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Educators and policy-makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary…
The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG) carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland Physics…
Since Galileo and (more recently) D'Arcy Thompson, it has been understood that physical processes and constraints influence biological structures and their resulting functions. However these cross-discpline connections -- and their…
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help…
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has…
We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…
We offer second year students the opportunity to explore Current Topics in Biophysics in a course co-taught by a physicist and a biologist. The interdisciplinary course allows university students to engage in analytical thinking that…
A central goal of Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
Energy concepts are fundamental across the sciences, yet these concepts can be fragmented along disciplinary boundaries, rather than integrated into a coherent whole. To teach physics effectively to biology students, we need to understand…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life science majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue post-baccalaureate studies in medical and scientific…
Improving the scientific literacy of non-scientists is an important goal, both because of the ever-increasing impact of science and technology on our lives, and because understanding science enriches our experience of the natural world. One…
Teaching physics to biologists requires far more than making the course for engineers mathematically less rigorous and adding in a few superficial biological problems. What is needed is for physicists to work closely with biologists to…
A goal of Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we…
We have developed a set of laboratories and hands on activities to accompany a new two-semester interdisciplinary physics course that has been successfully developed and tested in two small test classes of students at the University of…
Energy is a complex idea that cuts across scientific disciplines. For life science students, an approach to energy that incorporates chemical bonds and chemical reactions is better equipped to meet the needs of life sciences students than a…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
An elementary understanding of the relevant length, mass and energy scales at the molecular level can be used to explain the order of magnitude of material properties such as mass density, latent heat, surface tension, elastic moduli and…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…