A class where qualitative discussions, coming weeks before computationally complicated practice, helps students' problem solving abilities

Psychologists have long known that an expert in a field not only knows significantly more individual facts/skills than a novice but also has these facts/skills organized into a mental hierarchy that links the individual facts (at the bottom of the hierarchy) together with larger more-encompassing ideas (at the top of the hierarchy). In the Spring quarter of 2012, UC Davis offered 4 sections (about 180 students each) of the first quarter of introductory physics, Physics 9A, covering Newtonian mechanics. One of these sections is a "treatment" group and had the entire 10-week quarter's set of ideas introduced, largely qualitatively, in the first 6 weeks followed by the 4 weeks where students learn to use those ideas to solve the algebraically complicated problems that physicists prize. The other three sections were organized as usual. The treatment group and one of the other sections were taught by the author and were identical (same homework, discussion, lecture, and lab) except for the organization of the content. After controlling for GPA as well as Force Concept Inventory pretest scores, the treatment group was found, with better than 99% confidence, to score higher on the final exam. Some curricular details of the treatment class are discussed in this paper.