To all interested, I have conducted an item analysis on my last cumulative physics test that I gave my class, consisting primarily of 11th graders of average academic abilities.
The following questions were missed by more than 50% of the students:
13. A catapult fires a projectile at a speed of 50 m/s 30 degrees above the horizontal. What is the initial horizontal and vertical speed of the catapult?
18. An object with mass 8 kilograms experiences a force of 20 N applied to it. What is the acceleration of the object?
22. Find the angular momentum of an object with mass 7 kg, radius 2 meters, and velocity 10 m/s.
27. Find the equivalent resistance of a 2-ohm resistor and a 7-ohm resistor connected in parallel.
Anyone with any kind of physics background would realize how easy these problems are.
Sigh.......it's nearly impossible to teach my students anything even remotely resembling physics. They just refuse to learn or take responsibility for themselves, and they're fed this narrative that they're "so special" by their parents. It's sickening. It's not the unions that are the problem; it's the parents. They just refuse to hold their kids accountable for anything.
These are really easy questions. How my physics teacher from junior year would ask them:
13. A catapult fires a projectile at a speed of 50 m/s 30 degrees above the horizontal. Find the distance traveled and the total time before it hits the ground.
18. A car with mass 1000 kilograms is traveling at 20 m/s applied to it. After 10 seconds it collides with another car weighing 20000 kg traveling the same direction at 10 m/s. If the collision is perfectly elastic, calculate the resulting velocity of each car.
22. A round ball with radius .5 m is rolling down a slope of angle 30 degrees. Calculate its velocity <moment of inertia for a sphere given on test>
27. A circuit with 8 resistors in both series and parallel given (too lazy to draw it now). Find the power across resistor x.
I'm proud to say that with the possible exception of question 22, I can still do these problems a year later.
And re: math in science, I really do think that people shouldn't be taking physics until they've taken at least trig and some sort of calculus involving integrals and derivatives. With the knowledge that by integrating distance you get velocity, and by integrating velocity you get acceleration, and by integrating force you get energy, kinematics literally becomes a breeze. Yet without understanding the concept of integration of shading in the area under the curve, the laws become haphazard, and it becomes much harder to understand the concept behind memorizing equations. Also, I could not imagine someone doing banking angles, forces at an angle, and acceleration down a non-frictionless ramp without trig.
