Report on a Kellar plan course in first-year university physics

Abstract

A slightly modified version of the self-paced Kellar plan has been used for 11 years to teach an undergraduate course in Introductory Physics at the (New) University of Ulster; it was well received by the students and produced excellent results.Self-paced courses, such as the one first proposed by Kellar (1968). have been employed in many universities in America (Green 1971) and in Europe. Many schools, colleges, and polytechnics in the UK have also started to offer courses which are based on similar principles. These include the Nuffield course in physics at A-level. the APPIL scheme for physics course at A-level. ACCESS courses offered by some universities in their Continuing and Adult Education departments. and so on.At the New University of Ulstert a Kellar plan course in Introductory Physics was introduced by my predecessor (Higginbotham 1975). This course was offered to (i) mature students seeking admission to physics-based courses after being out of touch with A-level physics and mathematics for some time, (ii) students who did not have the required standards (e.g. good A-level grades in physics and in mathematics) to be admitte.d to a three-ye'ar honours course in physics-based subjects offered by the physics department, and (iii) students who were admitted to a fouror three-year honours course in chemistry. mathematics. education. environmental science or combined sciences and had opted to do physics as a free-choice unit. The first year of our

Undergraduate Science Education: A Review of Research

“…With the development of cheap and reliable audio-visual aids, such as tapeplayers and film-and slide-projectors, together with other reprographic technology, it seemed to many that the lecture might well be replaced with audio-visual presentations, combined with 'handouts' of lecture notes and, perhaps, appropriate problem-sheets or other exercises; self-directed learning seemed to be the way forward (Aylward and Barclay 1970;Hills 1976). In fact, self-paced instruction is still an ideal pursued by some in university science education (Srivastava 1989). Science may lend itself particularly well to this form of teaching, where there are many links between topics (Davies 1976), although the best method of pacing for problem-solving capability seems likely to involve a mixture of teacher-paced and student selfpaced instruction (Davies 1977).…”