Investigating Students' Ideas About X-rays While Developing Teaching Materials for a Medical Physics Course

The goal of the Modern Miracle Medical Machines project is to promote pre-med students' interest in physics by using the context of contemporary medical imaging. The X-ray medical imaging learning module will be a central part of this effort. To investigate students' transfer of learning in this context we have conducted a series of clinical and teaching interviews. In the latter interview, some of the proposed learning materials were used. The students brought to our discussion pieces of knowledge transferred from very different sources such as their own X-ray experiences, previous learning and the mass media. This transfer seems to result in more or less firm mental models which often are not always internally consistent or coherent