The
good news is that courses with rather modest changes to
explicitly address student beliefs have avoided the usual
negative shifts.11 Those changes include introducing the
physics ideas in terms of real-world situations or devices
with which the students are familiar; recasting homework
and exam problems into a form in which the answer is of
some obvious utility rather than an abstract number; and
making reasoning, sense-making, and reflecting explicit
parts of in-class activities, homework, and exams.ant