United States

Calls to reform to science teaching have elicited numerous responses over the past decade. One avenue of reform, 3 Dimensional Learning (3DL), focuses on what students learn, instead of how students learn. 3DL achieves this by organizing science learning around the same 3 dimensions that experts organize their knowledge: Scientific Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts. To aid transformations toward 3DL, the 3DL4US group has created protocols to help characterize when 3DL may occur on assessments and in instruction. In this talk, we present initial results that extend this effort to student engagement with the Scientific Practice of Developing and Using Models. We will look at results from student problem solving interviews to see how the practice manifested in their work. These results will help inform us about the effectiveness of instructional efforts to engage students with the Practice of Using Models as we attempt to create 3DL environments.

AAPT SM 21

Student Engagement in the Practice of Developing and Using Models

models

student work

skills

3 dimensional learning

scientific practices

modeling

representations

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

PERC SM 21

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

poster

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

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An instructor may often wonder what their students understand from their lessons or may want to know what students already understand before coming to class. While formative assessments can help, they can also be stressful and time consuming. During the fall and spring semesters from 2018 to 2021 in Physics I and Physics II, students reported their level of understanding of the material before and after each class. This information helped to inform the instructor on how to teach the class as well as how well the class went and what material might need to be reviewed. We graphed the average level of understanding for each class session to compare the students’ understanding before and after class, between semesters, and between years. Each semester is analyzed for trends, and we plan to share the interesting results that were found.

Measuring students’ level of understanding in introductory physics courses

Among the many significant challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic, many educators had to face the most significant challenge to convert well-designed in-person instruction methods to online teaching methods. To improve educators' online teaching methods to increase comprehension in classrooms, we collected data from STEM introductory level courses in the form of student feedback surveys, and personal interviews conducted online. We used persona methodology and ethnography to document the diverse learning group in a STEM classroom. Personas are "life-like models, whose characteristics are driven by the various goals and motivations of real or potential users." We used these personas to learn how an individual's learning experience affects their participation, goals, motivations, and expectations during online learning. These personas can support the design of online courses with student- centered approaches that better engage undergraduate students across multiple disciplines.

Personas of Student completing Online Instructions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This AGEP Alliance model provides faculty professional development and career preparation to minority STEM doctoral candidates. To increase the numbers of historically underrepresented faculty in STEM, the target audience is instructors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that are in the dissertation stage of their PhD degree.  The Alliance’s HBCU Instructors Bridge to Academia Program (HI Bridge) consists of research seminars, research advising, faculty mentoring, research presentations, peer collaboration, networking, and alumni follow-up meetings.  These activities are designed to support the candidates in completing their PhDs and prepare them for success in their faculty careers. Our work is also designed to identify factors that influence attrition rates of the target audience. We will be presenting the organizational structure of the Alliance team and the progress that has been made with the first cohort of participants.

AGEP Alliance Model for Underrepresented STEM Doctoral Candidates at HBCUs

The term 'Representations' refers to sketches, diagrams, pictures, graphs, tables, and mathematical equations are representations we commonly use in undergraduate physics courses and STEM more broadly. Even though expert instructors are familiar with these representations, the studies show that novice students are often struggling to understand and use these representations. Studies on the use of social semiotics in physics classrooms suggest that the instructors explain representations at a basic level and then, more in-depth, all physics representations. We collect student-generated problem-solving videos (Pencasts) from calculus- based physics courses at UGA. In this study, we analyze we look for patterns of students internalizing and combining representations to solve physics problems. In this poster, we present our initial findings. We find that students commonly use tables and visual representations with individualization to maximize learned skills and incorporate their understanding in the class. We expect to extend our work to other STEM branches.

Students' Problem-Solving Processes Associated with Representations in Pencasts.

Reasoning across different contexts consistently is a challenge when learning physics. Despite demonstrating correct conceptual understanding and reasoning on one task, students often fail to use the same knowledge and skills on similar tasks. Dual-process theories can explain these inconsistencies, asserting that cognition involves two thinking processes: the heuristic, which is fast and automatic, and the analytic, which is slow and deliberate. Inconsistent responses arise when the heuristic process produces an intuitively appealing (but incorrect) response that the analytic process fails to reject. We hypothesize making the dual nature of human cognition explicit and more visible to the students could help them recognize and evaluate intuitive responses more productively. Results of a study designed to probe the impact of such instruction on student learning in introductory calculus-based mechanics courses are presented here.

The effect of dual process theory instruction on student learning*

During the mid-part of the spring 2021 semester, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the conversion of well-designed in-person instruction methods to online teaching methods. During the Fall 2020 semester, Introductory Physics students at the University of Georgia were asked about their experiences with their online instructions during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an idea to use this feedback to improve further instruction in the following semesters. We gathered our research by collecting student feedback surveys from students in SCALE-UP classrooms where group-based learning is prevalent. The survey included multiple choice and open response questions about camera and privacy, preferred methods of group activities, and their tendency to participate. Data was collected across multiple STEM disciplines. Students found the instruction to be presented more clearly when attending in-person, and many requested the use of more real-life examples during class time.

Student Feedback: Transition to Online Instructions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In Summer 2020, an accelerated, 9-week version of the full-year introductory physics laboratory sequence was offered in the emergency remote teaching (ERT) environment. The three term sequence covers mechanics in the first course, electromagnetism in the second, and finally wave, optics and thermodynamics in the last course. Students had to complete three labs each week. We discuss the process for transitioning the traditional laboratory curriculum of the courses to ERT. We also describe changes to the third course in the sequence that were informed by preliminary results from a study of students’ attitudes conducted during the rapid remote implementation of the Spring 2020 instance of the course. Finally, we show changes in students’ attitudes over the three course sequence.

Students’ Self-Efficacy in an Accelerated Remote Introductory Lab Sequence

Anxiety is the top mental health concern among undergraduates and thought to be particularly high among science students. However, there is little known about how online science courses affect anxiety. In this study, we surveyed over 2100 undergraduates about their anxiety in large-enrollment online science courses. We used open-coding and logistic regression to analyze the data. Students reported that technology issues (69.8%), proctored exams (68.0%), and difficulty getting to know peers (67.2%) increased their anxiety online. Accessing content at a later time (79.0%), attending class from where students want (74.4%), and not having to be on camera (73.5%) decreased their anxiety. Students suggested that instructors could decrease anxiety in online courses by increasing test-taking flexibility (25.0%) and having an organized course (14.7%). This study provides insight into how instructors can create more inclusive online learning environments for students with anxiety.

The impact of online college science courses on student anxiety

Advisors and graduate students are sometimes stuck and not moving their research forward. We use Deliberate Innovation(DI) techniques to understand the specific situations centered around research that graduate students and their advisors find themselves in that may be problematic. A critical element of this is determining whether advisors and advisees show indifference in particular situations. We understand indifference by noticing what people are and are not drawn to in the research setting, and will be focusing on ways in which we have seen it show up. Finding this indifference allows us to know where to focus our attention, with the ultimate goal of finding situations in which we can help graduate students and advisors get unstuck and move their research forward.

Using Deliberate Innovation to Understand Indifference in Graduate Advisor/Advisee Relationships

Motion is used in a variety of ways in introductory mechanics contexts. Given the foundational importance of related ideas such as force and acceleration, it might behoove instructors to understand how their students are interpreting this all-encompassing word. In this study, we explored how beliefs and conceptions about motion are refined or used by undergraduate, upper-division physics students in a series of think-aloud interviews with coupled-multiple response (CMR) items developed from free-response data and with two adapted example questions from the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE).

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