United States

Many concepts in physics involve abstract ideas that require learners to imagine invisible causes, while interpreting the concrete effects and integrating seemingly ambiguous representations (ERs). The difficulty of this parallel processing often results in learners developing misconceptions and lacking the skills to communicate about these concepts effectively. This paper describes a study that used an augmented reality program (Magna-AR) to help learners see abstract magnetic fields within a real-world environment using the internal magnetic field sensor within mobile devices. Learners were asked to use Magna-AR to construct 3D visualizations of magnetic fields of the Earth and around other smaller magnets. Learners were also asked to draw 2D visualizations of magnetic fields and to identify the connections between various ERs of magnetic fields. A selected subset of the learners also participated in follow-up interviews. Preliminary analyses of these data will be discussed.

AAPT WM 21

Sensing and Representing Magnetic Fields in Augmented Reality

magnetic fields

physics education

representational competence

augmented reality

Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

PERC SM 20

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

poster

AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

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These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
- meet and greet other physics educators
- form networks nationally and locally
- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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For highly interactive courses regularly&nbsp;using lab equipment, the transistion to remote instruction presents significant challenges. Breakout rooms during video conferences can be quite helpful for discussion, but without shared experiences with equipment, it's not quite complete.&nbsp; And, while there exist many videos and resources online, there are likely details or more salient points you'd like students to consider than what's readily available from the publisher or on the internet. This&nbsp;talk will present lessons learned in creating&nbsp;amateur videos of&nbsp;mock group-work as an attempt to keep the flow and atmosphere of a studio-format&nbsp;class constructive.&nbsp;This is part of a series of talks stemming from the NextGen PET FOLC project. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NSF DUE-1626496.

On Creating Your Own Course Videos to Emulate Group Work

Vernier products have greatly changed how my classroom and lab is run. I have designed my classroom around student access to Vernier probeware so that lab can occur at anytime! In this talk I will discuss how I use some of my favorite prodcuts in class and online (I mean COVID and all). I will highlight the products that in my opinion have impacted student learning the greatest. This will include everything from motion to atomic spectra!

Vernier and My Classroom

After a 30-year physics teaching position at Cloud County Community College in Concordia, KS I retired on the last day of July 2020. Three days of fishing and I went back to work. This time at Bennington, Nebraska, as a High School Physics and Chemistry Instructor. Who were the first people I called once I moved into my new school? Vernier Software, my go to, my clutch performers, my other right hand. From Graphical Analysis to Pivot Interactives Vernier has always been beside me in my career.&nbsp;This talk will be historical, and futuristic, ultimately leading to my newest favorite vernier product, Pivot Interactives.&nbsp;

“Retired, Rehired, Reloaded with Vernier”

Whether instruction&nbsp;is in a face-to-face classroom or virtual, Video Analysis allows students to identify physics in the world around them while collecting some real data. Students don't need any equipment to learn physics and if you teach secondary physics, you know how important it is for students to journal.&nbsp; Vernier's Go Direct Technology allows for real time data collection and partners with Science Journal.&nbsp; This session will give examples of how both of these have been used in classrooms to enhance student understanding.&nbsp;

No Equipment, No Problem

Thermal physics encompasses thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content and is a core upper-division course requirement for most physics degrees. Thus, in order to improve student outcomes in these courses, it is important for both educators and researchers to have a validated method of evaluating student understanding of upper-division thermal physics content. For an assessment like this to be useful, it is crucial that the assessment tool can be easily implemented, easily scored, and provide insightful feedback. In this presentation, we discuss a multiple-response upper-division thermal physics assessment that was distributed in an online format. Initial validation results, average student performance, and feedback for instructors will be discussed.

Initial Implementation of an Upper-Division Thermal Physics Assessment

Assessment results provide valuable information about student learning. Accurately interpreting this information to modify courses is an essential step towards facilitating better student learning. Thus, as part of developing a standardized assessment for upper-division thermal physics, we design theory-based feedback for instructors in which they can trace how well their courses align with learning goals associated with scientific practices. This feedback provides instructors a ctionable information to operationalize scientific practices into their learning goals, thus encouraging not just content knowledge, but how to use that knowledge. In this talk, we lay out this feedback design process with specific examples from our data. This work highlights the importance of actionable feedback for instructors that facilitates explicit course modifications in physics classrooms. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Designing Research-based Assessment Feedback for Instructors

We report on the development of a rubric designed to analyze pedagogical content knowledge in the context of questioning (PCK-Q). The rubric is based on five components of PCK-Q: Orientation, Knowledge of Curriculum, Knowledge of Students’ Understanding, Knowledge of Instructional Strategies and Knowledge of Assessment (Magnusson, 1999). We are developing it to analyze 1) written responses to an instrument designed to measure PCK-Q and 2) video classroom observations of student assistants’ (SAs’) interactions with students. The classroom observations have first been coded by a coding scheme that analyzes levels of questioning and direct instruction in an inquiry-based classroom. We expect the strongest evidence of PCK-Q in video sequences of SAs using sequences of guided questions. Guided questions demonstrate evidence of instructor content knowledge, knowledge of students’ understanding and knowledge of common student difficulties, while helping students evaluate experimental evidence, solve a problem or come to a correct conceptual understanding.&nbsp;

Development of a Rubric to Analyze Student Teaching Assistants’ PCK-Q

This will be a humbling talk. We take you on our journey of fails in digital and analouge data collection, encoding and scoring as well as procedures and ideas of fixing them. We answer questions like: “ How can I reach sufficient encoding redundancy? ”, “ How to estimate the coding error probability? ”, “ What are the pitfalls in (digital) data scoring? ”, “ What metadata might become useful for my analysis? ” Or as Springuel, Wittmann &amp; Thompson (2019, p.2) would say: “[D]ata encoding is often neglected or taken for granted, even though this step forms an important bridge between the data collection and analysis. ”

Fails for Concept Inventory (digital) Data Encoding

Our course "The Science of Acoustics" is an introductory course on waves, oscillations, and sound. My colleagues and I&nbsp;have been teaching the lab portion in a consistent way over the past decade with only minor tweaks to equipment and instructions, but our switch to remote learning forced me to rethink some activities. This talk is about making choices concerning how to modify&nbsp;lab activities so students can achieve the relevant learning objectives. I may not have made "correct" choices in every case, but I will discuss thinking on labs that range from ones&nbsp;kept basically identical except for the use of virtual equipment (e.g., a pendulum lab)&nbsp;to others where the questions we asked were completely flipped around (e.g., a lab on standing waves). I will also reflect on how this experience will affect my delivery when things go "back to normal."

Making choices for virtual labs in "The Science of Acoustics"

The use of custom, inexpensive home experiment kits during the pandemic revealed several strategies that will be applied to traditional teaching of introductory physics labs at Oglethorpe University.&nbsp; These include: using the&nbsp;PHYPHOX app and smartphone sensors;&nbsp;cost-effectively increasing&nbsp;the number of onsite lab stations using kit parts so more students are directly involved in running the experiments;&nbsp;having each student collect their own data and write up results with them while still collaborating with team members;&nbsp;limiting the number of formal lab reports required after students demonstrate documentation skills in order to focus on spreadsheet development&nbsp;and conceptual knowledge;&nbsp;and having home kits available even when onsite so students can use them remotely for custom projects based on standard experiments.&nbsp; In particular, having all students collect and analyze their own data virtually eliminates the 'freeloader' syndrome where some students do far less work than others on experiments and documentation.

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On Creating Your Own Course Videos to Emulate Group Work

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