Determine which existing physics courses your institution’s majors take.
- Work with appropriate institutional offices such as your offices of admissions and/or institutional research to get data on the student populations your existing introductory courses serve.
- Identify the programs that students in your introductory physics courses are enrolled in, recognizing that these courses often serve multiple constituencies. These could include biology majors, biochemistry majors, neuroscience majors, and students preparing for medical school and/or health fields such as nursing, physical therapy, and pharmacy. Determine the percentages of each of these constituencies in each type of introductory course your department offers.
- Reflect on how courses for majors support the mission and goals of your institution and your department. See the section on How to Create and Use Foundational Documents for details.
- Use enrollment and faculty load data to determine whether and how your department could modify existing courses and/or develop a separate course sequence. Recognize that successful courses could increase future enrollment and that IPLS courses may be your department’s highest-enrollment courses.
- Recognize that courses for majors are likely to include more students from than courses for physics majors. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to support students from marginalized groups.
- Assess your department members’ attitudes about working with majors. Plan a series of department meetings to identify faculty thoughts, concerns, and interest in adapting and teaching introductory courses for life sciences majors. Support your department in recognizing courses as valid and valuable.
- Meet with faculty in the programs that your courses serve to learn how physics is relevant to their programs and research, to discuss overlaps and differences in how physics and other disciplines talk about and use similar concepts and content (e.g., energy), and to identify potential partners for designing courses.
- Meet with professional advisors who work with pre-health students to learn about requirements for associated majors and expectations of related graduate programs.
- Learn what requirements physics courses help students meet, i.e., which or pre-health courses have physics courses as prerequisites. Determine what other requirements and needs your courses could meet for life sciences programs in your institution, as well as for graduate programs that students from your institution enroll in. Ensure that any changes you make to your courses don’t jeopardize students’ ability to fulfill their requirements, but at the same time, think broadly about how specific requirements can be addressed.
- Learn about and visit science courses that majors typically take before taking your physics courses to understand the knowledge, skills, and expectations they bring. For instance, note the kinds of skills students develop, the course format and structure, what kind of homework is assigned, what preparation is expected for class, how tests are administered, and how laboratories are run.
- Learn about how various disciplines use physics content. Pay particular attention to disciplinary differences in language and notation. For instance, there are important reasons why mathematics, biology, and chemistry use different terminology and emphasize different aspects of phenomena than physics does. Understanding these reasons can help resolve confusion created by different disciplinary treatments of the same topic. See Evidence below for examples of disciplinary differences.
- See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to use surveys and use interviews to learn about your students.
- Survey majors in physics courses to find out their career interests and goals, how your courses fit into these interests and goals, and what other science courses they have already completed or are taking concurrently.
- Survey previous or current students in your introductory courses to find out what connections they have noticed between physics and their other courses or pre-professional activities, such as EMT work or volunteering in medical settings.
- Learn about your students’ backgrounds in math and quantitative skills and consider how these courses can support the growth of those skills.
- Learn about majors’ attitudes about learning physics. Provide with resources to assess life sciences majors’ perceptions of learning physics, for instance, through a pre-post survey using a research-based instrument such as the Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG) or Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS). Use the results to guide improvement of your courses. Use caution when comparing survey results for these courses to results for courses with very different student populations, and focus on what your results tell you about your students.
- Plan to make revisions slowly over time, recognizing that it takes time for to gain new expertise, develop relationships with partners in other departments and programs, and learn to implement new curricula. Consider creating a three-year or five-year plan rather than overhauling courses all at once, unless external resources and/or instructional staff interest and expertise permit a more rapid change.
- Determine whether you already have an introductory course that primarily serves majors that could be modified to better serve this population. For example, you may have an algebra-based course that teaches a traditional physics curriculum that could be modified to become an course.
- Determine whether it would be appropriate to divide courses that are serving multiple constituencies into separate courses or sections to better address the needs of majors in general or of specific categories of life sciences majors. For example, you may want to divide an existing introductory course into a course for physics majors and an course.
