Utilizing active learning to engage engineering students in a freshman physics service course taught in an EFL environment

Engaging Electrical Engineering (EE) students in a freshman general physics service course is challenging as they see little relationship between the topics and their major. Non-native speakers enrolled in a course taught in English face an additional challenge beyond understanding the basic physics, that is, understanding specialized English. These challenges are especially serious at second tier universities in Taiwan where the students’ knowledge of physics coming out of high school is based on memorization rather than understanding and whose comprehension of the English language is less than ideal. As a result, they easily tire, stop listening, and stop attending classes. We show that an active learning based approach increases both students’ enjoyment of physics and understanding of new physics concepts and English. Bilingual guided discovery worksheets (GD) for PhET interactive simulations, smartphone-based games, small group flashcard responses, and a website summarizing the ‘big idea’ to be presented in each time slot were developed. The effect of this teaching strategy was measured both quantitatively (grades) and qualitatively (student survey). While students agreed that games were most enjoyable, there was no consensus on which activities were most helpful. Strong attendance (relative to lecture based courses) up to the end of the course suggests that students found class time interesting and useful. GD were most effective for topics in which students had little prior knowledge. The subsequent addition of smartphone-based games increased attendance and reported enjoyment, but did not significantly modify the final grade.