Improved Student Performance In Electricity And Magnetism Following Prior MAPS Instruction In Mechanics

Abstract

We examine the performance of a group of students in Introductory Electricity and Magnetism following a ReView course in Introductory Mechanics focusing on problem solving employing the Modeling Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS) pedagogy[1]. The group consists of students who received a D in the fall Mechanics course (8.01) and were given the chance to attend the ReView course and take a final retest. Improvement to a passing grade was qualification for the Electricity and Magnetism course (8.02) in the spring. The ReView course was conducted twice—during January 2009 and January 2010. As a control, we took a group of students with similar z-scores in 8.01 in Fall 2007 that were not offered the ReView course. We show that the ReView students perform ~0.7 standard deviations better than the control group (p~0.002) and ~0.5 standard deviations better than what is expected based on their performance in 8.01(p ~0.001).