Hi, all! We're winding down a weird year. This year my AP Physics 2 class was an intensive half-year course that started Feb. 4... the day after we were all sent home due to the plague. We came back into the classroom on March 24. Good luck teaching AP2 on that schedule!
The folks in my class all had a very strong AP Physics 1 background - they knew how to learn physics already. Thus, we accomplished a lot by doing problem solving practice based on fact sheets, with demos and quick virtual "experiments" thrown in. When everyone returned to the lab, I could show the real live physical situations, and students had the context to understand quickly.
Once we had discussed the basics of most units, I began giving a fundamentals "quiz" every day. These have never been for a grade! I'd have gotten terrible pushback if they were. In fact, this whole course has been not for a grade, but for AP exam prep alone. Sure, my juniors work diligently every day while the seniors play paper football on the lab tables for a larger percentage of class each day. Right now, this year especially, I don't care. Even the seniors take the quizzes seriously. Even the seniors are making progress, though slow progress. Everyone is getting better every day.
It's these quizzes that are the best review. Simply the experience of taking the quiz and then getting instant feedback helps. There's no pressure to perform, there's no shame for the student who gets 3/10. But everyone is still a wee bit competitive! When a weak student was one point short of my best student's score, he celebrated as if he had won a baseball game!
I don't know if all my students will pass. Those hard working juniors - they'll get 4s and 5s. Those seniors - they've got a shot. And they have a much better shot at passing the AP exam now that they've taken fundamentals quizzes every class day for weeks.
How do you create these quizzes? I have created a draft fact sheet for AP Physics 2. I'm not ready to publish that yet, because it's still very rough. But the process here is the same as for every course: I copy the entire fact sheet, and paste into the random.org list generator. Then I riff off of each fact.
Sometimes I ask the fact straight up: "A positive charge is forced ___ the direction of an electric field." Sometimes I put the fact in a specific context: "An electric field points right. What is the direction of the electric force on a positron in this field?" And sometime, I get a bit tricksy* by asking something like "what happens to a positron in this field whose initial velocity is to the left?"
There are no trick questions in physics - in fact, questions like "A car moves at constant speed 4 x 10^9 m/s, what is the car's acceleration?" are explicitly prohibited by the College Board! An answer choice, let alone the correct answer, may never "deny the stem." The exam will never expect a student to respond, "hah, that's impossible, nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so your question itself is bunk!" There are certainly tricky questions that require careful multi-step reasoning; but never trick questions.
The resulting quizzes provide cumulative review that hits every topic on the exam several times over many weeks. Even when students get answers wrong, they learn from their mistakes.
Given the shortage of time and student energy, I'm choosing to focus on fundamentals. These folks have strong problem solving skills. But those skills are useless if they don't know when to use F = qE as opposed to F = qvB.
Would you like to try these fundamentals quizzes? Be my guest. They're in this folder here. I give a strict four minute time limit for each, because if you don't know these right away, you ain't gonna figure them out by thinking for a while!
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