Pearson Books Physics
Sandra Grady
There are two different publishers for CP books at Amazon. I called Pearson hoping the rep could tell me the difference between Hewitt's CP and the Pearson version also by Hewitt. She could not answer my question.
Could TOPS experiments be used easily with either edition? Lori D., You have the Hewitt book published in 2002; and Cynthia OK, you used the 3rd edition based on a recent post where I asked about CP. Others in that post mentioned other editions, yet it was not clear which books were being referenced.
I really have no idea about the question you are asking. (So, why are you responding, woman?!) ;-D I just wanted to say that I had originally intended to use Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, but I ended up signing my son up for the physics course with Derek Owens. I couldn't be happier. DS is learning at his own pace (which is sometimes fast, sometimes SLOW) and doing a great job so far. The instructor doesn't seem daunted by my smart-alek-y son's goofy comments on his homeworks/tests, and has actually responded to them in a humorous way (far cry from the beleaguered public school teachers who took immature boy humor as an immediate sign of disrespect.) Mr. Owens does the grading and is available to answer questions. The physics course is essentially a conceptual physics course with labs; prereq is algebra I. DS has recently spent some time with trig concepts on Khan Academy bc there is apparently some trig in the course; I think there is a sufficient amount of instruction in the course for what is required, but he wants to earn badges and whatnot on KA!! Just wanted to throw another option out there.
When I was researching CP, I found that CP has changed publishers many times but the content doesn't change much. It seems even the 3rd edition has been published many times. I went to publishers websites to find isbns. Here's what I came up with.
Keep in mind that the high school editions, those listed above, don't have any answers in them. You need to get the TE and the practice book TE for answers. On the other hand, if you get the college level Conceptual Physics there are answers to all the odd problems from the text in the Practicing Physics book as well as answers to the Practicing Physics exercises. My dd is using the college edition text 0-321-05202-1 and the Practicing Physics book 0-321-05153-X.
Keep in mind that the high school editions, those listed above, don't have any answers in them. You need to get the TE and the practice book TE for answers. On the other hand, if you get the college level Conceptual Physics there are answers to all the odd problems from the text in the Practicing Physics book as well as answers to the Practicing Physics exercises. My dd is using the college edition text 0-321-05202-1 and the Practicing Physics book 0-321-05153-X.
I may be mistaken but it appears to me that Pearson, Addison-Wesley, and Prentice Hall are all affiliated publishers. If you go to the link on Amazon of the book I purchased, it is published by Pearson Prentice Hall; if you go to Addison-Wesley's site you see that Pearson is an affiliate of AW. It all looks like the same family of publishers to me. Based on that, I think you can use any of the Hewitt CP texts. But you might be best to try to get the same edition of student text and teacher manual. I chose the 3rd edition (2002) because they were readily available and I could find a lot of TE to match (I was teaching a co-op with about 30 students).
I cannot answer about the TOPs because I've never used them. I used Hewitt's lab manual for those labs that could be done without specialized equipment or I modified them to work. I also used Google to find experiments to fit the readings. I simply Googled the topic and added the words "lab" and sometimes "kids". That allowed me to get experiments that were more easily performed with everyday items.
and the TE has covered 1,2, then skipped what was 3 and moved 4 up into the 3 slot, then you wouldn't know it unless you figured out from comparing the problems which if I remember correctly were in a separate place. (ie not in the answer part of the TE)...
It is math based, but it isn't calculus based physics. The student should have a good grasp of algebra 1. Some of my better math students took this course and algebra 1 concurrently, others took it after taking algebra 1. The student should be able to find an unknown i.e., in a 3 variable equation, find 1 unknown if the other 2 are given. There are a couple of trig questions, but we didn't worry too much about those - just told them how to do it and moved on (rather than working through the math derivations). The student should be familiar with the Pythagorean theorem.
My dd's primary complaint about studying physics this year (in physical science with CPO) is that she can't discuss the concepts with anyone. She is also having trouble testing well which is why I'm interested in CP.
The review questions come right out of the reading almost verbatim. The Think & Explain questions use the information you learned but makes you think and apply it a bit more. There is no math involved in these two types of questions. Plug & Chug and Think & Solve are generally algebra equations to solve using formulas given in the chapter.
Depending upon where your son is in algebra when he's doing CP, you could just use the first two types of questions. There are usually 20-30 of these. The algebra questions aren't really hard, but they do use units of measurement a lot with cancellation and may be very confusing for someone just learning algebra.
You can email him with questions, and he answers emails very quickly, but there isn't discussion like you would get in a classroom or with an actual tutor. You can get a good idea about what his classes are like at his website. He has extensive samples.
This is clear in the fact that this book covers the IB syllabus exactly. For example, the Pearson textbook includes color forces in the chapter on Topic 7 & 11 Modern Physics, and the Cambridge textbook includes the formula for thermal conduction in the chapter on Topic 8 Energy Production.
There are many detailed experimental investigation sections in this book, and often the experiments are used to introduce or verify theories, allowing the reader to develop an intuition for physical phenomena and to understand abstract formulas more easily.
In the beginning of this book, there is a line saying you can find more exercises on the Oxford University Press website, but I only found the answers to the practice problems already in this textbook.
So, personally, I think this book is a bit weak on practice problems. But my physics teacher said this book has good problems. I think he meant that this book is very good at picking good questions from IB past papers. I agree with this, and I trust his judgement.
The HL content and SL content are separated, so you might feel some gaps between the related chapters across SL and HL, but each chapter corresponds exactly to each Topic of the IB syllabus, which is more convenient for the reader to search for information.
The HL and SL chapters are separated, so related chapters across SL and HL have small gaps in between. But each chapter corresponds exactly to the IB syllabus Topics. The layout is similar to that of the Oxford textbook, both being looser than the Pearson text.
The book has one small, almost insignificant drawback: it combines the two requirements in the IB syllabus, Comprehension and Application, when it lists out the learning objectives at the beginning of each section. The Pearson and Oxford books, on the other hand, both list the Comprehension and Application requirements separately, which is a bit clearer.
In this article, I talked about 3 Physics textbooks for the 2016 IB DP syllabus. The books are published by Pearson, Oxford, and Cambridge respectively. I listed out their features, compared and contrasted the strengths and weaknesses of each of them in my mind. Throughout the process, I tried to reference to concrete examples. At the end, based on my own learning experience, I gave some suggestions for using textbooks.
As a young man, Karl Pearson studied many things, including astronomy, meteorology, physics, mechanics, and biology and German literature and history. He became a socialist and rejected Christianity in his twenties. His first choice of college was Trinity College at Cambridge, but he failed the entrance exam. He was accepted at his second choice, King's College, and was offered a fellowship as he began his studies there. After completing his degree, he left England to study political science in Germany in the 1870s. Because of his admiration for Karl Marx, Pearson changed the spelling of his first name from Carl to Karl. He contributed to discussions of socialism, and Vladimir Lenin wrote highly of him. By the time he returned to England, he had written two books on political science. He created an unchaperoned Young Men's and Women's Discussion Club with an equal voice for everyone, an extremely unusual idea for the time.
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