Effective Practices
Strategically develop your department’s courses for non-STEM majors
- Identify the learning outcomes and/or goals that your institution has already articulated for non-STEM majors. Consider how your courses can fulfill general education requirements (e.g., lab science, quantitative, writing, and upper-level general education) or broad institutional needs (e.g., first-year seminars or general-interest science courses).
- Map out which courses in your department meet which institutional and student needs, and which populations each course serves. Identify and address gaps in your offerings, courses that are ineffective because they are trying to meet the needs of too many different groups of students, and courses that are unsustainable due to low enrollments. See D below for details.
- Survey faculty expertise and interest to inform course design and staffing.
- Offer courses that are likely to appeal to a large number of students by connecting to their interests and daily lives, such as Energy and the environment, Radiation and nuclear technology, Physics of the senses, History of the universe, Quantum reality, Physics discoveries that changed the world, From quarks to the cosmos, Physics of everyday technologies (or everyday life), or Physics for hackers (basic E&M and circuits).
- Collaborate with other programs (e.g., education, history, political science, journalism, or architecture) to determine how your department might develop courses that serve their students’ needs and fulfill their major requirements. See 4 below for guidance on courses for elementary education majors.
- Consider offering interdisciplinary courses in partnership with colleagues in other disciplines, e.g., an upper-division history of physics course in partnership with history, a women in physics course in partnership with women and gender studies, a science writing course in partnership with journalism, or a course like Berkeley’s Sense and sensibility and science in partnership with philosophy and psychology.
- Determine how each course fits into the broader curriculum at your institution and what assessment regime governs it. For example, if a course fulfills a requirement for majors in another program, ensure you understand what students in the other program are expected to learn and how their learning will be assessed. Or if a course serves general education goals, determine how your institution articulates and assesses those goals.
- If the context or content of a course has interdisciplinary overlap, partner with experts in relevant fields to engage with their disciplines authentically, without overstepping disciplinary boundaries. Maintain humility in knowing what you don’t know about other disciplines.
- Create for each course for non-STEM majors based on the intended audience of the course, the needs of the audience, and your goals for the course. For example, design courses to help students pass architecture entry exams or to contribute to writing skills, critical thinking skills, or lifelong learning. See 3 and 4 below for other potential goals.
- Clearly articulate your values and goals for each course, and ensure that all content, assignments, and assessments support those values and goals. Recognize that doing this is particularly important in courses for non-STEM majors, because you often have more freedom in these courses than in courses for physics or other STEM majors to define your own learning outcomes. For example, if you want students to learn about quantum physics because the subject can cause people to question the nature of reality and trigger profound feelings, ensure that your assignments focus on exploring the implications of quantum mechanics for the nature of reality. Or if you want students to learn to critically read news stories, ensure that substantial time is devoted to modeling and practicing such critical reading.
- See the section on Implementing Research-Based Instructional Practices for guidance on how to align assignments and assessments with course goals and structures.
- Ensure that the workload for each course aligns with the number of credit hours and how the course fits into students’ other academic commitments, perhaps by regularly collecting data on how much time students spend on course activities (e.g., reading, homework, papers, reviewing material for exams).
- For courses that serve students in specific programs (e.g., elementary education, architecture, philosophy, or music), coordinate with those programs to ensure that your courses fit into their sequence of required courses and to avoid time conflicts.
- Identify spaces, equipment, and facilities that are available or that are needed, and that are consistent with pedagogical requirements. These may include classroom features (e.g., reconfigurable furniture, whiteboard walls or tables, room to move between groups of students), classroom technology (e.g., projection system(s), wifi, computers, clickers), student access to technology outside of class (e.g., appropriate devices and internet bandwidth), lab and demonstration equipment, support facilities (e.g., demonstration equipment storage and preparation, shop facilities), and support personnel (e.g., lab manager, shop staff).
- Ensure that your courses draw from the expertise, interests, and availability of your (see 1.A.iii above) while meeting the needs of your institution and its students.
- Develop a course assignment policy that allows for continuity and innovation while avoiding burnout, e.g., instructors should teach the same course no more than X and no fewer than Y continuous years, and/or course assignments are determined by a designated committee.
- Recognize that successfully using active learning may require additional . Find ways to involve undergraduates in assisting in the classroom, e.g., through a model such as or a . See the section on Undergraduate Instructional Assistants for details.
