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We report the results of a comparison of student understanding of physics concepts with and without online homework, as measured by the force concept inventory. We compared students in large introductory courses taught by interactive engagement and noninteractive engagement methods and with ungraded homework and with online homework. We also compared the understanding of students in different grade subgroups. The increase in the average force concept inventory normalized gain was statistically significant for all students taught with online homework, indicating that graded homework increases student understanding of physics concepts. The gain was significantly higher for those students taught with interactive engagement methods together with online homework. The C grade subgroup taught by interactive engagement methods benefited more from the implementation of online homework than the other subgroups.

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Studies of student understanding of simple electric dc circuits have shown that many of them find it very difficult to apply qualitative reasoning to explain the observed phenomena. It has been suggested that these difficulties may be due to their failure to construct models of microscopic processes that lead to these phenomena. Indeed, in the traditional courses, such models have generally not been emphasized. In the present study, we compared the performance of different groups of university students in answering a questionnaire designed to probe their understanding of the relationship between macroscopic phenomena of transients in a dc circuit and the microscopic processes that can explain these phenomena. One group studied from a traditional text, the second group used a recently developed text that emphasizes models of microscopic processes. We also conducted detailed interviews with some of the students. From an analysis of the performance of these two groups, and also from a comparison with a previous study on Israeli high school students, we found that most of the students whose instructional experiences included an emphasis on the development of models of microscopic processes developed a better understanding of the transient phenomena studied. They applied qualitative considerations in their analyses and were able to develop coherent models to describe their observations. Overall, they demonstrated a superior understanding of the physical phenomena.

Performance of students in an introductory inquiry-based physics class is compared with that of students in three other introductory physics courses on two different examination problems. One problem is a qualitative problem, typical of those used in inquiry-based physics. The second problem is a quantitative problem, similar to those found in a standard introductory physics text. The students in the inquiry-based physics course were all elementary education majors. They performed significantly better than the engineering students and as well as the honors physics students on the two problems used.