Main
Handout: Tutorials 
Physics 122, Spring 2011
Prof. E. F. Redish
Although
no participation points are assigned during tutorial sessions, they are the
core activity for making sense out of the most fundamental and challenging
concepts. Many students find them the most valuable element in the class
for learning to do my exam questions and homework problems.
- Discussion sessions
are run as group tutorials. --
The discussion sessions will be run as group activities with tutorial worksheets
in your manual. The tutorials have two goals:
- to help you develop your conceptual understanding of the basic ideas underlying the physics,
- to help you learn to think about how you know what you know.
- Tutorials are where you learn to talk the talk! --
The tutorial is about a lot more than just filling in the "right" answers
in the worksheet. In the tutorial the most important thing for you to do
is to try to understand what the physics principles are saying, and how
they don't actually contradict what you know from living your life (though
at first, they may seem to). You accomplish this by discussing the issues
with your peers, learning what they think and clarifying for them what
you think. You may be surprised to find that many of your colleagues don't
actually agree with things that you think are obvious! And a critical part
of learning to do science (any science) is not just learning the facts
and procedures, but learning to discuss the issues intelligently -- and
to work out things that may not be obvious at first.
Prof. E. F. Redish
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This page prepared by
Edward F. Redish
Department of Physics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-6120
Email: redish@umd.edu
Last revision 27 December,
2010.