Some challenges in tertiary education due to quasi-bifurcation of courses at the secondary level

Students in upper-level secondary education typically pursue only one of two paths in preparation for college, namely calculus, as a gateway for prospective STEM majors, or statistics, which applies to many majors in the humanities. Poor awareness of key principles in the latter by students taking the former, along with an underdeveloped sense of logic and reason, has an adverse impact on the study of entropy and other topics in physics. This instructor has designed various experiments {cf. [1-13]} to address these deficits, including the example of how to arrange two groups of ten particles, one with equal amounts of two types of particle and the other with equal amounts of five. Students are amazed to discover a factor of 450 between these loosely similar groups, and this turns to shock after the same proportions are scaled to form two groups of 100 particles where the corresponding factor is 10³⁷. This high degree of surprise is put to good use as the instructor guides the curiosity of students in a manner that produces a high degree of learning.



[1] APR10.Z11.7; [2] APR12.J15.8; [3] APR14.D1.50; [4] APR18.F01.5; [5, 6, 7] MAR19.G70.102, 103, 104; [8, 9] MAR21.C15.12, H71.49; [10] APR22.F01.35; [11] MAR23.G00.188; [12] APR24.N00.64; [13] MAR25, in prep (meetings.aps.org)