The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students’ ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to suggest that people often do not retain all, or even most, of what they learned previously. How much information is retained appears to be dependent both on the individuals’ approach to learning as well as the style of instruction. In particular, there is evidence to suggest that active engagement techniques in the classroom can improve students’ retention of the material over time. Here, we report the findings of a longitudinal investigation of students’ retention of conceptual understanding as measured by the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) following a first-semester, calculus-based introductory physics course, which features significant active engagement in both lecture and recitation. By administering the FMCE at the end of a first-semester physics course and again at the beginning of the subsequent second-semester physics course, we examine students’ knowledge retention over time periods ranging from 1-15 months. We find that the shift in students’ FMCE scores between these two courses is positive but corresponds to a small effect size, indicating that students retained effectively all of their conceptual learning (as measured by the FMCE). This finding largely persists even as the length of the gap between the two courses increases. We also find that, when breaking out students’ performance on individual questions, the majority of students maintain their score on individual questions. Averaged over all questions, roughly a fifth of the students switched their answers from right to wrong or wrong to right on any given item.

中文翻译：

---

互动式入门力学课程后保留概念学习

本科物理课程的循环形式取决于学生回忆和利用以前课程中涵盖的材料的能力，以便在以后的课程中可靠地利用该知识。但是，有证据表明，人们通常不会保留他们以前学到的全部甚至大部分知识。保留多少信息似乎取决于个人的学习方法以及教学风格。特别是，有证据表明，课堂上的主动参与技术可以随着时间的推移提高学生对材料的保留率。在这里，我们报告了第一学期后通过力与运动概念评估（FMCE）对学生对概念理解的保留进行纵向调查的结果，基于微积分的物理入门课程，其特点是积极参与演讲和背诵。通过在第一学期物理课程结束时和随后的第二学期物理课程开始时管理FMCE，我们可以检查学生在1到15个月不等的时间内的知识保留情况。我们发现，这两个课程之间学生的FMCE分数的变化是正的，但对应的影响较小，表明学生有效地保留了所有的概念学习（由FMCE衡量）。即使两个课程之间的差距越来越大，这一发现在很大程度上仍然存在。我们还发现，在按学生的个人问题来表现他们的表现时，大多数学生会保持他们在个人问题上的得分。