United States

This poster will address development and initial implementation of a NSF grant funded biomedically relevant active-learning curriculum in my second semester Physics for the Life Sciences course. This NSF grant funded curriculum provides students with a biomedically relevant curriculum that stresses the importance of physics as a basic science relevant to their future medical/healthcare careers. I will provide insight as to how I contributed in the development process and adapted curricular materials of Rotational Kinematics and Torque in a flipped classroom setting and how this benefited me in my pedagogical growth in teaching physics. Further, pre-post analysis of attitude survey results will be addressed to show the effectiveness of the curriculum. This work is supported by the grants DUE- 1934038 and DUE- 1933984 from the National Science Foundation.

AAPT SM 21

Implementation of a biomedically relevant active-learning Physics curriculum

biomedically relevant

active learning curriculum

adaptive

introductory physics

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poster

Research-based tutorials---worksheets that guide students in constructing physics knowledge for themselves---have repeatedly proven to be a highly effective complement to lectures in physics courses. Our collaboration has created a collection of tutorials for middle-division quantum mechanics (QM), which has been successfully adopted by QM instructors nationwide. However, many instructors lack the resources and/or institutional support to run tutorials; it can be difficult to find time, space, and personnel to facilitate these activities. As an alternative, we are developing online versions of our QM tutorials that students can work through without instructor facilitation. We are designing the online tutorials to guide students through the worksheets in ways that encourage sense-making and allow students to progress without revealing the answers. For example, they include adaptive guidance pathways based on students’ responses. Early beta versions are available, for free, at acephysics.net.

Online Tutorials for Middle-Division Quantum with Adaptive Guidance

Understanding the basic concepts of electricity represents a major challenge to most students in K-12 education. Learners find it particularly difficult to develop a robust understanding of potential and potential difference and often believe that the electric current is “used up” by devices. A promising way of making circuits more accessible to students in introductory electricity lessons is offered by the use of analogies in combination with simulations. We therefore developed a new, analogy-based simulation of simple electric circuits. The simulation is intended for use in combination with the bike chain and the air pressure analogies, the implementation of which has been shown to support students’ development of a conceptual understanding of simple DC circuits. Teachers and students can access the 3D simulation free of charge using a modern browser.

An Analogy-Based 3D-Simulation for Teaching Simple Electric Circuits

In a prior study, we investigated graduate student reasoning on a set of entropy-related conceptual tasks in a think-aloud format. The tasks involved entropy from microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, ideal gases, and a novel context involving a system with a dynamic string. In the current study, we conducted interviews with undergraduates using the same questionnaire. Most students were interviewed during the second half of their upper-division Thermal Physics course at the University of Colorado Boulder while two were upper-division undergraduates from other institutions with strong physics programs. We analyze the responses of the undergraduates to a section of the interview involving a novel system of a dynamic string waving in a bath of water and discuss the similarities and differences between the undergraduate and graduate students' responses. The responses from the two populations share many similarities with a few noteworthy exceptions. The undergraduates generally did not produce multiple macrostate classifications in the novel system, and some expressed a concern with what they perceived to be an infinite number of microstates---and thus infinite entropy---which was not a concern among the graduate students.

Comparing undergraduate and graduate student reasoning on conceptual entropy questionnaire

We report on a three-year grant aimed at improving the oral communication skills of STEM graduate students. By teaching storytelling techniques, playing improv games and recording podcasts, eight STEM storytellers per cohort took a year-long class to develop their skills as speakers. Funded by the NSF Innovations in Graduate Education program, (#1735124) we used formative and summative assessments for determining students’ levels of anxiety before giving talks, apprehension for public speaking, and we calculated how much jargon each student employed while discussing their thesis work for a general audience. We collected data on all three cohorts, with 22 of the 24 completing a full year of coursework related to communication skills. Quantitative and qualitative results will be shared in this poster, demonstrating that the publicly available STEM Storytellers curriculum is a powerful method for improving the oral communication skills of STEM graduate students.

Improving the Communication Skills of STEM Graduate Students

Building a positive and inclusive cohort feel among students of physics is challenging when their first postsecondary experience is in large lecture-style courses. To this end, this poster will describe the range of different communication technologies and tools that my Department has used to increase our formal and informal communication with undergraduate students of physics at different stages of their degree programs. Comparisons focus on three aspects: the instructor/administrator’s intended goal for usage, the actual usage patterns by students during (pre-COVID) in-person learning, and the actual usage patterns by students during (COVID-necessitated) remote learning.

Beyond email: effective communication strategies to engage students of physics

We implemented a fully online full year introductory physics sequence for life science and pre-health students at Portland State University during the 2020- 2021 school year. Curricular materials such as videos by experts in the medical field, content, activities, simulations, and assessments around medical examples and applications were developed. These were delivered through an adaptive, personalized, and interactive online platform Cogbooks. We plan to offer this course in-class in the upcoming school year and further study student learning and the impact of the curriculum on student attitudes.

Implementation of a Full Year Introductory Physics Sequence Pre-Health Students

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics. Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both. In this poster we will describe the process of how we selected the fluid statics constructs and the process of writing and refining the statics-related questions. Instructors interested in serving as a field test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of statics questions for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

Digital worksheet questions based on health and life scenarios were developed for students in an introductory physics for life science course, to practice conceptual and algebraic modeling and quantitative analysis. Many of the quantitative values used were students’ own estimations or data or choice of scenario parameters from authentic data tables and graphs provided. Students would get different numerical answers depending on their details of choice, and possibly different evaluations of what their numerical answer inferred about the scenario. These materials were meant to support student transition into exploring the physics mechanisms underlying their own health/life scenarios.

Health/life Scenario Digital Worksheets with Student Choice of Details

We discuss an investigation of student difficulties with the representation in which a Hermitian operator corresponding to a physical observable (e.g., the Hamiltonian operator corresponding to energy) is diagonal in the context of degenerate perturbation theory involving the Zeeman effect in the hydrogen atom. This investigation was carried out in advanced quantum mechanics courses by administering written free-response and multiple-choice questions and conducting individual interviews with students. We discuss the common student difficulties related to these concepts, knowledge of which can be useful for developing research-validated learning tools.

Student difficulties with diagonal operators for degenerate perturbation theory

Students from two nearby high schools designed and configured a QuarkNet cosmic ray muon detectors to measure any changes in cosmic ray flux due to an inserted 0.1T magnetic field. The design included two separate methods to measure differences in muon path. We hypothesized that the neodymium magnetic field would vary muon flux in an offset detector array. Results will be presented.

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