Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 1;16(4):e0249086. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249086. eCollection 2021.
Providing less prepared students with supplemental instruction (SI) in introductory STEM courses has long been used as a model in math, chemistry, and biology education to improve student performance, but this model has received little attention in physics education research. We analyzed the course performance of students enrolled in SI courses for introductory mechanics and electricity and magnetism (E&M) at Stanford University compared with those not enrolled in the SI courses over a two-year period. We calculated the benefit of the SI course using multiple linear regression to control for students' level of high school physics and math preparation. We found that the SI course had a significant positive effect on student performance in E&M, but that an SI course with a nearly identical format had no effect on student performance in mechanics. We explored several different potential explanations for why this might be the case and were unable to find any that could explain this difference. This suggests that there are complexities in the design of SI courses that are not fully understood or captured by existing theories as to how they work.
为准备不充分的学生提供补充指导（SI）在数学、化学和生物学教育中一直被用作提高学生成绩的模式，但在物理教育研究中，这种模式很少受到关注。我们分析了斯坦福大学入门力学和电磁学（E&M）课程中参加 SI 课程和未参加 SI 课程的学生在两年内的课程表现。我们使用多元线性回归来计算 SI 课程的收益，以控制学生高中物理和数学准备的水平。我们发现，SI 课程对学生在 E&M 中的表现有显著的积极影响，但具有几乎相同形式的 SI 课程对学生在力学中的表现没有影响。我们探讨了几种不同的可能解释，但未能找到任何可以解释这种差异的解释。这表明，SI 课程的设计存在复杂性，这些复杂性尚未被现有理论充分理解或捕捉到，这些理论解释了它们的工作原理。