- If appropriate, provide release time and/or professional development for teaching these courses to, e.g., partner with experts in disciplines related to a course, collaborate with a program served by a course, learn about teaching writing, or learn about elementary science education standards (see 4.D below).
- 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.
- Assess your course offerings portfolio and the effectiveness of courses in meeting and, if applicable, institution-level general education student learning outcomes on a regular (e.g., every one to three years) basis. See Programmatic Assessments below for details.
- Use meaningful, actionable, and research-based measures to solicit appropriate student feedback on these courses and ensure they are meeting student needs. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Instructional Practices for details.
- Solicit feedback from programs these courses serve to determine if they are meeting their students’ needs.
- Advertise to all students non-STEM majors courses with high general appeal. Partner with campus academic advisors to encourage students to enroll in these courses early in their academic careers.
- Consider designing a course for first-year non-STEM majors that can serve as a gateway into the physics major by engaging students in research or other creative activities to introduce them to the discipline. Make it easy for students in this course to transition into the major, by, e.g., offering the first course in the physics major in the spring semester.
- See the section on Recruiting of 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.
Pedagogically support a broad range of students
- Prioritize opportunities for students to experience the joy of physics, gain an appreciation for its aesthetic beauty, see how it connects to things they care about and experience in their everyday lives, and apply it to their work in their own disciplines.
- Implement diverse pedagogical strategies that engage students as active learners. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Instructional Practices for more details.
- Assign work that involves creativity, choice, and/or self-direction, with appropriate guidance, to broaden the appeal of scientific exploration, e.g., investigative projects, topic essays, design projects.
- Provide homework or activities that build students’ confidence and scaffold learning by breaking tasks into discrete steps and gradually removing guidance.
- Establish positive and supportive classroom norms or collaboratively with your students, document these norms, and model them in class. An example of such a norm might be to critique ideas in a constructive way without doubting one’s own or someone else’s thinking abilities. Recognize that norms for argumentation in physics may seem overly confrontational to students from other disciplines, and have explicit discussions about such disciplinary differences.
- Create course activities and grading structures that prioritize and encourage engagement, learning, and understanding over evaluation by, e.g., providing opportunities for homework corrections and using .
- Recognize that standard course designs and expectations for workload and mathematical preparation may not meet the needs of many constituencies of students, e.g., first-generation college students, commuter students, students working full time, students raising children, and/or students from other .
- Recognize that students from may not interpret course practices and structures in the same way that students from do, and you may need to modify or reframe these practices and structures to be more inclusive. For example, consider asking students to collaboratively discuss pros and cons of different explanations rather than asking students to “argue for” or “defend” their answer, in order to better support students from cultures that value consensus building over confrontation; consider renaming office hours and tutoring as “free help sessions” or “student hours,” which may make them more inviting to first-generation college students. See v and vi below.
- Help realize their goals around inclusivity and student-centered instruction by connecting them with relevant campus resources and support. For example, suggest that instructional staff request feedback on course materials or classroom practices from your institution’s teaching and learning center or an expert colleague (in a context in which that colleague’s help is departmentally recognized as service or mentoring).
- Ensure that all students, particularly those with the least preparation, are not only provided with resources to support learning but are also taught how to learn from those resources.
- See the section on Implementing Research-Based Instructional Practices for guidance on how to understand and implement practices that support the diversity of students in your classes.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to ensure that your classes are equitable and inclusive.
- See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to ensure that your classes and curriculum create an inclusive and student-centered environment for all.
- 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 science or math. Recognize, in particular, that juniors or seniors are already scholars in other disciplines.
- Learn about and engage with students’ knowledge and skills in other disciplines. Build on the unique combination of your physics knowledge and what your students already know. In a course for a specialized audience, build on students’ specialized expertise. In a course for students with a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and interests, leverage that diversity through activities that explicitly draw out differences in perspectives on disciplinary knowledge from insiders and outsiders to physics and to your students’ disciplines.
- Learn about the knowledge and skills your students bring to your class based on their unique backgrounds and experiences. Create space for students to bring experiences and ideas from their lives and communities into the classroom. Build on what students bring by posing complex and interesting discussion questions and asking students to use their knowledge to explore these questions. For example, build on the knowledge and experience that students from farming communities may bring of agricultural practices and equipment, that students from Las Vegas may bring of seeing the visible beam of light from the Luxor casino, that scuba divers may bring of water pressure, that painters may bring of how artists categorize colors, and that students from communities impacted by environmental destruction may bring of the impact of harmful technologies.
