A Tale of Two Curricula: The performance of two thousand students in introductory electromagnetism

The performance of over 2000 students in introductory calculus-based electromagnetism (EM M&I averages were significantly higher in each topic. The results suggest that the M&I curriculum is more effective than the traditional curriculum at teaching E&M concepts to students, possibly because the learning progression in M&I reorganizes and augments the traditional sequence of topics, for example, by increasing early emphasis on the vector field concept and by emphasizing the effects of fields on matter at the microscopic level.