Even practicing physicists will find much here (in fact, more than a small number would benefit from a little refresher!).

In the interest of self-disclosure I should note that I am a co-author of one of the ranking tasks in this book.

That having been said, I have found this collection of assessment tools to be a valuable addition to the various pencil and paper activities I use in my physics classes.

The idea of the ranking task is to have a student compare a umber of physically similar systems that are allowed to vary in only one or two ways. The student must rank the systems (usually from greatest to least) on the basis of one of the system's physical variables (i.e.-velocity, acceleration, electric field strength, currect, etc.). The variables that are allowed to change may or may not affect the ranking of the systems. As an example, the mass of a falling object may be allowed to vary over rocks allowed to fall under the influence of gravity only. The ranking task may ask the student to rank the systems ont he basis of which one took the longest time to fall. In this case, the mass, while different in each situation, is irrelevant to the fall time and thus would not be used to determine the ranking.

The real power of these assessment tools is that they can quickly and clearly get at a student's mis/alternative conceptions as to which physical variables might change a system's behavior. The items can be used as quiz and test questions as well as during class time as a "self-check" on "in-class check" by the educator to assist students in working through a Karplus learnign cycle of ellicit-confront-resolve and apply for a concent or concept cluster in a subject area.

In addition to ranking tasks for most of the areas found in standard first year physics curriculum that book also discusses the pedagogical theory behind the assessment tool and has an answer key. As a physics educator, I have found this resource to be extraordinarily helpful both as a source of material for my classes and as an inspiration in creating my own material. I would rcommend this for any physics educator teaching high school or college physics at the introductory level.

New approach to old thinking. Great learning tool. Made sense on difficult concepts.

Students's preconcetions (misconceptions, alternative/naive/intuitive conceptions) are generally main obstacles of conceptual learning. This book merely aims to overcome that problem by providing a task of ranking for a set of physical situations. Topics are; Kinematics, Forces, 2-D motion, Work-energy, Impulse-momentum, Rotational motion, Properties of matter, Thermodynamics, Waves, Electrostatics, DC and resistive circuits, Magnetism and EM. An effective way in your teaching of physics.