Principles & Practice of Physics, 1st edition

• MasteringPhysics is the leading online homework, tutorial, and assessment product designed to improve results by helping students quickly master concepts. Students benefit from self-paced tutorials, featuring specific wrong-answer feedback, hints, and a wide variety of educationally effective content to keep them engaged and on track. Robust diagnostics and unrivalled gradebook reporting allow instructors to pinpoint the weaknesses and misconceptions of a student or class to provide timely intervention.

• Hints and answer-specific Feedback in Mastering offer help similar to what students would experience in an office hour.
• Gradebook Diagnostics: With a single click, charts summarize the most difficult problems, vulnerable students, and grade distribution allowing for just-in-time teaching to address student misconceptions.
• Learning Catalytics^™ is a "bring your own device" student engagement, assessment, and classroom intelligence system. With Learning Catalytics you can:

• Assess students in real time, using open-ended tasks to probe student understanding.
• Understand immediately where students are and adjust your lecture accordingly. 
• Improve your students’ critical-thinking skills.
• Access rich analytics to understand student performance. 
• Add your own questions to make Learning Catalytics fit your course exactly.
• Manage student interactions with intelligent grouping and timing.

• Video Tutor Demonstrations feature “Pause-and-predict” demonstrations of key physics concepts and incorporate assessment as the student progresses to actively engage them in understanding the key conceptual ideas underlying the physics principles.
• PhET Tutorials prompt students to engage with the renowned PhET simulations and test students’ conceptual understanding. PhET Simulations are interactive tools that help students make connections between real life phenomena and the underlying physics. 
• Math Review Tutorials help students review and remediate their math weaknesses with hints and answer-specific feedback.  
• Math Remediation found within selected tutorials provides just-in-time math help and allows students to brush up on the most important mathematical skills needed to successfully complete assignments. 
• MasteringPhysics tracks student performance against your Learning Outcomes. Mastering offers a data-supported measure to quantify students’ learning gains and to share those results quickly and easily: 

• Add your own or use the publisher-provided learning outcomes to track student performance and report it to your administration.
• View class performance against the specified learning outcomes.  
• Export results to a spreadsheet that you can further customize and/or share with your chair, dean, administrator, or accreditation board.

• Prelecture Concept Questions prompt students to do their assigned reading prior to coming to class for a more engaged lecture experience. Open-ended essay questions ask students to identify what they found most difficult about a certain concept providing insight to you for “just-in-time” teaching. 

Note: You are purchasing a standalone product; MasteringPhysics does not come packaged with this content. If you would like to purchase all the package items (physical text and MasteringPhysics with the Student Workbook) search for ISBN-10: 0136150934 /ISBN-13: 9780136150930. That package includes ISBN-10: 032194920X /ISBN-13: 9780321949202, ISBN-10: 0321951069 /ISBN-13: 9780321951069 and ISBN-10: 0321957776 / ISBN-13: 9780321957771.

MasteringPhysics is not a self-paced technology and should only be purchased when required by an instructor.

New learning architecture

The book is structured to help students learn physics in an organized way that encourages comprehension and reduces distraction.

• The separation of the Principles and Practice volumes addresses students' tendency to focus on shallow problem solving at the expense of understanding. The Principles volume teaches the physics; the Practice volume teaches the skills needed to apply physics to the task of solving problems. For example, Principles includes simple worked examples aimed at promoting understanding; Practice contains complex worked examples, problem sets, and related features.
• The division of each Principles chapter into a Concepts section and a Quantitative Tools section helps students to build a robust understanding of the material instead of focusing too quickly on equations. The Concepts section develops the ideas in qualitative terms, using words and pictures and building from specific observations to general principles. The Quantitative Tools section formalizes the ideas mathematically. 
• The core ideas of mechanics are developed in one dimension, helping students to concentrate on learning them before tackling the mathematical complexities of two-dimensional analysis. Chapter 10, "Motion in a Plane," introduces the second dimension.

Traditional texts take a somewhat 19th-century approach to physics, delaying the introduction of ideas that we now see as unifying and foundational. This text builds physics on those unifying foundations, helping students to develop an understanding that is stronger, deeper, and fundamentally simpler.

• Conservation laws. The conservation laws are the backbone of contemporary physics. This text develops conservation of momentum and energy before Newton's laws, and it emphasizes symmetry, conservation, and unity throughout. In mechanics, this approach avoids many of the pitfalls related to the concept of force, leads naturally to the two-body character of forces, and enables students to solve a range of problems before bringing in calculus.
• Concept of a system. Many ideas in physics depend on distinguishing system from surroundings, and selecting an appropriate system is a key skill for solving many types of problems. This text uses the idea of a system explicitly and consistently. 
• Relativity. Both Galilean and special relativity help to explain many ideas of physics. This text introduces reference frames in Chapter 6, and it covers special relativity in Chapter 14, rather than at the end of the second semester.
• Statistical treatment of thermodynamics. The traditional, 19th-century approach to thermodynamics is intensely confusing to students. This text builds thermodynamics on a more logical and coherent foundation, starting with an accessible treatment of the statistical basis for entropy.
  

Research-based instruction

In addition to the large-scale features listed above (all of which are based in research), this text uses a range of other research-based instructional techniques.

• Strong connection to experiment and experience.  As much as possible, this text develops ideas from experimental observations–often ones the student can make. In working out the physical reasoning that leads from observations to principles, the text often reads like a dialog between author and reader. This approach is very different from the traditional one in which definitions and principles are stated ex cathedra and then backed up with derivations and examples.
• Strong visual instruction. The figures in the Principles volume are designed as visual explanations, presenting ideas in visual terms and collaborating actively with the text. In accordance with research on visual instruction, they incorporate explanation, and they are also quite schematic, highlighting key relationships and omitting unnecessary detail. For instance, figures that do not need a third dimension do not use one. Many figures show multiple representations–combining a situation sketch with a graph or bar diagram, for instance. 
• Integrated student engagement. While most texts include "self-check" features of one type or another, this text integrates them closely into the learning program. The Checkpoint questions in the Principles chapters often serve as the springboard for the next phase of the discussion. Each Concepts section ends with a Self Quiz that lets students test their understanding of the material before proceeding. In Practice, each fully solved Worked Problem is followed by a Guided Problem that has a list of questions and suggestions in place of a full solution. Practice also contains a feature called Developing a Feel that helps students to develop a quantitative feel for the quantities introduced in the chapter and to learn to make valid assumptions and estimates.