Investigating examination strategies in first year physics courses at LTH – Course development in partnership with the students

Abstract

In this project we have investigated the examinations of two physics courses, FAF231- “Physics –
Waves and Wave Propagation” and FAF240- “Quantum Phenomena and Nanotechnology”, at the
first year of the engineering physics program at Lund Institute of Technology (LTH). The
examinations in both courses have rather unconventional formats, and we compare these with a
more (for LTH) traditional type of examinations, the written exams. It should be noted that certain
aspects of the curriculum and organisation of the concerned courses have previously been discussed
by Reistad and Kröll [Reistad04], and Ohlén and Hessman [Ohlén04], respectively.
What students learn and how they approach their learning in a course are intimately connected to
how the students expect to be assessed [Biggs03], i.e., students will in general focus on the course
material that they think will be assessed. Assessment is often described to be either formative,
providing a feedback to the students on their progression, or summative to control how well the
subject have been learnt. According to Brown[Brown99], there exists a wide range of reasons why
we assess students, such as to provide feedback to students, grade student achievement, motivate
students, estimate students’ potential to progress, and/or give us feedback on our teaching, etc.
The main objective of this project work has been to explore how well the examination works and in
particular get an answer to what extent the examination process stimulates deep approach learning
and whether this can be improved. The main perspective in this study is to obtain information about
how the students experience and understand the effects of the existing examination processes. To
this end, two interview sessions were carried out with students that had attended both courses.
The report is outlined as follows: In section 2, the overall information including organisation and
examination of the courses is described. The details and formats of the group interviews are given
in section 3 and in section 4 the summarized results from the student interviews are presented and
discussed. Section 5 provides a package of measures for the purpose to improve the examinations.
Finally, a summary and conclusions are formulated in section 6.