Community College Students’ Responses on Research Papers as Assignments in General Physics Courses: A Case Study

Research activities have been gaining momentum across community colleges, at least in the form of short research projects and scientific paper reading assignments. This might motivate our students to apply for intensive summer research projects at national labs and/or research institutes, besides helping them to understand the practical applications of the course contents learned in their classroom. Moving forward in this direction to hone students' skills and increase their chances for success after college, instructors looked at assigning relevant research papers as regular assignments in the advanced courses like calculus-based physics. Such assignments could be uncommon practice for general algebra-based general physics courses, but they have been assigned regularly in my general algebra-based physics courses. In this presentation, as a part of my ongoing scholarship of teaching and learning project, I will discuss students' responses to those assignments based on submitted assignments and associated surveys. Due to limited data at his point, no definite conclusions could be made, but the initial studies revealed that their course content knowledge was significantly improved by reading the research papers. In addition, they learned the basic anatomy of research, such as how research was conducted, limitations of research, etc. Naturally, some students had concerns over these assignments because of the amount of time required for the preparation; the majority of students recommended continuation of such assignments from the beginning of the semester. Interestingly, students were seen answering questions based on what they knew instead of depending on the internet. Among a range of questions associated with a research paper, some were like (i) In most of the problems of the worksheets you have completed so far in the class, work done was zero (fig. 4(a) of the paper). But the same problem in Fig. 4(a) can be explained as shown in Figs. 4(b) and 4(c). Explain these three approaches in your own words. (ii) Interpret the results of the study as given under the section 'VIII SUMMARY'.