Physics Department improves undergraduate experience for non-majors

UC Santa Cruz student Corey Witt’s passion is taking care of people. He is a full-time emergency-medical technician and works per diem at a rehabilitation center in Scotts Valley that helps adults and youth recover from drug and alcohol abuse. His goal is to be a doctor.

To ensure he meets all the requirements for medical school, as well as his major, Witt has taken multiple physics courses since coming to UC Santa Cruz as a freshman in 2022. His major is molecular, cell, and developmental biology—and like many other students pursuing bio-adjacent degrees—Witt enrolled in those physics classes out of necessity, not interest.

"My main struggle was at the very beginning of college physics,“ Witt said. “I took an AP physics class in high school, and I honestly didn't do that well. And it was during COVID, which altered instruction and presented more challenges. So, I didn’t come to UCSC with a strong physics background.”

Then, a shift began to occur when Witt encountered the courses in the Physics 6 series for non-majors. They are led by associate teaching professor Amy Furniss, who uses an approach designed around the idea that physics isn’t the forte of most students in her class. This approach creates space for students to demonstrate their learning progress with opportunities to retake an exam—albeit, with entirely new questions—if they fail the first time. The course structure is transparently designed, explicitly summarizing what concepts students need to learn.

These fundamental teaching strategies—of making room for failure, and being explicit and transparent about how the students’ knowledge will be assessed —combine to create an atmosphere that Furniss says is more conducive to learning than traditional forms of physics instruction.

She should know. Furniss has been teaching physics for more than 15 years, having started as a tutor as an undergraduate. Over that time, she has seen firsthand how the traditional design of physics courses put some students at a disadvantage, and generally, penalized individuals without any previous exposure to physics—instead of encouraging them to master the concepts as they grapple with their misunderstandings.

“I found that I loved to share physics through teaching, and everybody got excited about the laws of physics. It was a great feeling not only for me, but more importantly, for the students themselves,” Furniss recalled about her time as a tutor. “But when it came to exams, which determined the majority of a student’s grade in the class, I found that when using traditional course structure, what I was really assessing was the students’ knowledge before they even walked into the classroom.”

More opportunities to learn

The students who did well in her initial classes typically had plenty of math preparation prior to joining the class, whether through advanced-placement courses, parents with college degrees, or other socioeconomic advantages, Furniss explained. The ones who performed poorly often lacked those privileges, and that’s why Furniss went back to basics in course design, deciding to take an entirely different approach that centers learning instead of assessment performance.

“We want classrooms to be inclusive. But unfortunately, that word has essentially become a buzzword that requires significant overhauling in order to implement in today’s classroom,” Furniss said. “When someone calls themselves an ‘accessible educator,’ you have to ask what they actually do to make the content in their classroom more accessible. It’s deeper than making sure students can find the content in various formats, and it absolutely does not mean lowering a course’s standards.”

What does that look like? Instead of a course where students’ grades are determined by a few high-stakes, one-shot exams that they must do well on to get a good grade, students get the opportunity to retake a test when they fail to show mastery of the material. They will be asked different questions, but the additional exam will be intentionally oriented to gauge student understanding of the same concepts. This gives students an opportunity to check in on their knowledge gaps and review what they got wrong, talk about it with Furniss or a tutor, and then show their improvement by taking the test again.

The power of transparency

As for transparency in teaching, Furniss explains this by way of a metaphor: teaching someone to make an omelet. If they’ve never made one and you simply tell them to make an omelet, they’ll be at a loss. Individuals who have already mastered fried eggs and use of a non-stick pan are more likely to succeed, and not because they are innately more capable of making an omelet.

Now, if you instead give everyone detailed, step-by-step instructions on which ingredients are needed, how to prepare them, what cooking equipment to use, and so forth, you position everyone for success—both those who have cooked eggs before, and those new to the kitchen.  In the end, everyone learns to make an omelet.

In the classroom setting, Furniss likens this to contrasting forms of communication a teacher could use with beginning physics students. On one hand, students are vaguely told to understand a concept like kinematics in preparation for an exam. With transparent instruction, they are told they need to understand how to use vectors in specific scenarios, how to break vectors into components, how velocity is related to position, and how acceleration is related to velocity and position.

Furniss has changed her course structure to do the latter, and her students have benefited from the extra time and effort this approach requires. Karina Mendez graduated from UC Santa Cruz last spring after double majoring in marine biology and environmental studies. She took the Physics 6A and 6C courses to meet her requirements, and looking back now, counts Furniss among a small handful of professors who she felt truly cared about seeing her succeed—and demonstrated it with their actions.

Mendez recalled how Furniss reached out directly to her after she failed her first exam—along with every other student who failed—to offer individual help. Mendez also described how, midway through the quarter, Furniss asked the class to tell her what they thought of her teaching, the course structure and whether it was effective, or if she needed to provide more visuals or real-world examples, along with other questions intended to help her tailor her approach.

“I’ve never experienced that, in any of the classes I’ve taken, from community college all the way to transferring to UC Santa Cruz,” Mendez said. “I’ve never had a professor check in with their students about how they’re teaching, and then take that feedback and discuss it with us at the very next lecture!”

Intentionality takes time

Furniss acknowledges that most understand that providing this level of attention and customization is the ideal. The challenge is that most professors don’t have the time to continuously re-examine and refine the educational experience of their students. Fortunately, though, UC Santa Cruz appreciates the importance of effective and inclusive teaching and is implementing measures at both the departmental and university-wide levels to ensure students experience this in their courses.

Faculty leaders in the Physics Department have been carrying out a major effort over the last decade to improve the undergraduate education experience. For physics majors, the focus has been on improving retention and four-year graduation rates by identifying and addressing barriers in the curriculum and course schedules.

As a result, the department has introduced a series of new initiatives over the past four years to address equity gaps and improve the undergraduate experience—from first quarter to graduation. For all of these efforts, UC Santa Cruz was just one of three universities nationwide to be honored this year with the American Physical Society’s Improving Undergraduate Physics Education Award.

Struggle does not equal rigor

At the university level, the embedding of designated teaching professors such as Furniss across campus ensures that innovation in instructional design occurs in classrooms, in real time. To Furniss, it also represents a shift from the traditional, but widely held idea that the hallmark of a “good” class is how much students struggle—and if they aren’t struggling, then the course is too easy.

“The amount that a student struggles is not the same as the amount a student learns,” Furniss explained. “When students come into my classroom, the goal is to fill their brains by whatever means. It’s just a matter of the obstacle course and support that I set up. Do I set them up to trip and fall, or do I set them up to make progress with failure so they can get up over that bar?”

This intentionality has benefitted the many non-physics majors who Furniss has taught that need to learn concepts relevant to their main field of study. For instance, while she didn’t appreciate it at the time, Mendez now values knowing the basics of thermodynamics as she applies for a deep-sea exploration internship that will involve the operation of robotic vehicles.

As for Witt, in addition to his full-time and on-call jobs in the healthcare field, he is also a physics tutor for Furniss for the fall. Since taking her course, he has developed a “mini-passion” for physics and has even built himself a Nixie tube clock from scratch, applying what he learned about electricity and magnetism in Physics 6C.

“I can relate to students who are struggling with physics because that was me,” Witt said. “It’s just so beautiful to help someone who needs a little extra help finally get it and see the light bulb go off in their head.”