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Possible benefits from tutorials in 234. Alex Small. Physics 234 in Winter 2010. 57 students started the course 47 students completed the course We have a lot to cover: Finish E&M Do AC circuits the right way (complex numbers!) Get and solve the wave equation Diffraction
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Possible benefits from tutorials in 234 Alex Small
Physics 234 in Winter 2010 • 57 students started the course • 47 students completed the course • We have a lot to cover: • Finish E&M • Do AC circuits the right way (complex numbers!) • Get and solve the wave equation • Diffraction • Geometrical optics • Relativity • We have 3 hours per week for 10 weeks • Some idiot scheduled 2 holidays in the midst of this
If life gives you a fire hydrant, make a sprinkler! To mitigate the problem of too much to do in too little time, I did 2 things: • Asked the grader to hold office hours to provide additional peer tutoring during times when I wasn’t available. • Held one office hour per week in a classroom and spent most of those sessions on relevant U. Washington tutorials
Tutorial Sessions • 8 weeks of U. Washington tutorials relevant to lecture. 1 week of homework help. 1 week away. • Suggested tutorial format not strictly followed. (I promise to go to confession.) • Attendance taking did not start until week 3 because ***essment was not on my mind. • Average attendance was 7.8 students/week • 17 students attended at least 1 session. • Attendance dropped over time. Homework help was more popular.
Anecdata Correlation between attendance and course grade is as strong as correlation between homework and course grade!
Caveats and Plans • Small sample size • Maybe the best students seek out more opportunities and skew data? • Do this more systematically next year, do more carefully-planned ***essment.