Effects of a thermal inversion experiment on STEM students learning and application of damped harmonic motion

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel home experiment simulating thermal inversion effects on damped harmonic motion, demonstrating its potential to enhance physics understanding and epistemological development among STEM students.

Contribution

It presents a new open-ended experimental activity that promotes self-directed learning and epistemological growth in physics education through environmental problem modeling.

Findings

Open-ended experiments improve understanding of physics phenomena.

Students develop epistemological beliefs about learning physics.

Students find the activity positively impacts their application of physics in real-world contexts.

Abstract

There are diverse teaching methodologies to promote both collaborative and individual work in undergraduate physics courses. However, few educational studies seek to understand how students learn and apply new knowledge through open-ended activities that require mathematical modeling and experimentation focused on environmental problems. In this work, we propose a novel home experiment to simulate the dynamics of a particulate under temperature inversion and model it as damped harmonic motion. Twenty six first year students enrolled in STEM majors answered six qualitative questions after designing and developing the experiment. These questions helped analyze the students epistemological beliefs about their learning process of physics topics and its applications. Results showed that this type of open-ended experiments could facilitate the students understanding of physics phenomena. In addition, this experiment showed that it could help physics professors to promote students epistemological development by giving their students the opportunity to search for different sources of knowledge and becoming self-learners instead of looking at the professor as the epistemological authority. At the end, students described this activity as a positive experience that helped them realize alternative ways to apply physics topics in different contexts of their environment.