COVID-19 Questions for Physics Exams
Date
2024-02-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
The Physics Teacher
Abstract
Physics instructors are always looking for questions and activities that both are tractable to students and illuminate real-life applications of physics. This is especially true in Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS), where many students enter with the belief that physics is merely a “weed-out” course that has little to do with their majors and career goals.1 Authentic applications of physics to the life sciences help dispel this myth.
The COVID-19 pandemic provides numerous examples of the relevance of physics to current events and the life sciences. Physics principles are used both to model the spread of the disease and to develop technologies that curb its transmission. Given the disruption COVID-19 has wrought on almost every aspect of life, physics content related to the pandemic inevitably captures students’ attention. Few topics are more relevant to their lives, at the time of writing, than COVID-19.
While previous papers report on the effects of COVID-19 on physics instruction,2 COVID-related curricular materials have not been widely disseminated. This paper looks at how information about the disease can be incorporated into the assessment aspect of a class. Specifically, we share a sample of exam questions we have used to assess IPLS students since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since they are exam questions, they are written such that they can be answered by a student in a short period of time as part of a larger timed assessment. Consequently, they are not meant to investigate every possible application of physics to COVID-19. They are also not meant to be collaborative activities that require a substantial amount of time, and potentially interdisciplinary knowledge to solve, although we have used them to assess the knowledge of students who have come through an IPLS sequence using such activities.3 Instructors looking for inspiration as they develop an activity may find these questions to be a fruitful launching point. These questions can also be used by other instructors on exams or developed into interactive in-class problem-solving activities.4
The questions below assess content from three different parts of our IPLS sequence: scaling, diffusion, and electricity. The following sections show the sample exam questions, describe their solutions and their relevance to our IPLS sequence, and discuss students’ performance in answering these questions.
Description
This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Colin Scott Wallace, Duane Deardorff, Daniel Young, Alice D. Churukian; COVID-19 Questions for Physics Exams. Phys. Teach. 1 February 2024; 62 (2): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0127554 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0127554. © 2024 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by American Association of Physics Teachers. This article will be embargoed until 02/01/2025.
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Citation
Colin Scott Wallace, Duane Deardorff, Daniel Young, Alice D. Churukian; COVID-19 Questions for Physics Exams. Phys. Teach. 1 February 2024; 62 (2): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0127554