Improving Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL): One story of assessment informing instruction

Commonly associated with "thinking like a physicist", Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL) is characterized by the blending of conceptual and procedural mathematics to reason about physical phenomena, e.g., the reasoning about a 1/r² force, and all that is implied. PQL is valued across physics, but is hard to characterize, teach and assess. It relies on a deep familiarity with a few functions, and ways of reasoning about them that are profoundly connected to the meaning of physics quantities (Zimmerman et. al. 2025). PQL should be teachable by a community that relies on it so heavily. I'll share compelling evidence that it is hard for instructors to meet this objective. Progress in this area is at very early stages in physics education research, and efforts to create readily adaptable materials that can be used across a broad spectrum of instructors and courses is still on the horizon.

In a collaboration between the University of Washington, Rowan University and Stockton College we have developed the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL), a 20-item validated assessment instrument that provides a probe of PQL development in calculus-based physics courses. The PIQL is designed to be used by instructors to assess how well their course meets the learning objective of helping students improve their PQL (White Brahmia et. al., 2021). We are currently developing and pilot testing activities that integrate PQL development into the contexts of mechanics and E&M, that eventually will be adaptable to a variety of modalities (e.g. clicker questions to focus discussion in lecture, collaborative small group problem solving, homework and exam questions). These activities are aligned with the conceptual development of quantities students encounter in their co-requisite calculus instruction (e.g. rates of change, accumulation, vector products) but involve physics quantities instead of generic variables. In this talk I will describe the PIQL and share what we've learned about the development of PQL from a variety of courses across the physics major. I will share how we use the PIQL to inform the ongoing development of activities that can be implemented in the introductory courses, as well as some very early results from the implementation of these activities at the University of Washington.