Use Biomedical Laboratories in Physics to Develop Student Reasoning

The results of the “intrinsic motivation for learning” work by Thomas Malone (1) can be combined with the “development of reasoning” work by Robert Karplus (2) to create introductory physics laboratories that feature biomedical applications of physics. This presentation will discuss the attributes of the work of Malone and Karplus and illustrate how they can work together to construct physics laboratories that encourage the development of reasoning by students as well as intrigue them with biomedical applications. A concrete example will be given in a six-week module “How Do We See Color?” that was developed as part of the Humanized Physics Project (3, 4). Updated to provide the complete presentation September 17, 2010