The aim of Fathoming Physics classes is for students to develop a genuine, robust, conceptual understanding of physics.

This is the approach most likely to produce the best academic outcome as well as the highest level of student enjoyment and motivation.

These classes cover the HSC physics syllabus and are taught at a level suitable for students concurrently studying extension 1 or extension 2 maths. New year 11 classes begin in term 4 and HSC classes begin in term 3 each year. This allows us to work a term ahead of school to provide ample time for students to consolidate their learning ahead of assessment tasks.

To give students a feel for the level of these classes – I have previously taught HSC physics for a number of years at a local selective school, and the level I teach these classes is slightly higher than the level at which I taught at school. The small size of my tuition classes allows me to talk to each student indivually during class to monitor students’ understanding and ensure that everyone is making sense of the physics as we progress through the course.

Starting tuition at the beginning of year 11 (module 1) is highly recommended. This provides sufficent time to revisit important concepts and skills several times during the course as part of our regular revision schedule. It allows me to help all students – including those who don’t find physics easy – to make sense of the physics in the course so that students can achieve their personal best result. This becomes more challenging the later students join the class.

Classes are structured to make use of practice testing and interleaved, spaced repetition. These learning strategies have been shown to be highly effective at maximising exam results (see below).

Each week I provide a half hour exam (on the topics covered in the previous week’s revision), revision questions (focusing on material covered in the following week’s exam), and multiple choice homework (with worked solutions which students recieve immediately upon submission).

The most important factor that determines students’ final result is their own level of commitment. Students who get a band 6 in HSC physics are those who ask questions in class (it’s a friendly environment!) and do the homework.

 Many academically gifted students choose to begin tuition in term 4 of year 9 (so that they complete the year 11 course half way through year 10). 

The year 11 class is my introductory level class, which assumes no previous knowledge of physics. It is suitable for younger students with a genuine interest in learning physics who also have a strong mathematical background (fluency in algebraic manipulation, quadratic equations, right-angled trigonometry and the ability to graph and interpret graphs of linear and quadratic functions). 

Term 4 year 9 is the earliest I would suggest beginning tuition, even for students from selective schools. I do sometimes have exceptional students (who have demonstrated exceptional ability, e.g. excelled in the maths comp or in math olympiad pathway programs, or Junior Science Olympiad exams) for whom it works well to begin earlier. Please contact me if you would like to discuss this possibility.

For students who begin a year early (at the end of year 9) I offer a three year pathway, with the second year consisting of HSC content, but with revision and exams that continue to consolidate their understanding of year 11 as well as HSC content, and the final HSC year focusing more on extended responses and more sophisticated exam questions to prepare for HSC assessments.  

Some students are interested in sitting the Physics Olympiad exam in addition to achieving an outstanding result in HSC physics.

I offer an HSC+Olympiad course (combining the HSC course and Extension topics to prepare for the Physics Olympiad), please see Olympiad class information. This class is invitation only, based on students’ interest in physics, consistency in homework completion and exam results in the year 11 course.

Effective learning (in general)

Substantial work has been done in the fields of cognitive science and educational psychology to establish which learning strategies are most effective across a wide range of subjects. There is strong evidence for the efficacy of two strategies in particular:

• Practice testing
• Spaced repetition

and moderate evidence for:

• Interleaving

Please see the following review paper by Dunlovsky et al.: Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology, and a 2022 Nature review paper by Carpenter et al.:The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice.

An additional worthwhile paper is that by Roediger et al.: Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention

A summary of the some of the findings discussed in the above papers:

• Research tells us that taking a test not only measures a student’s current knowledge, but significantly enhances their performance on later tests more than the equivalent time spent studying, particularly when there was a substantial delay between the practice test and the final test.
• Spacing out study of content over time is more effective than studying for the same amount of time in more closely spaced study sessions.
• Interleaving (studying a range of topics in a single study session, rather than a single topic) ensures that students are retrieving information from their long term rather than short-term memory (each retrieval from long term memory improves later retrieval), as well as making choices about the required approach to each problem which realistically replicates the situation students face in exams.

The following article by Dunlovsky provides an accessible summary of effective learning strategies designed for a student audience: Strengthening the student toolbox

Fathoming Physics classes are designed around these effective strategies, incoporating practice testing in the form of a weekly half hour exam, as well as spaced repetition of content and interleaving of topics in our weekly revision.

Research into effective strategies for teaching physics has been underway for more than 40 years (A review article by McDermott and Redish: RL- PER1: Resource Letter on Physics Education Research).

 The main findings include:

• Students begin their study of physics with strong prior conceptions (often incorrect conceptions) about the physics underlying many physical phenomena. These ideas can be quite robust and resistant to change even in the face of repeated explicit correct instruction.
• Effective physics teaching must take these common prior beliefs into account via learning activities that actively elicit and address them, providing students with alternate approaches to understanding phenomena that students themselves find more believable and satisfying. We could summarise this as the need to convince rather than tell in order to produce meaningful learning in physics.

An example in practice: Students can often cite Newton’s 3rd law prior to beginning year 11 classes, but rarely genuinely believe it. If you ask students, most will feel sure that a fast moving, heavy truck will apply more force to a stationary light car during a collision than vice versa. A critical experiment we conduct in our Mod 2 lessons is to check, using sensor carts equipped with force probes, that the force a fast moving heavy cart with a hard bumper exerts on a light, stationary cart is identical to the force the light cart exerts back on the heavy cart. Students are generally very surprised at this outcome, and this acts as a memorable event that allows them to make correct future predictions about similar scenarios they encounter in assessments. Students are then able to explain the difference in effect of the collision in terms of the higher acceleration of the light cart due to its small mass, rather than being caused by larger force acting on it (as ΣF=ma).

A heavy sensor cart with a hard rubber bumper hits a light cart with a soft bumper. The force each exerts on the other is recorded and found to be the same (video).

An example of active learning in practice: Students often firmly believe that the reaction force to the weight force is the normal force. In one activity in module 2, students use a range of different representations (motion diagrams, vectors diagrams and graphs) to reason about how the normal force acting on a person must vary during a jump given their observation of the motion of a person jumping. We then take data in real time using a force plate and students compare this to their predicted graphs to make sense of their measurements.

In this activity we address:

• Student misconceptions about the reaction forces (as the normal force changes during a jump while the weight force remains constant, the normal force cannot be the reaction force to the weight force!)
• The “everyday” (rather than abstract) context ensures that students find the problem engaging and relevent to their understanding of the world they live in.
• Students receive rapid feeback on their predictions as we take real data in a few seconds in class so that students are genuinely convinced about the resolution to the problem.
• Finally – actually doing the experiment (and making errors!) is a very memorable experience. Every demonstration like this that we do in class acts as a memory anchor I can refer to regularly in future lessons as we think about new situations (“Remember jumping on a force plate? How does this question we are doing relate to what you learned about the normal force in that situation?)”