LASSP & AEP Seminar: Catherine Crouch (Swarthmore)

Does it stick? Long-term outcomes for biology majors from introductory physics optimized for the life sciences

This talk will present the design and structure of our reformed introductory physics course for life science majors (IPLS), together with key IPLS course outcomes, both short-term outcomes measured at the end of the course, and long-term outcomes measured 1-2 years later, including as part of the senior biology capstone. We find that student attitudes to learning physics and student appreciation of the relevance of physics for biology improve, and those improved outcomes persist at least a year after the course ends. We also find that at the end of the course, IPLS students display a greater ability to analyze a biological problem in a manner that requires combining ideas from the course in a novel manner, compared to life science students who took the introductory physics course for engineers. In the senior biology capstone course, students who took IPLS demonstrated both stronger quantitative reasoning than their peers who did not take IPLS, and the ability to use specific physics ideas and mathematics learned in IPLS, as much as 2-3 years after completing the course. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Bio:
Catherine Crouch is a professor of physics at Swarthmore College, where she has taught since 2003 and is serving as department chair for 2021-2026. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021 for her work in physics education, spanning research, curriculum and pedagogy, and institutional leadership.

Prof. Crouch has extensive expertise in both materials physics and pedagogical best practices for college and university science. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University 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.

She has published more than thirty peer-reviewed articles in both experimental physics and physics education research and has involved more than thirty Swarthmore undergraduate students in research. She has won five National Science Foundation grants for physics education work as PI or co-PI. She served in the Chair line of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Education for 2019-22 and co-chaired its Committee on Education for 2022.

In 2017, Prof. Crouch co-founded and served as the first faculty director of Swarthmore’s Collaborative STEM Inclusive Excellence initiatives to expand support and resources for students in the sciences during the regular academic year. She led this effort until becoming physics department chair in July 2021. She also taught in the Swarthmore Summer Scholars program during summers 2016 and 2017 for underrepresented and first-generation students in the sciences.