Paper detail

Sixteen years of Collaborative Learning through Active Sense-making in Physics (CLASP) at UC Davis

This paper describes our large reformed introductory physics course at UC Davis, which bioscience students have been taking since 1996. The central feature of this course is a focus on sense-making by the students during the five hours per week discussion/labs in which the students take part in activities emphasizing peer-peer discussions, argumentation, and presentations of ideas. The course differs in many fundamental ways from traditionally taught introductory physics courses. After discussing the unique features of CLASP and its implementation at UC Davis, various student outcome measures are presented showing increased performance by students who took the CLASP course compared to students who took a traditionally taught introductory physics course. Measures we use include upper-division GPAs, MCAT scores, FCI gains, and MPEX-II scores.