Students encounter many difficulties in electricity and magnetism. The course places heavy emphasis on atomic-level description and analysis, with detailed attention to the atomic structure of matter and its electric and magnetic interactions, with special emphasis on polarization phenomena in metals, insulators, and ionic solutions. Electrostatics and circuits are usually portrayed as completely separate sciences, but we unify them by analyzing circuits directly in terms of the fundamental Coulomb interaction.
Special software helps students visualize electric and magnetic fields.
Students who followed the reform curriculum did significantly better on this test both soon after taking the course and later. Students in the reform curriculum also did better in traditional problem-solving on a final exam. Chabay and I are now developing an alternative to the first-semester college course on mechanics and thermodynamics, with emphasis on physical modeling. Textbook homework problems typically begin at a point where all the important idealizations and approximations have already been made for the student. Yet this modeling is the important physics, while the work assigned to the student is mostly formula manipulation.