- Determine whether there are groups of majors your department is not currently serving, but who could be served by a new or modified course. Work with relevant programs to ensure that your course serves their students’ needs and that they will require or encourage their students to take your course.
- Think carefully about which populations of majors will be served by which courses in your program. Recognize that life sciences are very diverse, so different topics will be more relevant and interesting to students with different life sciences foci. Develop coherent courses that serve the particular populations of students in each course by focusing on a few topics in depth rather than many topics superficially. At the same time, recognize that in-depth authentic treatments of topics can be engaging and valuable even to students whose majors are not directly related to those topics, so you can explore specialized topics even in courses that include students with diverse interests.
- If a separate course is not feasible, consider how your existing introductory physics courses could be modified to benefit multiple categories of students. See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for guidance on designing these courses.
Develop support structures for your department’s introductory courses for life sciences majors
- Share with your department the potential for increasing your enrollment of majors by creating, redesigning, or otherwise improving an sequence.
- Emphasize the value of courses as exciting growth opportunities for , students, and your department. Discuss the ways these courses can be more sophisticated than other introductory physics courses. Share with instructional staff summaries of research on IPLS courses, research-based instructional materials, grant programs, opportunities for scholarly work, and testimonials from students.
- Ensure that recognize the importance of providing high-quality and appropriate courses for majors, who typically comprise a large percentage of the students your program serves.
- Ensure that there is adequate support for adjunct and part-time in these courses. Understand and value these instructors’ roles in advancing student learning and provide them with adequate compensation and professional development.
- Identify reasons for hesitancy about teaching an course, so that issues can be addressed. For example, hesitancy due to discomfort with lack of knowledge of topics may be addressed with professional development, resources, and/or support from colleagues with expertise in life sciences. See C and D below.
- See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for guidance on how to develop systems for staffing introductory courses to ensure quality instruction and equitable assignments for instructional staff.
- Identify and support to contribute in a variety of ways to developing and improving these courses, including both instructional staff who have special expertise in the and who don’t.
- Identify and support champions to lead department efforts in investigation, implementation, and assessment of courses. Have faculty with sufficient experience and longevity serve in these roles, even if they do not teach these courses, so they can effectively advocate for departmental resources.
- Identify in your department who have biological training, who are biological physicists or medical physicists, or who collaborate with life scientists, and include them in the development of your courses. Encourage these department members to bring in examples from current research and other sources that give these courses more contemporary relevance.
- Find faculty in programs who conduct discipline-based education research, have backgrounds in physics, do research that uses physics, and/or have been particularly helpful in thinking about how physics interacts with their disciplines to serve as partners.
- Work with partners to discuss potential disciplinary themes around which to structure your course, develop ideas for authentic biological examples, ensure that content is appropriate and accurate, and provide information about students' preparation and expectations.
- Support development of interdisciplinary connections with and pre-health faculty. For instance, hold a meeting among science faculty at your institution to share ideas, identify common themes among disciplines (e.g., energy, fluids, thermodynamics, kinetics, and dynamics), identify areas of common difficulties in student understanding (e.g., mathematical reasoning, vector analysis, conservation laws, identification of systems), and discuss best practices to help students learn to integrate science across disciplines.
- Support professional development in through, e.g., meetings, meetings, and Living Physics Portal community workshops.
- Provide opportunities for to share work in a publishable manner, e.g., through resources or in journals such as The Physics Teacher, the American Journal of Physics, and The Biophysicist.
- Encourage in these courses to learn about the connections between physics principles and practical questions in medicine and health care that are relevant to the students their courses serve. See Resources below.
- If appropriate, support teaching these courses in making connections with faculty in clinical health programs or professional clinicians to learn about the preparation needed by students bound for allied health fields, including graduate programs.
- Share with in these courses information about the , emphasizing that the exam focuses on integrated, interdisciplinary physics understanding and reasoning rather than on isolated factual questions or calculations that result in a number without interpretation.
- Provide or advocate for release time for when they are designing, developing, and teaching these courses for the first time.
