United States

Research-validated clicker questions as instructional tools for formative assessment are relatively easy to implement and can provide effective scaffolding when developed and implemented in a sequence. We present findings from the implementation of a research-validated Clicker Question Sequence (CQS) on student understanding of the time-development of two-state quantum systems. This study was conducted in an advanced undergraduate quantum mechanics course. The effectiveness of the CQS was determined by evaluating students’ performance after traditional lecture-based instruction and comparing it to their performance after engaging with the CQS.

PERC SM 21

Using a clicker question sequence to teach time-development in quantum mechanics

instructional tools

peer instruction

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.

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AAPT SM 21

poster

**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)

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

We examined the prevalence of rapid answer copying among university students completing online homework for an introductory level calculus-based physics course taught remotely during the COVID pandemic. We first compared the attempt duration distribution of 26 problems, between 42 students who self-reported as having completed the homework by themselves against the rest of the class. Significant differences were detected for 3 out of 26 problems. We then identified abnormally short problem attempts indicative of potential rapid answer copying, by fitting the attempt duration distribution of each problem with finite-mixture models, using mixtures of either normal or skewed distributions. We detected a significantly smaller fraction of short attempts from self-reporting students on only 3 out of 26 problems and found no statistically significant difference in percentage correct of short attempts between the populations. In conclusion, our analysis did not find evidence indicating wide-spread rapid answer copying among students. We also explored differences in learning behavior between the two populations by applying process mining to the event logs of one of the homework learning modules, which reveals that some students may have copied answers after spending longer time or using multiple attempts on a given problem. However, this form of answer copying is also unlikely to be prevalent since the percentage correct on normal attempts are also similar between the two populations on most problems.

Measuring the level of homework answer copying during COVID-19 induced remote instruction

Students watching asynchronous online lectures often struggle with active attention, may be overwhelmed by complex information, and may inaccurately judge the depth of their own learning. Learning prompts are possible solution to these issues, however, some research suggests prompts may be more effective for some students than others. The goals of this study were to (a) test the effectiveness of different types of prompts in online physics learning and (b) determine whether individual differences moderate the effectiveness of prompts. Students (N=253) enrolled in physics courses over three semesters watched a video lecture on the concept of simple harmonic motion. During the lecture, students were shown a) cognitive prompts, intended to facilitate elaboration and organization strategies, b) metacognitive prompts meant to facilitate self-monitoring and regulation, or c) no prompts. Students were asked to type a response to each prompt before continuing the lecture. Afterwards, students completed a quiz on simple harmonic motion. Students enrolled during our third semester of data collection (n=102) also responded to survey items meant to assess differences in studying approach and metacognitive awareness. Students who received cognitive prompts performed significantly better than students who received no prompts. Furthermore, students who reported having more disorganized study approaches performed better than similarly disorganized students in other conditions. There was no effect of condition for students who scored lower on disorganization. Students who received metacognitive prompts did not score significantly higher than students in other conditions. These findings suggest embedding prompts to promote elaboration and organization strategies may improve learning. This intervention may be most beneficial for less organized students.

Students with Disorganized Study Habits Benefit from Cognitive Prompts During Online Video Lectures

About 40% of first-time college enrollees begin their path at a two-year college (TYC), with 80% intending to ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree (Shapiro, 2013). Our research team worked with faculty at a TYC working in a cohort program to support STEM students intending to transfer to earn a bachelor’s degree. A required component for the cohort students is a project-based STEM Research Methods course, offered to students in their first year at the TYC. In this presentation, we share the results from emergent coding of a collection of weekly journal entries that are informed by a set of observations, field notes, and interviews. We share the themes from this research that provide guidelines for how TYC teachers can facilitate research experiences for students early in their college careers. We present an analysis of these themes using a framework of learning “gains” in CUREs initially proposed by (Lopatto, 2004).

Characterizing Learning Gains in a Two-Year College Embedded Research Course

Intelligence mindset has been studied extensively in education research, but domain-specific intelligence mindset research is relatively new in the physics context. Additionally, recent mindset research has uncovered separable factors within the intelligence mindset construct. In this study, we test a model involving four factors (My Ability, My Growth, Others' Ability, and Others' Growth) to pre and post survey data from Physics 1 classes. In particular, we explore how these mindset factors change over time as well as their ability to predict course grade. We find that students are less likely to endorse a growth mindset for themselves and others at the end of their first calculus-based introductory physics course than at the beginning. We also find that decrease in mindset measures are more drastic for female students than male students. Finally, we find that the best predictor of course grades is the My Ability component of the mindset construct, which has implications both for creating equitable and inclusive learning environment and determining how educators implement mindset interventions.

