The text is structured around weekly units. Each unit is introduced with an activity or demonstration on a Wednesday. The laboratory on Thursday builds on the Wednesday material. Friday the information from Wednesday and Thursday are usually synthesized in a weekly wrap-up followed by a quiz or test on the events of the week. Once the term gets rolling, Monday is usually occupied with going over quizzes, tests, and laboratories. Misconceptions from the previous week are probed and questioned in the Monday session.
The text sections are numbered with three digit section numbers. The first two digits are the unit number. The third digit is a one for the Wednesday interactivity, two for the laboratory, and three for the rubric. A third digit of four may be used for quizzes and tests. Digits higher than four are used for "interstitial" interactivities or laboratories caused by holidays.
This text is not a traditional content coverage text. This text also is not a step-by-step guide to leading this course. The course is based in constructivist theories of learning, the discrepant events science of the late Tik K. Liem, and cognitive psychology. The course builds from concrete observables to provide "conceptual" hooks on which the students can "hang" new concepts. The course is also informed by Kuhn's model of Paradigm shifts. The class is seen as a community of scientists constructing a shared set of understandings about the physical world.
While the course has constructivist portions, the course does not expect students to reconstruct the last 3000 years of natural philosophy and physical science. As Newton noted, seeing farther requires standing on the shoulders of giants. Those who first generated new understandings were considered brilliant geniuses. The course also includes demonstrations, lecture, and guided learning as appropriate. The laboratories are not devoid of all content, the discovery element is tempered with guidance and some directive learning. The laboratories do seek, however, to avoid the formulaic "fill-in-the-next-blank" cookbook structure of traditional physical science laboratories. That said, there is a blurry line between a table that guides data collection and fill in the blank unthinking recording of data.
A tension also exists between a fully complete rubric and providing space for science as discovery and exploration. The analysis section of the rubrics can "telegraph" the answer expected and shift the laboratory from exploration to an exercise in trying to get the answer the student thinks the instructor wants the student to find. In some instances, especially after midterm, the analysis section of the laboratory marking rubric is underspecified. The instructor is expected to realize this and make their own modifications to the rubric as appropriate.
There are times during the laboratories when the instructor will turn the discussion lead over to the class. At such times the instructor is looking to the students to work out a way to handle the data. For example, in the conduction of heat laboratory the instructor asks the students to design an appropriate chart or graph with which to convey their findings. The instructor is not looking for a single right solution. There is not a single right solution. The right solution is whatever the community of scientists in the room decide is the best solution. The instructor might ask questions about the solution if the instructor is confused, but the instructor is only asking for clarification and is not suggesting that the solution is necessarily inappropriate.
Throughout the text there are instructional notes. These are intentionally kept in text used by the students. Students in the course include education majors destined one day to teach in the classroom. The design intent is that the text should be a guide to these students. The text also seeks to provide a sense of transparency with regard to how the course is being taught. Text books rarely include the techniques and methods of delivery. In this course the techniques and methods are intentionally exposed, they are important parts of the course content. For those familiar with the term, the text is like Bauhaus architecture: the functional form is exposed, the underlying structure is revealed.
The text originally utilized the LINEST function for systems in which the y-intercept was theoretically necessarily zero. The LINEST function permitted forcing the y-intercept to be equal to zero. In a volume verus mass density scatter graph, or a time versus distance velocity graph, the data point (0, 0) is arguably the most accurately known value. Forcing the best fit line to have a y-intercept of zero produces a direct relationship, which underlies these systems.
The complication, however, is that even the slope is a mathematically mysterious concept for the students. The existence of two ways to arrive at a slope, LINEST and SLOPE adds to the mystery and thus confusion for the students. With the advent of the ability to add linear regression trend lines to charts in OpenOffice.org 3.1, finding the slope-intercept became significantly easier for the students. In addition, in-class work later in the term away from the computer laboratory relies on scientific calculators, few of which can produce a linear estimate with a y-intercept forced to be equal to zero.
With the students having difficulty understanding the physical meaning of the slope, the LINEST ultimately became simply a mathematical distraction to the physics. That function has been removed from the text. Where the y-intercept is theoretically zero the instructor introduces a discussion of what a zero value on the x-axis might be predicted to generate as a value on the y-axis.
The fourth edition saw further removal of LINEST from the few remaining laboratories which tended to benefit from forcing the y-intercept to be zero, sound and index of refraction. The fourth edition shifted from providing the theoretic speed of sound and index of refraction of water to having the students obtain this information using WolframAlpha. The ability to use of this knowledge engine became a learning outcome during the use of the third edition fall 2010.