Strategically design your department’s introductory courses for life sciences majors
- See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for guidance on how to
- design an introductory course structure to meet your department’s goals, students’ needs, and institutional constraints;
- use research-based instructional practices and inclusive pedagogy in the introductory courses;
- support instructional staff to provide effective classroom instruction in the introductory courses;
- support students to maximize their learning; and
- establish and sustain institutional support for your introductory courses.
- Design courses, including laboratory experiences, that are deeply interdisciplinary and that explore how authentically use physics, rather than rely on surface-level life sciences applications of traditional physics content. Use examples and develop skills that students will need for their future careers. See Resources below for examples of curricula and classes that do this.
- Recognize the ways in which your students are already sophisticated learners, and the knowledge and skills they bring to your class, even if they don’t have much background in physics. Recognize, in particular, that majors, unlike physics and engineering majors, are likely to take your introductory courses when they are juniors or seniors, and thus when they are already scholars in their own disciplines.
- Learn about and engage with students’ knowledge and skills in their own disciplines. Build on the unique combination of your physics knowledge and your students’ specialized expertise in . Explicitly draw out and discuss differences in how physics and other disciplines talk about and use similar concepts and content.
- Learn about and engage with the expectations students bring from their high school physics experiences, recognizing that there may be a mismatch between the ways physics was taught in those courses and the approach used in an course.
- Ask students to identify topics they are interested in learning about and/or topics about which they have expertise they can share with other students.
- Use majors in your introductory courses as resources; encourage them to share and discuss what they have learned in chemistry and biology courses.
- Identify specific connections between introductory physics and the other courses your students take during their college careers. Consider connections related to scientific concepts, instrumentation, and technology. Prepare a chart or other reference document for and listing connections between physics and other specific courses or research efforts at your institution.
- Invite guest speakers who can share with students how they apply physics principles in their careers. For example, invite research biologists, biochemists, physicians, physical therapists, dentists, optometrists, and/or biomechanics researchers
- Talk to partners in the departments served by these courses to find out what skills they would like their students to develop. For example, faculty may want to be able to count on physics courses to teach specific quantitative skills that they may not address in their own courses.
- Recognize that majors are likely to take only one year of physics and focus on appropriate skills that will be of the most use.
- Consider learning outcomes that match the recommendations of national reports such as Vision and Change and Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians and/or the learning goals listed in the Conference on Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences Report, section V.C. See Resources below.
- See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for general guidance on how to develop course-level student learning outcomes for each introductory course.
- Discuss your with departments and programs your courses serve as well as the faculty partners identified in 2.C above.
- Develop course content and structures that build on others’ research and experience by using existing resources and curricula for courses, so that do not need to develop them from scratch. Find such materials on the Living Physics Portal and in journals such as The Physics Teacher, the American Journal of Physics, and The Biophysicist. See Resources below for details.
- See the section on Implementing Research-Based Instructional Practices for detailed guidance on how to design and assess courses based on program-level and course-level student learning outcomes.
- See Programmatic Assessments below for examples of how to assess the effectiveness of your courses.
- Assess the content of your courses and consider whether changes, deletions, or additions are needed to better serve the particular students in your courses.
- See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for general guidance on how to continuously improve courses through a cyclic process of design and assessment.
- Consider whether some intermediate and upper-level physics courses could be made relevant and accessible to majors who become interested in physics through courses, particularly if such changes could support your department in meeting minimum enrollment requirements set by your institution.
- Discuss with your partners in other departments possibilities for interdisciplinary degree tracks for students interested in both physics and . See the section on Degree Tracks for details.
- Work with partners to encourage majors to take required physics courses in their first years, to give them more time to add a physics major or minor or switch to an interdisciplinary degree track.
- Ensure there is a pathway for students in your courses to add a physics major or minor, perhaps via a specialized degree track focused on connections between physics and .
- See the section on Recruiting Undergraduate Physics Majors for guidance on how to ensure that there are mechanisms to support students in your introductory and service courses in becoming physics majors or minors.