- Recognize that students bring an existing understanding of science, and design course activities to allow students to examine their own beliefs and build new mental models to make sense of physical phenomena. See the section on Incorporating Research-Based Instructional Practices for more information.
- Use language that is familiar to your students rather than jargon or technical terms, introducing and defining new terms as needed. Recognize that many terms (e.g., energy, momentum, work, velocity, and theory) have physics-specific definitions that may not match how students use the terms colloquially, and address confusion that may result from this mismatch.
- Consider encouraging students to build scientific models and explanations using their own words, and teach the terms physicists use to describe these concepts only after students have developed their own robust models.
- Provide regular opportunities for students to first develop conceptual understanding of and intuition for physics concepts and key relationships (e.g., linear, inverse, and quadratic), and then scaffold that understanding to the physical meaning embodied in an equation (e.g., through thought or simulation experiments demonstrating how an increase in the number of particles in a given volume creates an increase in pressure).
- Provide regular opportunities for students to generate, communicate, and demonstrate ideas in multiple ways, by, e.g., writing short answer explanations (without equations), creating short video explanations, or creating posters. See the section on Communications Skills for details.
- Consider assigning projects, presentations, or papers instead of quantitative homework or exams, in order to support students in developing their conceptual understanding and applying course material to their lives and society.
- Understand the math prerequisites for each course for non-STEM majors (e.g., a general education math course), determine whether they are appropriate (and change them if they are not), and ensure that your and course activities match the skills students are expected to have. If students are struggling with math in a course and you have to build in “remediation,” rethink the course design.
- Find ways to build numerical thinking without using algebra. For example, build an understanding of exponential growth by multiplying numbers repeatedly rather than using exponentials, or explore relationships in an equation by discussing how quantities will go up or down in relation to each other without doing algebraic manipulations.
- Provide opportunities and support for students to refresh any math skills they need, recognizing that junior or senior students may not have engaged in math since high school but are capable of re-engaging with these skills and may be interested in doing so.
- Provide multiple accessible pathways for students to work with peers and get support from and through, e.g., homework and study sessions in addition to adequate office hours (sometimes called “free help sessions” or “student hours”). Discuss the value and function of office hours and how they might differ between physics and other disciplines.
- Recognize and address barriers that may hinder students from seeking assistance (e.g., stigma, time constraints, lack of awareness of resources) by building a supportive culture and infrastructure. For example, build student confidence in the classroom, normalize asking for help inside and outside of the classroom, and ensure that office hours and other supports are convenient for students to access and attend.
- Connect students to relevant departmental and institutional resources such as writing centers, quantitative skills centers, teaching and learning centers, and/or peer academic mentors.
Use courses for non-STEM majors to connect physics to topics and issues your students care about
- Include topics and examples that connect to things your students notice, value, and use in their daily lives.
- Include topics and examples relevant across demographic groups to improve inclusivity. For example, assuming familiarity with a particular sport may exclude some students.
- Draw on local issues and current events for engaging topics of discussion, e.g., local energy sources such as nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind; invasive weeds and fire impacts in a region where wildfires are prevalent; Nobel Prize announcements; a congressional bill related to clean energy; or a recent natural disaster.
- Make the subject matter relevant by connecting it to technologies and instruments students use in their everyday lives (e.g., smartphones, supermarket scanners, GPS mapping, and musical instruments), or by bringing in outside experts to discuss physics-related technology. Illustrate how physics reasoning skills can be used to make meaningful decisions in everyday life (see 3.B.iii. below).
- Include topics of particular relevance to society, technology, and contemporary physics research, e.g., biophysics, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, general relativity, and climate science.
- Engage students in discussions of the depiction of physics principles in popular culture, e.g., how space travel or energy and momentum conservation are represented in video games and movies.
- Build on students’ existing critical reasoning skills to cultivate interest in novel problems that they don’t necessarily encounter in their daily lives but that are scientifically interesting.
- Engage students in exploring phenomena, building scientific models, using data to test those models, and applying the models to new phenomena. For example, ask students to create a model for magnetism in iron nails when they are cut into pieces or for the dependence of simple and physical pendulum period on length at low versus high amplitude.
- Engage students in interpreting data, evaluating claims, and making decisions from evidence by practicing, e.g., differentiating signal from noise, evaluating causal claims, avoiding reasoning biases, and exploring the limitations of data collected from different sources and through various methods.
