Strengthening students’ understanding of physics through active learning and research-based instructional materials

by Prof. Christian Kautz (Hamburg University of Technology)

Friday 16 Oct 2026, 09:30 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

TBD

Research on teaching and learning in physics and engineering has identified specific conceptual and reasoning difficulties that often prevent students from developing a functional understanding of various topics taught in their introductory courses. There is evidence that instructional materials that take into account such difficulties and prompt students to critically assess their own understanding can improve student learning.

In this workshop, empirical data will be shown to demonstrate the need to focus on conceptual aspects in addition to more traditional textbook problems. As an illustration of how this can be done, we will introduce participants to the Tutorials in Introductory Physics [1], a set of materials intended to supplement the lecture, textbook, and laboratory of standard introductory physics courses for students in physics, engineering, and other fields. The Tutorials have been translated from English into other languages, including Spanish, Greek and German.

At Hamburg University of Technology, the Tutorials served as a model for the development of instructional materials for other STEM subjects, such as electric circuits, engineering mechanics, fluid dynamics and engineering thermodynamics, as well as specific topics in mathematics.

In addition to providing hands-on experience with the instructional materials, we will discuss various practical aspects of incorporating the Tutorials into introductory physics or engineering courses and present data from a large multi-year study to assess their effectiveness.

Further topics to be discussed in the workshop include how the Tutorials can be adapted to various course sizes and formats, how they can be combined productively with other interactive teaching methods such as Peer Instruction and Inverted Classroom approaches such as Just-in-Time Teaching, and how assessment of student learning (including examinations) could be affected.

Workshop U Padova & bio (Kautz).pdf