Matter, interaction, and change: A framework for an integrated approach to teaching introductory physics

With the development of Relativity Theory and the Standard Model, physics has made great advances in our understanding of its basic concepts. Yet little of that insight has informed modern pedagogy, particularly at the introductory level. Many textbooks, trade books, and journal articles still often refer to force as pushes and pulls, define energy in terms of work, claim that mass is the quantity-of-matter, equate mass and inertia, treat energy and momentum as if they were unrelated, and generally have little to say about what matter is. Based on the foundational perspective that there is matter, it interacts, and that interaction results in physical change, we develop a coordinated and integrated set of conceptual definitions of the primary ideas of matter, interaction, force, energy, inertia, momentum, and mass.