Physics+Textbooks

=__Physics Textbook Reviews__=



Texts reviewed:

O'Dwyer __College Physics__, Wadsworth Publishing, 1981 Beiser __Physics (third edition)__, Benjamin Cummins Publishing 1982

Evaluation

Subject specific:
 * energy treatment – how do they do this, and focus on conservation laws

College Physics introduces the Work Energy theorem (Work equals change in kinetic energy), the modified Work Energy theorem (Work equals change in KE + PE), then talks about conservation of energy. Physics introduces Energy, then specifically kinetic, potential, and rest energy, then goes into conservation of energy. This seems like a more straightforward description of energy. In addition, Physics immediately goes into work done against gravity after defining work, so students have an example of work done to think through. College Physics goes straight from work to examples of energy (kinetic and gravitational energy) without giving an example of work or showing how work and energy are related.


 * vectors – good explanation of how to work with these

Treatment of vectors in College Physics is done after introducing the concept of motion and uses examples from concepts already learned to illustrate the ideas. Physics does a nice job of describing the difference between the scalar and vector and seems to give more examples to work through, although the examples use concepts that the students don't know (force).


 * complexity of problems with each chapter: how much do they touch on multiple concepts?

College Physics breaks down problems into "Questions", "Single-Substitution", "Standard-Level", "Advanced-Level" -- it seems helpful to know the difficulty of the problem a student is working on. Physics also has a breakdown into "Exercises" and "Problems", but it isn't clear what the difference is. It does a good job of including multiple concepts in the problems.


 * Including conceptual questions as well as quantitative questions – what is the quality of them?

No conceptual questions in Physics, but there are conceptual questions in College Physics.


 * Gravity treatment – how in-depth is the treatment? Does it connect E&M and gravity laws?

Both include gravity and circular motion in the same chapter. Physics is fairly brief in covering orbital mechanics, while College Physics has more depth on the subject.

General:
 * Starting off with example from student’s life for concept

College Physics starts off the energy chapter by trying to explain why the concept of energy is used, while Physics tries to relate it to the student's life in terms of how it would influence them. College Physics introduces the idea of centrifugal force toward the end of this chapter, but the presentation seems like it would be likely to confuse the student.


 * Having chapters build on each other

In both texts, they present kinematics before statics, and there was some question about if this order made sense, or if it would be easier to do statics first.


 * Are there lab-type activities and are they good?

There were examples given, but not enough depth to be considered a real lab-type activity.


 * Meets standards: Deals with thermodynamics and relationship with earlier energy chapter, optics treatment – specifically wave optics

Both texts seem similar on this front.

Overall, the difference in exercises between the two (with College Physics having more varied options) makes College Physics a better option, while the presentation of energy in the Physics text seemed better.