Great strides have been made in the field of Physics Education Research (PER) over the past two decades. Significant contributions to this progress actually come from a major restructuring effort on University of Illinois' PHYS 211 (Calculus-based Mechanics) led by three teaching-minded faculty members. This course is currently being offered for the first time at ZJUI.
I will start with a discussion of the award-winning, PER-informed aspects of the course, and explain the administrative and infrastructure support necessary as enrollment increases from the current class of 30 students to the projected 1000. So far researchers have evaluated the innovative pedagogy only with American students. Evaluation with Chinese students will be of great value. I will conclude by presenting some ideas for research into cultural effects in education which ZJUI is uniquely positioned to facilitate.
Janet Sheung:
Lecturer, Physics Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL
PhD & MS in Physics
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
BS in Physics
California Institute of Technology
