Review of Physics Curricula Offered by CPO – Philip Coburn, PHY 690Every spring, physics teachers take stock of the curricular materials they have been using forthe year and consider whether better lab equipment, textbooks, lab manuals and the like are “out there.” This review is an attempt to summarize my findings after looking in depth at several offerings from CPO, formerly known as the Cambridge Physics Outlet. Although best known for their plywood physics instructional equipment, they have in recent years developed textbooks and lab manuals that they offer as part of cohesive curricular programs. I evaluated these materials in my role as physics teacher at a private selective day school in Buffalo, NY. The school requires all 9th graders to take physics at one of three levels: advanced, regular, and conceptual. We have been using Paul Hewitt’s text Conceptual Physics (1997) with all levels of freshmen for at least eight years.CPO offers three different physics program levels for high school. The three programs share names with their associated textbooks. Foundations of Physical Science (2nd edition, 2005, abbreviated FOPS) is a physical science program with a mix of physics and chemistry topics gearedfor 8th to 10th graders (according to the CPO website FAQ’s at www.cpo.com). Physics: A First Course (1st edition, 2008, abbreviated PAFC) is a physics-first program also designed for 8th to 10th graders. Foundations of Physics(1st edition, 2004, abbreviated FOP) is a physics program designed for 10th to 12th graders and non-physics major college students. All three are authored by CPO founder Thomas C. Hsu.Each program has four components: a set of student textbooks, a set of student lab manuals (called Investigations), an equipment kit, and a teacher’s guide and teacher toolkit. Prices for each program are listed in the table. Note that each equipment kit includes all the necessary materials to conduct all of the labs in the associated Investigations manual for one lab group, excluding Coburn Page 1 of 13consumables. A look at the price table shows that in essence, CPO offers a set of lab equipment for free if you buy a classroom set of texts and manuals. The three programs have several features in common. They all claim to be inquiry-centered with the Investigations lab manuals at the core of the curriculum; more on this later. All three textbooks also feature a distinctive landscape format that leaves room for a column of figures and graphs on the right and a column of paragraph title phrases on the left of the central column of text. Each page is self-contained; text never carries over from one page to the next. This format is parlayed into a real strength. By breaking up the text into managable chunks, providing related visuals, and cuing students with paragraph topic phrases, Hsu provides several concrete aids to reading for his audience. While the writing in all three books does not match the folksy readability of Conceptual Physics (1997), the language is adequately clear in most cases. Two of the texts, FOP and FOPS, are printed in two colors (black and blue) rather than the traditional four. The real variations occur in approach and content; I will outline these next.Overview of contents and approach: FOPSFoundations of Physical Science (2005) contains a mix of physics and chemistry topics. The physics units covered are Forces and Motion, Work and Energy, Electricity and Magnetism, Sound and Waves, and Light and Optics. In addition, there are units on Properties of Matter, Changes in Matter (compounds and reactions), Water and Solutions, and Heating and Cooling. FOPS tends to present a shallow, mostly non-mathematical theory for phenomena and then focus onone or two particularly interesting applications. For instance, the section on electromagnets (pp. 164-167) has as much information on building an electromagnet by wrapping wire around a nail as it does information about the connection between electric current and magnetism. Coburn Page 2 of 13Of particuar interest to New York teachers, Hsu’s mathematical approach and depth in FOPSare significantly simpler than that used in Regents Physics; many Regents Physics equations are notpresented. Hsu employs limited use of algebra in FOPS but does not use trigonometry or formal vectors. All force and motion problems are presented in one dimension; the use of signs to represent vectors in opposite directions is dealt with through hand-waving, not clear exposition: “Tofigure out the net force, we usually have to make some forces positive and some negative so they can cancel out (FOPS, p. 51).” Free-falling objects and projectiles are not addressed mathematically. Circular motion is not presented. One positive is that a standard process for solving mathematical science problems is presented in detail with an example (p. 16). Perhaps optimisitically, the CPO website provides a table with correlations among the textbook, lab manual, and New York state standards, providing a preview of the ways in which the textbook could be usedto meet Regents requirements.FOPS has one particular strength; it has the highest level of integration between the text and lab manual of the three programs. The beginning of each chapter of the text lays out for the student the investigations associated with that chapter. For each chapter, the first investigation is meant to be done before lecture on a topic so that students can see the phenomenon in question before formally studying it (cf. Arnold Arons’ principle of concept first, name after in Arons, 1990, p. 31). In addition, chapters one and two explicitly and extensively address process science skills such as designing an experiment and using techniques that are accurate and repeatable. Furthermore, chapter two presents concepts of position, speed, and distance through the lens of developing a graphical and mathematical model from data similar to that gathered in one of the investigations. Both implicitly and explicitly, the text draws connections to the investigations, even if only to point Coburn Page 3 of 13out that, “… the strings used in your lab investigations behave just like ropes used in larger machines (FOPS, p. 70).”In general, I would characterize FOPS as a lab-centered physical science curriculum. Its mathematical depth and rigor are poorly suited to Regents physics, but it has a lot of potential for physical science
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