Arunee Eambaipreuk*, Kwan Arayathanitkul, Narumon Emarat, and Manjula Devi Sharma
Eur. J. Phys. 42 (2021) 035703 (17pp)
This study examined iterations of incorporating interactivity where content, structure and time spent on different in-class activities, ‘intensity’, are varied. The study described in this work deals in some depth with the use of worksheets during lectures on the topic of circular motion. It was done with a total of 1,405 students studying first year physics over five years at Mahidol University, Thailand. Over these years the style of the worksheets as well as the in-class activities were modified as shown in Table 1. From the table, the main idea of the modified worksheets was based on including problem-solving strategy and practice. Other activities were added to support the idea.
In this work one-way Welch’s ANOVA was conducted for pre-test and post-test and one-way ANOVA for the examination scores. There was a statistically significant difference between student performance on an examination question of circular motion between the first-year cohort and the cohorts of later years as shown in Figure 1. We concluded from these data that there is a trend for improvements as intensity increases. The years of improvement had higher effect on the mean score than the score of Year 1. The result showed that the year of including the problem-solving strategy and setting to practice by using the strategy could help students grow into the idea that ‘strategies’ are important to help engage their problem-solving skill.
