Using Mathcasts to Facilitate Student Comprehension of Physical Applications of Math Concepts

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of math-focused videos, called Mathcasts, to help physics students better understand the mathematical concepts underlying electromagnetism, especially in flipped classroom settings.

Contribution

It introduces Mathcasts as a tool to connect prior mathematics knowledge with current physics topics, enhancing student comprehension outside of class.

Findings

Mathcasts improved students' understanding of mathematical concepts in physics.

Students showed increased engagement with math content through videos.

The approach facilitated better integration of math and physics learning.

Abstract

Many Physics Education Researchers have discussed the positive correlation between students' incoming mathematics skills and performance in their physics classes. Thus, in order to strengthen their performance gains in their physics courses, professors strive to bolster students' mathematics abilities but in-class time constraints force instructors to focus their lesson plans on physics concepts rather than renewing mathematics material. For the sake of preserving in-class time, many instructors are turning to lecture delivery outside of class by way of flipped classrooms and MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses). Videos can strengthen problem-solving skill sets and some PER researchers have begun moving worked problems and class lectures to YouTube. YouTube videos even have a relatively long history of being used for in-class discussions. We aimed to provide students with videos that directly connected mathematics concepts from previous classes (such as dot/cross products, limits of integration, solving systems of equations, etc.) to E&M concepts in their current class (such as work/torque, electric fields from continuous objects, Kirchoff's Laws, etc.).