Review of Foundations of Physics by Thomas Hsu Philip Coburn PHY 690 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 private selective day school located in Buffalo NY All ninth graders are required to take physics which is offered at an advanced regular and conceptual level I evaluated this textbook as a possible replacement for Conceptual Physics by Paul Hewitt 2002 the textbook we had used for six years in our freshman course Foundations of Physics is sold by CPO either separately or as part of a classroom bundle that includes 25 textbooks and lab manuals a teacher s toolkit and a classroom set of laboratory equipment see table While acknowledging its part in a larger curricular program this review is focused on the textbook itself In its 684 pages Foundations of Physics covers the full breadth of the standard physics curriculum motion forces energy momentum waves sound light optics electricity and magnetism thermodynamics states of matter and nuclear physics presented in this order Mathematically the text employs elementary algebra and right triangle trigonometry Vectors are limited to one and two dimensional cases excepting the right hand rule for forces in electromagnetism One of the strengths of the book is in its layout and supports for reading Textbook 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 of the 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 managable chunks providing related visuals and cuing students with paragraph topic phrases Hsu provides concrete aids to reading for his audience Occasionally pages seem to be topped off with filler material that is tangential or even confusing such as the discussion of g forces on page 98 but in general the format works well for the target audience Hsu is not able to achieve the folksy readability of Conceptual Physics but the language of the text is adequately clear in most cases Another strength of the textbook is that it is part of an integrated potentially affordable larger package including lab manuals a teacher s guide and even laboratory equipment see table The program s electronic data collection technology component is limited to the photogates and timers that are provided with the lab equipment reducing the problem of students using a black box about which they have no real understanding This comes at the price of losing the capability for real time graphing of motion data which has been shown to benefit student learning Sokoloff et al 2007 The included equipment makes it a particularly appealing option for a situation where a teacher is starting from scratch whether creating a new physics program or starting to teach physics for the first time It should be noted however that additional equipment kits may need to be purchased in addition to those supplied with the package Finally Hsu employs equations and notation that are broadly compatible with those used in New York State s Regents Physics program As examples of the differences Hsu uses v and v0 to represent the final and initial speeds of an object rather than vf and vi as used by the Regents curriculum In addition the CPO website provides a table with correlations among the textbook lab manual and New York state standards CPO 2010 providing a preview of the ways in which the textbook could be used to meet Regents requirements Foundations of Physics is not however a perfect textbook I have found as have other reviewers Hubisz n d that there are many topics about which the textbook can be misleading confusing or inaccurate In many instances Hsu does not seem to take advantage of the accumulated wealth of knowledge about student misconceptions McDermott Redish 1999 For instance the concepts of mass weight and inertia are known to be a source of confusion for students Arons 1990 pp 57 64 In his presentation of mass on page 26 Hsu sets up novice students to conflate the two ideas In his later discussion of weight and weightlessness 2004 p 98 he conducts a bait and switch in which weight is defined as the force on an object due to gravity but weightless does NOT mean that this force is absent or equal to zero cf Arons 1990 p 72 His language in the discussion of forces and inertia Hsu 2004 p 79 could easily lead students to think that inertia is a threshold to be overcome as described by Hestenes and others Halloun Hestenes 1985 p 1057 Hestenes et al 1992 p 144 Given the vast amount of research on the difficulty of overcoming student misconceptions in physics this is a fairly major failing The other thing that is surprising by its absence is any explicit tie in to the laboratory program Hsu himself asserts the centrality of the lab program to learning physics Hsu 2004 p i He lays out the importance of the experiential aspects of conducting labs as critical to forming real understanding of the concepts of physics The Teacher s Guide Hsu 2009 is devoted to linking the lab investigations and the text together Yet in the textbook itself these links and references are are absent In summary Foundations of Physics is an intriguing entry in the field of textbooks for high school physics Its layout math level and price all seem geared to appeal to a broad high school audience requiring no advanced reading or mathematics skills It may even be suitable for a physics first program though CPO also offers a textbook Physics A First Course targeted specifically at 8th to 10th graders in such programs The comprehensive classroom set of texts with equipment provides an unusual option that is particularly appealing for starting a new physics program However the text misses out on the opportunity to incorporate the fruits of physics education research in any obvious way or to integrate lab experiences into the presentation of concepts in the text Unfortunately this does not distinguish the book greatly from most of its peers since this flaw is common in high school texts Until such a high school physics text is written Foundations of Physics offers an affordable comprehensive and reasonably solid textbook for teachers and students TABLE
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