Agenda Items for Physics Department Discussion

Results of Fall 2002 CU faculty survey on "highest priority agenda items"

• Motivation in students and how different kinds of feedback affect it. How to get students eager to learn the right way? How does one get the students to buy into teaching for understanding rather than for memorization? (in reviewing the results, these two were lumped together)
• What would be the most useful mechanism, formats, approaches, etc. for establishing and maintaining an institutional memory in the department on courses and teaching techniques?
• How does one design homework questions and exam questions to develop and test for conceptual understanding?
• What should a physics major learn by the time they graduate?
• Intro. labs, what do we want them to accomplish and are they doing it? Are there better alternatives?
• How to deal with a broad spectrum of students in a class?
• Realizing and confronting the depressing student expectations about what physics is and how it is learned.
• How do we evaluate whether adjustments in the teaching techniques are actually beneficial for the students?

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