Teaching Intro Physics To Life Science Students

Teaching intro General Physics to Life Science/Bio students is something I do regularly. And it can be quite challenging because, in my case, calculus is not required and isn't used in the lesson. So there are many things that can't be easily derived from scratch.

I've resolved, a long time ago, that the approach to teaching such a class has to be different than the approach to teaching the calculus-based class, which is often populated by physics, chemistry, and engineering majors. In my experience, the average math skill is lower in the non-calc-based general physics class, which isn't too surprising. But more challenging than that, there is less of an interest and inclination towards the physics subject from such students. Most, if not all, of the Life Science/Bio students are in the class because they have to, and some even have an active dislike of the subject matter.

So it is definitely a challenge to not only convey the material in an understandable manner, but also to perk up their interest in the material so that they will do well in the course. It is why I tend to read papers like this one, which studied the correlation between life science students' interest, attitudes, and performance in a general physics class.[1] In particular, I'm always interested in using examples from biology/medicine to illustrate the particular physics topics that we cover in a lecture. As concluded in this paper, tailoring the subject matter to overlap with what the students are majoring in can affect not only the interest in the subject, but also their performance. This is a no-brainer for many of us, but this paper clearly shows the correlation.

BTW, it helps if the text being used is also geared towards the life science students.  The one that I had used before is "College Physics" by Giambattista, Richardson, and Richardson. I like the part where at the beginning of each chapter, it lists out some of the relevant applications in biology, medicine, etc. I just wish that the text has more examples from such areas, and more homework exercises in those areas, the way the paper described the examples and problems that were used in the course.

Zz.

[1] C.H. Crouch et al. Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. v.14, 010111 (2018).