United States

This mixed methods research case study addresses the design of introductory physics lab courses at a university from the perspective of the physics teaching faculty and students. The data from this research is being used for the development of a theoretical framework to strengthen the global need for integrated STEM education. The AAPT Physics Education recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum (2014) identified six focus areas: constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, developing technical and practical laboratory skills, analyzing, and visualizing data, and communicating physics. Participants responded to a four-point Likert scale on each of the AAPT six focus areas with open-ended questions to further articulate their experiences with physics lab courses. Students were administered a pre-and post-survey as well as five Likert scale questions on their STEM self-efficacy. The results, as well as the development of the integrated STEM theoretical framework, will be discussed.

AAPT SM 22

Effectiveness of introductory physics laboratory courses in supporting learning goals

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. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



technical paper

We draw on data from interviews with physics instructors and research mentors, interviews with physics students, and surveys of the physics community to model how physics gatekeepers respond to the access and inclusion needs of disabled undergraduate and graduate students. While we continue to develop this model, we will discuss a priori and emergent model features. We compare the differential pathways to access through two common mechanisms: institutional accommodations and inclusive practices. Then, we discuss an emergent mechanism from our data: gatekeepers provide access to “students who need it”. We argue that gatekeepers who provide access to “students who need it” likely have good intentions, such as demonstrating care and treating disability as a facet of diversity. However, we describe several challenges with this mechanism, such as the role of power in which students share their access needs and which students are evaluated by gatekeepers as “needing” alternative access.

Modeling Pathways to Access in Physics Learning and Research Environments

How might we use breaks in physics classes to provide a meaningful experience, heighten cooperation and concentration, and provide more safety for kids on the way to school? We developed a Tactile Reaction Training TRT that can be embedded in physics classes without compromises to lab safety. The training was about ten minutes for each of them and focused on getting a better body feeling to react more appropriately in danger situations. Aspects of Germany‘s core curriculum in Physics, e.g. conservation of Momentum, Force and Motion is connected to the training.

Tactile Reaction Training in Physics Classes

Curt Hieggelke was one of the largest contributors into making me the instructor I am today. His influence on me shaped my PER research goals, my career goals and my desire to make an impact in TYC Physics teaching. This talk will share my personal experiences with Curt, his influences on me and how he made me a better instructor and colleague.

How Curt Shaped My Entire Career and PER

This presentation will describe the desirable characteristics of HTML5 astronomy simulations targeted at smartphones and show several examples illustrating these characteristics. We will summarize current thinking regarding “best practices” for smartphone simulation usage in the classroom, covering what we have learned from our experiences and detailing a wish list of what we hope to learn in the future. Publicly available simulations will be described as well as possible avenues for building upon the classroom experience with student simulation work outside of the classroom.

Teaching with Astronomy Smartphone Simulations

Bridgewater State University has successfully been using a resubmission process for formative assessment quizzes and summative assessment tests in certain lecture sections of our algebra based physics course. Each section contains 32 students and there are no teaching assistants or recitation sections. Students can earn points back on formative assessment quizzes through the use of a ‘points recovery application’. Students can earn points back on summative assessments tests through a process that involves correcting the original test problem, teaching the material to the instructor or a Peer Learning Assistant, and then taking a new test under original testing conditions to replace the original grade. Through this process, students report increased satisfaction with the course, increased learning, and enhanced well-being.

Resubmission Processes in University Lecture Classrooms

As educators, we know that remediation is a fundamental part of the learning process, but how do we actively motivate students to engage in self-reflection and develop epistemic knowledge? During the last few years, I have focused on creating and implementing a remediation-based assessment model in my high school physics classes. This model sets out to eliminate fear of failure and encourage academic risk-taking through rewarding metacognition. Students were given standards-based feedback and the opportunity to participate in a universal reflection-and-retake policy to demonstrate their progress toward achieving targeting learning goals. Through this process, students were prompted to self-reflect and identify root conceptual difficulties, revise work and show evidence of understanding, and then take a reassessment. In this talk we will discuss the model specifics, strategies for implementation and modification for different classroom settings, as well as student outcomes and feedback regarding this learning process.

Modeling A Remediation Policy Focused on Developing Epistemic Knowledge

One expected outcome of physics instruction is that students develop quantitative reasoning skills, including strategies for evaluating solutions to problems. Examples of evaluation strategies include special case analysis, unit analysis, and checking for reasonable numbers. To investigate students’ use of evaluation strategies, we developed and administered tasks prompting students to evaluate symbolic expressions, including the electric field due to three point charges, the velocity of a block at the bottom of an incline with friction, and the final velocities of two masses involved in an elastic collision. Written and interview data were collected at the introductory, sophomore, and junior levels. We classified students’ evaluation strategies into three broad categories: consulting external sources, checking through computation, and comparing to the physical world. We compare our categories to prior work in PER and examine the categories through theoretical lenses of epistemic frames, mathematical modelling, proofs and justifications, and metacognition.

Perspectives on Evaluation Strategies

The use of computation in undergraduate physics education is on the rise, but this implementation faces the challenge of attending to students’ varied degrees of experience with programming. To explore how students approach learning a new programming language, we employ the resources framework, which posits that students approach new learning situations by making use of information or skills (resources) they have already developed. We designed a series of introductory Python tutorials and conducted think-aloud interviews to identify the resources that students activated while completing the tutorials. We present a preliminary analysis of two extreme cases: a student with a rich mathematical background and no programming experience, and a student with a moderate mathematical background and a rich programming experience in multiple programming languages outside of Python. These observations will help inform the further development of these tutorials to explicitly activate helpful resources.

Observations of Student Resources in Introductory Programming Tutorials

With the growing ubiquity of computation in STEM fields, understanding how to teach computational thinking (CT) practices has become an active research area in the last two decades, with particular emphasis on developing CT frameworks. In this paper, we apply one of these CT frameworks and correlate the results with a task analysis to examine how CT practices relate to specific design features of an in-class problem. We have analyzed video data from two separate groups working on one computational class period, which utilizes a minimally working program to model magnetic field vectors. While still in the initial stages of the study, our preliminary results indicate that what is left out of the minimally working program will impact the CT practices students use, particularly around building computational models. Ultimately, we hope this work will help instructors to design activities that can target & build specific CT practices.

Relating Computational Thinking Practices and Problem Design Features

In an ongoing project, we have been using dual-process theories of reasoning to make sense of student difficulties and guide the design of instruction. A focus has been on qualitative tasks in which students give a quick answer, based on an intuitively appealing model, that contradicts physics principles emphasized in their course. We have recently found some success with a HW-based intervention to address a persistent difficulty with air resistance (see Rosen et al., this meeting), and are trying to adapt the intervention to a different content domain. An overarching goal is to identify domain-general curriculum development strategies based on dual process theories. Our target domain involves the balancing of extended objects – and the documented belief that the center of mass divides an object into two pieces of equal mass. In this talk, we describe the intervention strategy, as implemented in the balancing context, and share assessment data.

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