Leveraging interdisciplinary connections and framing to boost interest in service courses

Catherine Crouch, PhD 
Professor of Physics 
Swarthmore College 
Visiting Scholar - LInc 
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences 

Research suggests that one aspect of helping students learn content effectively is to tap into sources of student interest, such as relevance to other areas that are already of interest to the students and to present learning the material as valuable to the student beyond succeeding in that particular course. This is a particularly pertinent consideration for undergraduate “service” courses, such as physics for life science or engineering students, or statistics for the social sciences, in which students taking the course have already identified a strong interest in another subject and are taking the course to meet a requirement. I will present key findings from assessment of such a service course, introductory physics for life science students at Swarthmore College, suggesting that restructuring both the framing and the content of such courses around meaningful connections between the two disciplines can lead to increased interest and recognition of value of the course material, and that these benefits persist well after the end of the course. The design of other service courses can potentially be informed by these findings.

Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch is Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College, where she has taught since 2003, and served as department chair since 2021. For 2022-23, she is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in SEAS with the group of Eric Mazur while on sabbatical from Swarthmore. She earned her PhD. at Harvard University with Bob Westervelt studying electrical transport in nanofabricated quantum dots, and then remained at Harvard in a dual postdoctoral fellowship in materials physics and physics education with Eric Mazur. Her work developing and evaluating introductory physics for life science students has been supported by three National Science Foundation grants (one active) as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute institutional grant; she has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles on this work.