Engineering and physics professors collaborate to improve mechanics instruction

Students typically do not delve deeply into the science of mechanics until early college introductory physics and engineering courses. Teaching mechanics in these classes is no small task. To build effective instruction, professors must know which ideas and skills are firmly in place in students.

Moelter et al. presented observations on approaches to mechanics instruction after the team of several university physics and engineering professors attended each other’s courses and examined their respective textbooks and curricula. The multi-year collaboration helped identify areas of potential difficulty for students and challenges associated with the teachers’ disciplinary emphases.

“Most instruction in introductory physics courses for future engineers occurs in disciplinary silos,” said author Matthew Moelter. “Physics instructors often bemoan the lack of student prerequisite skills, especially mathematical ones, while engineering instructors reteach foundational Newtonian ideas in their mechanics courses.”

In addition to discrepancies in disciplinary representations and problem-solving approaches between physics and engineering courses, the authors uncovered special challenges for community college students transferring to universities. Fortunately, substantive collaboration between community college and university faculty is expected to help instructors better understand concept layering and build horizon knowledge about what students are expected to accomplish in subsequent courses.

“To be successful in this, we can’t just review a list of topics or examine course documents or learning objectives,” said author Stamatis Vokos. “Visiting classrooms and observing students as they learn the material is imperative, as our study clearly demonstrates. Our joint effort produced revelations that had not surfaced in our independent teaching experiences, including for those of us who have been involved in discipline-based education research for decades.”

Source: “Mechanics in engineering and physics: Differences and lessons,” by Matthew J. Moelter, Brian Self, Stamatis Vokos, Dominic Dal Bello, and Brian Youngblood, The Physics Teacher (2025). The article can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0191267 .