United States

I’ve spent nearly 30 years navigating the physics and, more recently, astronomy communities advocating within the professional society space for women, people of color, LGBT+ people, and others from marginalized groups so that they might thrive in their educational spaces and careers. At the same time, I’ve had to navigate these communities from the identity of a Black Woman without a physics degree, which has contributed to the experiences I’ve had throughout my career and has shaped my approach to this work. In this talk, I’ll share some of my views, motivations, and experiences doing DEI work in the professional society space; discuss some of the work I’ve done including my most recent work leading the AIP Task Force to Elevate the representation of African Americans in Undergraduate Physics (TEAM-UP) project; and reflect on the ways in which each of us can uplift students and scientists from marginalized communities to create a better environment for them and all of us.

AAPT SM 20

“Doing Physics” and being a Champion for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Professional Society Arena

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

technical paper

One of the ubiquitous problems in classical mechanics is that of a simple pendulum attached to a support that oscillates in time. Under certain conditions, such a pendulum can be modeled as a driven harmonic oscillator, and, as a result, the pendulum can undergo large-amplitude oscillations when the driving frequency of the oscillating support matches the natural frequency of the pendulum. To accompany analysis of this problem in mechanics courses, a simple apparatus has been built to model the system described above. The apparatus will be presented, along with a Lagrangian mechanics analysis of the motion. In addition, several other applications of the demonstration will be discussed.

Demonstration to Show Resonant Oscillations of a Simple Pendulum

Disc golf is one of the fastest growing sports in the world. Played much like traditional golf, players attempt to throw a plastic disc to a target basket in the fewest number of throws possible. Like traditional golf, disc golf involves many interesting concepts from physics and kinesiology. Yet little is known within the disc golf community about the physical phenomena that governs the sport. In an attempt to explore and explain the physics behind the disc golf shot, an independent research project was conducted by an undergraduate student and a physics professor. This research describes the differences in flight patterns between the major types of disc golf discs and a video analysis describing throwing mechanics and the resulting effects on flight characteristics. This presentation will involve the description of the student research project and a description of how these concepts can be integrated into introductory physics courses.

Disc Golf Physics

The Living Physics Portal* (www.livingphysicsportal.org) is a website dedicated to cultivating a community in which physics faculty teaching interdisciplinary physics courses can discuss problems of practice and share curricular content. Our research team is interested in understanding faculty’s use of the Portal. As part of this effort, we have been exploring what forms of participation can be tracked and meaningfully interpreted from users’ actions. We have developed a model that categorizes particular actions on the Portal. The model of participation includes the following categories: Networking, Interpreting, Dialoguing, Collecting, Connecting, Creating, Remixing and Viewing. In this talk, we will showcase our model of online participation and apply this model to a single user’s online activity. *This work is supported by NSF #1624478 and #1624185.

Living Physics Portal: Designing analytics to map faculty’s evolving participation

I overview three aspects of physics lab instruction where there is a tremendous opportunity for education researchers and innovative practitioners to impact student learning. The first area is shifting the theory-centric culture of physics education to a balanced emphasis on experiment and theory, which reflects professional practice within physics. I will show why the laboratory should be recognized as a critical environment for learning complex problem-solving and as highly relevant for students' career preparation. The second area is embedding scientific practices within labs. Within the growing literature there is variation in viewing practices as discrete and transferrable skills versus integrated and highly contextualized, which has implications for researchers and educators. Third, I see potential for more project-based courses to blur the boundaries between lab instruction and research experiences by integrating a range of practices and reframing the purpose of a lab, which can affect students' autonomy and identity within the lab.

Challenges and opportunities for innovation and research in physics lab education

It is important for physics students to develop ethics knowledge, yet this is rarely taught in physics classes. We are addressing this limitation in our physics classes at Texas State University. Here, we focus on teaching about the ethics of building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii for an observational astrophysics class. We developed resources for students to make informed decisions about this complex issue. The unit encompasses an introduction of the TMT, a local perspective in San Marcos, a history of Hawaii, and perspectives about the TMT relative to formal ethical frameworks. In this talk, we will present data from this new unit in Spring 2020 including students’ video-recorded classroom conversations and their written work. We will highlight what worked well in our design and what could be improved in order to support the community of physics educators and education researchers in teaching about ethics in physics classes.

Lessons from teaching ethics using the Thirty Meter Telescope controversy

We developed five 30-minute topical quizzes in an introductory electromagnetism course (n~150) at MIT, and administered them electronically in class. For each problem on the quiz, students were given a randomized variant from a subset of three variants. We analyzed both the self-consistency of these quizzes and their correlation with other components of the course, including the final exam. We also looked at correlations between “types” of problems on both quizzes and the final. Finally, we sought to determine what problem variants, if any, were statistically significantly different from their counterparts within a problem. Quizzes, as a category, correlated more strongly with the final exam than any other component of the course, including the midterm exam. We argue that frequent quizzes are an effective and superior assessment compared to other assessments in the course. We intend to make these materials available to instructors at other institutions.

Topical, Randomized Quizzes in Electromagnetism

Students in undergraduate introductory physics courses do not always appreciate the importance of computational skills when it comes to physics. To help motivate students in this area, I have developed a simple game that introduces students to a few essential computational constructs: loops, if-statements, and Euler-Cromer integration. The game involves physics that cannot be done on paper. Students played the game on the first day of class, and then were tasked with reproducing the game. As a class, the students generated a checklist of essential features. Each then used the checklist to program a reproduction of the game. Students worked at their own pace, with only minimal instruction on computation in the beginning of the semester. I discuss successes and lessons learned.

Hungry Hungry Hamsters: Intro Physics Students Program a Game

Students in introductory physics laboratories often do not recognize the importance of estimating uncertainties – sometimes dismissing it as busy work. In addition, they often struggle with accounting for uncertainties in their measurements when reporting their findings. Here, we describe the implementation of a new laboratory activity in the calculus-based introductory physics sequence, which was informed by an emerging body of research on laboratory instruction. This laboratory activity focuses on the impact of measurement uncertainties on the construction of a linear best-fit model, particularly when the data points have non-identical uncertainties. In this talk, we will also share preliminary results from pre- and post-laboratory assessments.

Supporting student understanding of linear fitting with non-identical uncertainties

A growing body of research in physics education indicates that the nature of human reasoning itself may impact student performance on physics questions. Analysis of student reasoning patterns through the lens of dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR) suggests that students may struggle to engage analytical processing productively when responding to a physics question that contains salient distracting features. As part of a larger effort to investigate and support student reasoning in physics, we have used reasoning chain construction tasks in order gain insight into students’ initial perceptions of viable approaches for solving a qualitative physics question and to examine the impact of guiding students to explore alternative approaches before revisiting that physics question. In this talk, preliminary results will be presented and implications for research-based curriculum development aligned with DPToR will also be discussed.

Scaffolding student exploration of alternative approaches

Thinking like a physicist is often hailed as a goal of introductory physics. Sensemaking strategies provide an avenue for developing physicist-like reasoning. Strategies such as drawing a picture, identifying assumptions, checking units, and analyzing limiting cases can help develop students’ physicist-like reasoning. Explicit sensemaking instruction aids in expanding students’ views about sensemaking and helps them develop habits that persist beyond explicit prompting. In this talk we present ways of scaffolding and fading sensemaking strategies as well as rewarding their use in introductory physics courses.

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Inclusive Physics & Astronomy Discussions at Western Washington University

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