The Transfer of Physics to Everyday Life

Leslie Atkins Elliott, Boise State University

As part of an ongoing study of transfer, I administered a survey¹ that examines the prevalence of a particular kind of transfer, addressing whether or not students notice, value and use ideas from physics (in this case, optics) in their everyday lives. When told the premise of this survey, students in a traditional introductory physics course for science and engineering majors laughed - in every section across two universities. In one section a student joked with his lab group, imagining a hypothetical moment of transfer and saying, with mad-scientist prosody, “yeah - the air drag caused by me riding my bicycle causes my beard hairs to deflect 13 degrees towards my neck.” And in response to the question asking whether or not students think of concepts from class when they see everyday objects, such as eyeglasses and television screens, only one of the 55 students surveyed “strongly agreed;” nine “agreed.” For the other 45 students, then, they report that classroom instruction on optics has not influenced how they view everyday objects that exploit these principles.

In contrast, when students in a science course for elementary education majors, Scientific Inquiry (Atkins & Salter, 2015),² were given the survey, not one student strongly disagreed. 13 of 25 strongly agreed with that statement, 9 more “agreed.” One student, Maddy, offered the following example:

“Right now, our group is working on the idea of how glasses and contacts change the shape of your cornea to balance out a person's misshapen cornea. We thought we could explain it by explaining that people with near sighted vision need glasses with thicker glass on the sides and that people with far sighted vision need glasses with thicker glass in the center. However, we … didn’t know what far-sighted glasses looked like. When I was at Walgreens the other day, I saw some reading glasses and decided to investigate. And sure enough, the glasses were thicker in the center and as the intensity of the prescription increased, so did the thickness of the center. I was so proud of our group to turn out correct!”

Students’ quantitative and qualitative responses across the set of survey questions indicate that students in the Scientific Inquiry course have significantly different out-of-class experiences related to the content of the course than those in the traditional physics course, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Student responses to the Transformative Experiences Survey in Optics. All bars are length 1 and shading represents the fraction of students who answered with that response. A bar entirely above 0, then, indicates all students “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the question.

This talk provided an overview of an explanation for why two courses, each meeting 5 - 6 hours a week and covering topics of geometric optics, would have such different outcomes — not with respect to the traditional metrics of learning (e.g., concept inventories), but to the transfer of those ideas to everyday life. Rather than attending to the skills, knowledge, or traits of individuals, as is common in the literature on transfer and the related construct of transformative experience (TE),¹ I analyze how the classroom activity in the inquiry-rich course facilitates this transfer. In particular, I argue, the ways in which students themselves leveraged out-of-class contexts to develop and vet scientific ideas can - at least in part - explain why the class has such high TE. Below I briefly describe these contexts, and the ways in which they are leveraged in class.

These contexts, taken from work by Barnett & Ceci on contexts of transfer, are described in Table I along with examples taken from the Scientific Inquiry class.

Broadly speaking, the talk and its related research is an argument for the following: (1) that we expand our assessments of physics education to examine the role that physics education plays in the lives of students; (2) in doing so, certain features of classroom activity - in particular, students’ agency and the idiosyncratic ways in which students draw on their own background and resources - have increased importance.

Leslie Atkins Elliott is an Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and Foundational Studies at Boise State University, specializing in Science Education. Her research focuses on fostering participation in the practices of science - particularly writing and design - and how science instruction can reduce barriers between classrooms and everyday life.

(Endnotes)

¹ K. J. Pugh, L. Linnenbrink‐Garcia, K. L. Koskey, V. C. Stewart, and C.Manzey, “Motivation, learning, and transformative experience: A study of deep engagement in science,” Science Education, 94(1), 1-28, (2010).

² L. J., Atkins and I. Y. Salter, “Engaging future teachers in having wonderful ideas,” In Recruiting and Educating Future Physics Teachers: Case Studies and Effective Practices, edited by E. Brewe and C. Sandifer. 2015, APS.

³ S. M. Barnett and S. J. Ceci, “When and where do we apply what we learn?: A taxonomy for far transfer,” Psychological bulletin, 128(4), 612, (2002).

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.