- For courses that include laboratory activities, see the section on Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills for guidance on how to design and provide laboratory experiences that support the process of doing experimental physics.
- Explore with students how physics discoveries are integral to many contemporary technologies, e.g., the use of transformers to reduce power loss in the electrical grid, the use of optical fibers to transmit internet data, or the role of semiconductors in integrated circuits.
- Highlight the work of a diverse range of physicists, including historical figures and people you know, to help students recognize the diversity of people who contribute to and belong in physics. See the Teaching Guides and Educational Games on the History of the Physical Sciences for examples.
- Explore with students the benefits and drawbacks of specific physics applications and their economic and quality-of-life impact, e.g., GPS location finding, high-speed data transmission, LEDs, or nuclear power and weapons.
- Explore with students how their lives might be affected by future physics advances, e.g., room-temperature superconductivity, new battery technologies that dramatically increase energy storage capacity, or quantum computing.
- Explore with students the environmental impacts of physics-enabled technologies, e.g., rare-earth metal mining for microelectronics and nuclear waste disposal and recovery.
- Explore with students inequities in access to physics-enabled technologies (e.g., inequities in access to internet, renewable energy, and space exploration) and how these technologies can have local and global consequences (e.g., groundwater contamination, climate change, and light pollution).
- Partner with experts in philosophy and/or history of science to engage students with questions of what a scientific model is and how models are generated and function in physics.
- Explore with students how predictions of new and refined theoretical models must agree with the results of previously accepted models. Examples could include how quantum mechanics predicts Newtonian mechanics at large scales and special relativity predicts classical mechanics at low speeds.
- Explore with students historical examples of accepted theory being discarded when found to conflict with experiment, new theories being accepted when experiments agreed with their predictions, and/or experimental evidence being set aside because it conflicted with a well-established theory.
- Explore with students the fundamental limits of measurements and of theories to make predictions, e.g., due to chaos or quantum indeterminacy.
- Critically examine with students how social context shapes the kinds of questions that are asked in physics, the kinds of answers that are accepted by the physics community, and who gets to participate in physics.
- Critically examine with students how physics has been tied to positive social change as well as to structural oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and war.
Consider offering a physics or physical science course tailored to the needs of elementary education majors
- Collaborate with the school of education to establish the course as a requirement or strongly recommended component within the curriculum for elementary education majors.
- Consider co-teaching the course (at least initially, but potentially as an ongoing practice) with in the school of education.
- Consider limiting enrollment to elementary education majors to ensure that these students have access to an appropriately designed physical science course.
- See the section on High School Physics Teacher Preparation for more guidance on establishing courses and programs for future teachers.
- Incorporate inclusive, evidence-based, active-engagement pedagogies and engage students in hands-on activities, in order to model the practices that future teachers are expected to use. See Resources below for examples of courses and course materials. See the section on Incorporating Research-Based Instructional Practices for details on evidence-based, active-engagement pedagogies. See 2.B above for details on inclusive pedagogies.
- Provide opportunities for students to reflect on how they learn through active-engagement practices and to make explicit connections between teaching and their learning of science by, e.g., reading articles about children’s ideas in science or engaging in service learning activities, and then making connections with their own learning.
- Include opportunities for students to watch classroom videos (for examples, see Resources below) of children engaged in science activities and/or to work directly with children by, e.g., working in elementary school classrooms through your school of education or pursuing service learning activities at a local museum.
- Learn about your state’s elementary science education standards and ensure that you maintain regular communication with a contact in the school of education who is responsible for compliance with state standards. In many cases, the state standards will be based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and/or the Framework for K-12 Science Education.
- Include opportunities for students to engage significantly in each of the “Science and Engineering Practices” in the NGSS or applicable state standards, so they will know what these practices look and feel like and be more comfortable teaching science in ways consistent with the NGSS or applicable state standards.
- Include opportunities throughout the course for students to write in a variety of contexts and forms, focusing on both writing to generate ideas and writing to communicate ideas. See the section on Communications Skills for details.
- Design the course content so that it is aligned with, or consistent with, the core physics ideas from the NGSS or applicable state standards, focusing course content on energy, forces, waves, and/or matter and its interactions.
- Provide support for to attend workshops on how to offer such courses.
- Provide or advocate for release time for when they teach this course for the first time.
- Build on others’ research and experience by using existing materials (see Resources below) in the design of this course, so that instructional staff do not need to develop materials from scratch.
