Calculus-based Physics students’ understanding on vectors: a comparison between engineering students and life-science students

Students’ understanding of vector concepts affects their learning outcome of introductory physics courses. We administrated a research-based vector survey to test how well students understood eight essential vector concepts. Students from two calculus-based physics course sequences were recruited: engineering students from a traditional physics for engineers course sequence and life-sciences students from a general physics with calculus course. We found that even though engineering students outperformed life-sciences students, these two groups of students had difficulties answering 2D vector subtraction, dot product and cross product questions correctly. We have also analyzed whether dressing a vector problem with physical context affected student performance in the vector survey and have found that physical context had a stronger impact on the questions with lower student performance than on questions where students performed better: adding a physical context made students do worse in the 2D vector subtraction question, while for questions evaluating the dot product and the cross product, adding physical context improved student performance on these questions.