To whom do students believe a growth mindset applies?

The Physics and Astronomy Department at San Francisco State University is undertaking a comprehensive reform of our introductory physics laboratory courses, including training graduate teaching assistants, reflective journaling, and a move away from the previously used verification-style labs. As we make these changes, we have been administering a variety of surveys to gain insight into students’ skills, attitudes, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging in the lab environment. The survey used for this study is the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) assessment, which measures students’ performance in numerical skills commonly used in STEM (eg. graph reading, table reading, arithmetic, proportional reasoning, estimation, percentages, etc.) as well as their attitudes surrounding quantitative reasoning. Between Fall 2018 - Spring 2021 we collected roughly 5000 QuaRCS responses across the following courses prior to instruction: a three-semester calculus-based physics sequence targeted toward engineering, computer science and physical science majors; a two-semester algebra-based physics sequence targeted toward students in the biosciences; a one-semester conceptual physics course; and a one-semester conceptual astronomy course. Through factor analysis and mediation analysis of these data, we identify factors affecting students’ quantitative skills performance, such as numerical self-efficacy, numerical anxiety, numerical relevancy, school math affect, daily life math affect, and course motivation. Through this analysis, we can better understand the attributes of students at SFSU that contribute to their success. By leveraging these attributes in the introductory labs we hope to better support the diverse population of students in our courses.

Factors Affecting Introductory Physics Students’ Quantitative Reasoning Skills and Attitudes at a Large, Hispanic-Serving University

The Paradigms @ OSU team developed a kinesthetic representation for complex numbers where individual students use their arms to embody an Argand diagram. This representation can be expanded to have groups of students working together to represent complex-valued state vectors in quantum mechanics. We conducted group teaching interviews about the relative and overall phase of 2- and 3-element state vectors to uncover how students understand geometric relationships using the Arms Representation. We interviewed nine students in the second week of a junior-level, spins-first quantum mechanics course after they had been introduced to complex numbers via the Arms Representation, but before quantum mechanical state vectors had been addressed in class. This poster will discuss how the Arms Representation supported students in understanding that an overall phase does not change the relative phase. In particular, we will attend to the conceptual support offered by the Arms Representation, the geometric interpretations of phase, and the ways students translate between the Arms Representation, Argand diagrams, and algebraic notations.

Teaching Relative & Overall Phase with the Arms Representation

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

We report on an investigation in which we compare the conceptual performance of upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, who worked on two different validated Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorials (QuILTs). One of the QuILTs incorporates mathematical reasoning while focusing on helping students develop a good conceptual understanding of quantum optics using a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer with single photons and polarizers. Performance of students who engaged with this “hybrid” (integrated conceptual and quantitative) QuILT is compared with those who engaged with a conceptual QuILT focusing on the same topics without quantitative tools. Both QuILTs use a guided inquiry-based approach to learning and are based on research on student difficulties in learning these challenging concepts as well as a cognitive task analysis from an expert perspective. We find that the posttest performance on conceptual questions of physics graduate students who engaged with the hybrid QuILT was generally better than those who engaged with the conceptual QuILT. For undergraduate students, the results were mixed.

Impact of introducing mathematical reasoning on students’ understanding of quantum optics

This study investigated the impact of an instructional intervention on student scientific reasoning skills and general attitudes toward science. The intervention consisted of nine PhET simulations introduced to a general education physics class. Students manipulated the simulations while completing worksheets testing their comprehension of the concepts and the scientific reasoning being displayed. Completion of each PhET simulation activity took students about 50 minutes to complete. Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning was administered to assess improvement in student scientific reasoning skills, and the CLASS was used to assess changes in student attitudes towards science. Pre-to post Lawson results show gains in scientific reasoning. CLASS pre to post indicated overall shifts to expert-like responses. Qualitative data in the form of student surveys was collected and showed approval of use PhET simulations in the class.

Effect of PhET simulations in a general education physics course

Homework lets students practice the problem-solving process. The focus on process, rather than final answer, is particularly important. Unfortunately, many online homework systems, and some traditional pencil-and-paper strategies, grade based on the correct answer rather than students' written thought process. This can shift student focus away from the process. We have scaled a homework structure that emphasizes the problem-solving process and metacognitive reflection. Students are required to follow a problem-solving format developed previously, which has been shown to increase student metacognition.* In our procedure, students self-grade the completeness of their homework, and instructors perform a specific spot-check to increase student accountability. The spot-check takes minimal instructor time to administer and therefore can be scaled to large courses. Additionally, this homework structure shows high student satisfaction by the end of the term.

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Measuring the level of homework answer copying during COVID-19 induced remote instruction

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Using clicker question sequence to teach time-development in quantum mechanics