CLASP

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 8 claims (7 for, 1 mixed) · 3 studies (3 design), q2–q3 · 1 of 3 report an effect size · 8 claims rest on one study

Description

A three-quarter introductory physics curriculum for bioscience majors, developed and run at UC Davis and implemented in other university settings.

Components

• CLASP course series (Physics 7A/7B/7C): a large-enrollment reformed introductory physics course for bioscience majors: CLASP (Collaborative Learning through Active Sense-making in Physics) is a three-quarter, one-year introductory physics course at UC Davis enrolling about 1700 students per year, fully institutionalized since 1996-97 as the physics requirement for biological science majors. Each quarter has five independent sections of roughly 300 students taught by two co-instructors and five TAs, with one 80-minute lecture per week and two 140-minute discussion/laboratory meetings, so less than a quarter of in-class time is lecture. The course was designated an exemplary practice course in a 2006 national CEPR review of 139 introductory physics courses, and has also been implemented at California State Uni (Potter et al. (2012))
• CLASP (Connecting Libraries and Schools Project): CLASP was a three-year, $3.6 million pilot program initiated in 1991 by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund to promote collaborative programs among the New York Public Library, New York City public schools, and neighborhood organizations. A total of 107 schools from three NYC school districts and 23 branch libraries were involved. Typical activities included parent workshops, class visits, craft programs, and summer reading clubs. CLASP also purchased 60,928 items to supplement branch collections and issued mini-grants to teachers for special projects. (Small et al. (1994))

Claims

• Students who took the first quarter of CLASP before general chemistry earned significantly higher chemistry grades in all three quarters of the chemistry sequence [+W]
• CLASP students achieved an average normalized FCI gain of 0.39, above the traditional-course range and in the middle of the interactive-engagement range, despite only about a third of one quarter on mechanics [+W]
• Bioscience students who took the CLASP series had statistically significantly higher upper-division GPAs than students who took the traditional Physics 5 series [+W]
• Only bioscience graduates who took CLASP (2000-2001) had significantly higher UDGPA than transfer students in their majors, unlike 1993-1994 graduates and non-bioscience majors [+W]
• CLASP students' MCAT Physical Science scores were slightly higher than Physics 5 students', but the difference was not statistically significant; Biological Science scores were identical on average [~W]
• CLASP students' expert-like epistemologies (MPEX-II) were statistically unchanged over the quarter, unlike the declines reported for most standard and many reformed physics classes [+W]
• CLASP made limited progress on cooperative activities and little progress on developing replicable collaboration models [+W]
• Cross-sector education partnerships that overcome common challenges are characterized by shared goals, mutually reinforcing activities, and effective communication [+W]

Related Products and Programmes

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Key Sources

• Potter, W., Webb, D., West, E., Paul, C., Bowen, M., Weiss, B., Coleman, L., & De Leone, C. (2012). Sixteen years of Collaborative Learning through Active Sense-making in Physics (CLASP) at UC Davis. https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6970. doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.6970
• Small, Ruth V.; Katzer, Jeffrey; Eisenberg, Michael B.; McClure, Charles R. (1994). Connecting Libraries and Schools Project (CLASP) Evaluation. Report #7. Final Report. Information Management Consultant Services, Inc. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED382199

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	product
id	clasp
title	CLASP
description	A three-quarter introductory physics curriculum for bioscience majors, developed and run at UC Davis and implemented in other university settings.
status	review
moved_from	element/clasp-course-series-uc-davis, element/clasp-library-school-partnership-program, principle/library-school-joint-planning-principle
product_kind	curriculum
generated	by process:sweep-kinds on 2026-10-10
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	2 — potter-2012, small-1994

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