Review of Foundations of Physics by Thomas Hsu – Philip Coburn, Department of Physics, SUNY- Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo NY 14222 <[email protected]> Acknowledgement: This review was written in partial completion of PHY 690: Masters Project in Physics Education supervised by Dr. Dan MacIsaac, with guidance from Dr. David Abbott.Foundations of Physics (2004), by Thomas Hsu, is an introductory physics textbook aimed at a high school audience. The book is published by Cambridge Physics Outlet (CPO), best known for their plywood physics instructional equipment. I teach physics primarily to 9th graders at the Nichols School, a selective private day school in Buffalo, NY. All ninth graders are required to take physics. I evaluated this textbook as a possible replacement for Conceptual Physics by Paul Hewitt (2002), the textbook we had used for six years in the freshman course.Foundations of Physics is sold by CPO either separately or as part of a bundle that includes 25 textbooks and lab manuals, a teacher’s toolkit, and a set of laboratory equipment (seetable for details and pricing). This review focuses mainly on the textbook while also consideringits part in the larger Foundations of Physics program.In 684 pages, Foundations of Physics covers, in order, motion, forces, energy, momentum, waves, sound, light, optics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, states of matter, and nuclear physics. The math is at the level of elementary algebra and right-triangle trigonometry. Except for the right-hand rule for forces in electromagnetism,vectors are limited to one and two dimensions .One of the strengths of the book is its layout. Pages are laid out in a distinctive “landscape” format, leaving room for a column of figures and graphs on the right and a column of paragraph title phrases on the left to bracket a central column of text. Each page is self-contained; text never carries over from one page to the next. By breaking up the text into manageable chunks, providing related visuals, and cuing students with paragraph topic phrases, Hsu provides concrete reading aids. Unfortunately, some pages are “topped off” with distracting or confusing filler material, such as the discussion of “g forces” on page 98, but in general the format works well. While Hsu is not able to achieve the folksy readability of Conceptual Physics, the language of the text is adequately clear.Another advantage for New York State teachers is that Hsu employs equations and notation that are broadly compatible with those used in New York State’s Regents Physics program. In addition, the CPO website provides a table that shows correlations among the textbook, lab manual, and New York state standards (CPO, 2010), showing how the textbook andlab program could be used to meet Regents requirements.Foundations of Physics is not, however, a perfect textbook. One critical weakness is that it includes misleading or confusing presentations of conceptually difficult material (also noted byHubisz, n.d.). Hsu does not make good use of the accumulated wealth of knowledge about student misconceptions and learning difficulties (Arons, 1990; McDermott & Redish, 1999). Forinstance, the concepts of mass, weight, and inertia are known to be a source of confusion for students (Arons, 1990, pp. 57-64). While introducing the concept of mass (2004, p. 26), Hsu setsup novice students to conflate weight and mass: “The more mass an object has, the more weight it has.” In the discussion of mass, weight, and gravity (2004, p. 96) Hsu states that “The wordweight is used to describe the force of gravity acting on an object.” Two pages later (p. 98), he continues: “An object is weightless when it feels no net force from gravity… A… way to become weightless is to be in free fall.” The glossary (p. 656) defines free fall as movement that is due only to the force of gravity. It is not clear how to reconcile feeling no net force from gravity (being weightless) and moving only due to the force of gravity (being in free fall; cf. Arons, 1990, p. 72) The difficulties continue in the description of force and inertia: “An object with a lot of inertia takes a lot of force to start or stop; an object with a small amount of inertia requires a small amount of force to start or stop (2004, p. 79).” Hsu’s language here could easily lead students to think that inertia is a threshold to be overcome, a common and well-documented misconception (Halloun & Hestenes, 1985, p. 1057; Hestenes et al, 1992, p. 144). This difficult set of concepts is only one of many areas where this reviewer had trouble with Hsu’s inattention to content subtleties and student learning difficulties, including the wave phenomena of reflection and refraction (p. 270-271), potential energy (pp. 189-191), and voltage (p. 383, example on p. 400). Given the vast amount of research in the field of physics education, this is afairly major failing.As mentioned above, another feature of the textbook is that it is part of an integrated, potentially affordable larger package including lab manuals, a teacher’s guide, and laboratory equipment (details in table). This has both strengths and weaknesses. The teacher’s guide is devoted primarily to providing step-by-step guidance for each page of the investigations manual:an overview, a sample teacher-student dialog, an image of the investigation page, and examples, data, and answers. The dialogs, in particular, are a strength for teachers “new to the subject area,as [the dialogs] identify possible student misconceptions and highlight important learning content (Hsu, 2009, p. viii).” On the other hand, they also suggest a weakness: although the Foundations of Physics program claims to be inquiry centered (Hsu, 2004, p. i), the lab manual “investigations” are as carefully scripted as the teacher’s guide dialogs and contain little in the way of student-directed inquiry. A strength of the program’s electronic data collection technology component is that, by only using photogates and timers, it limits the problem of students using a “black box” about which they have no real understanding. However, this comeswith a corresponding loss of capability for real-time graphing of motion data, which has been shown to benefit student learning (Brasell 1987, Sokoloff et al, 2007). Finally, the per-student cost of the program varies widely, a
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