Freshman Journal Club: Sneaking recent research papers into introductory physics courses

We investigate the impact of introducing material from contemporary research papers to undergraduates much earlier than is usually practised. In particular we show that our methodology can reveal appropriately-defined impact on the model-making and model-breaking performance[1] of students from two introductory physics-based courses. Approximately half of the students in each (otherwise conventional course) are exposed to animations based on material from recent research papers. Such animations are included as part of one of two versions of Jupyter notebooks which are provided as supplementary course materials. These web-based notebooks are additionally used as PowerPoint substitutes whenever appropriate. We compare quiz scores between students who did and did not access the notebooks. The differences in the background of the students are taken into account by normalizing their performance on the paper-related questions with scores on the quizzes that did not involve material from the papers. These data are further cross-analyzed with performance data from final exams[2]. We hope that our findings can open the door to the development of education research methodologies that are less limited by issues of sample-size, model-selection, quantifying concept-learning, et cetera.