A Tale of Two Curricula: The performance of two thousand students in introductory electromagnetism

TL;DR

This study compares the effectiveness of traditional and Matter & Interactions curricula in teaching electromagnetism to over 2000 students, finding the M&I curriculum yields significantly higher understanding as measured by BEMA scores.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that the M&I curriculum improves student understanding of electromagnetism over traditional methods across multiple universities.

Findings

M&I curriculum results in higher post-test BEMA scores.

Differences are not due to pre-existing student variables.

M&I improves understanding across all subtopics.

Abstract

The performance of over 2000 students in introductory calculus-based electromagnetism (E&M) courses at four large research universities was measured using the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA). Two different curricula were used at these universities: a traditional E&M curriculum and the Matter & Interactions (M&I) curriculum. At each university, post-instruction BEMA test averages were significantly higher for the M&I curriculum than for the traditional curriculum. The differences in post-test averages cannot be explained by differences in variables such as pre-instruction BEMA scores, grade point average, or SAT scores. BEMA performance on categories of items organized by subtopic was also compared at one of the universities; M&I averages were significantly higher in each topic. The results suggest that the M&I curriculum is more effective than the traditional curriculum at teaching E&M concepts to students, possibly because the learning progression in M&I reorganizes and augments the traditional sequence of topics, for example, by increasing early emphasis on the vector field concept and by emphasizing the effects of fields on matter at the microscopic level.