Students' difficulties in solving simple pendulum like problems at community college and four-year college: A case study

Simple pendulum like problems are generally included in the college level physics courses or even in high school physics. Students are usually exposed to simple experiment such as finding the time period of a simple pendulum or demo or PhET simulation and relevant questions are included in either formative or summative assessments. To access understanding and difficulties in such problems, non-physics major students taking introductory physics courses (algebra based) were assigned a set of math questions with one question related to simple pendulum as a pre-test and post-test. Data were collected from 300 -- 400 students starting from 2016 Fall at California State University Chico and Yuba Community College Marysville. In this poster, students' responses on that particular question will be presented along with their improvement in math solving skills after taking the physics course.