Development of a Rubric for Improved Understanding of IPLS Curricula

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in shifting some of the basic presentation of the algebrabased physics curriculum in situations where it serves students with a background and/or major in the Life Sciences. Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) courses are becoming more common however the courses are often created entirely separate from one another with very different goals and aims, making assessment of these courses very difficult, and necessarily individualistic. This paper presents the development of a rubric for categorizing specific aspects of an IPLS curriculum in such a way that would allow certain comparisons across curricula. Roughly speaking, it categorizes the context of specific questions as being physics or biology related, and then further categorizes the actual content and information necessary to answer the question as being related to physics or biology, thus allowing users to determine the proportion of questions are that are superficially biological. An application of the rubric to existing course material is presented.