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Every fall several hundred thousand students enroll in calculus-based “engineering” physics courses throughout the United States. Informal statistics tell us that over half of them will fail to complete the sequence of introductory courses. These students complain that physics is hard and boring. The most compelling student critique of traditional introductory physics and chemistry courses comes from college graduates in the humanities who were engaged by Sheila Tobias to take introductory science for credit. These students paint a devastating portrait of introductory courses as uninteresting, time consuming, narrowly fixated on the procedures of textbook problem solving, devoid of peer cooperation, lacking in student involvement during lectures, crammed with too much material, and biased away from conceptual understanding.
Priscilla W. Laws (Sun,) studied this question.