United States

Physics education is full of instances of those who have abandoned reforms because they did not seem to work. Surprise: A talk or even a workshop is not enough to provide instructors deep conceptual understanding of how students learn physics! Courses are complicated systems that must be well designed to provide the best learning experience possible and significant learning can take place in many different types of courses. The science of teaching begins with understanding what student behaviors lead to learning. Many of the elements behind effective reformed courses have the same student behavior goal. Focusing on these goals may help faculty implement effective reformed instruction. I will present some of these important behaviors. Getting students to engage in them leads to improved learning. The art comes in with the question: Can we get the students to like it?

AAPT SM 20

The basic science of teaching to improve practice and outcomes

elements

behavior

systems

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

technical paper

Computational thinking (CT) is still a relatively new term in the lexicon of learning objectives and science standards. In 2013, the authors of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) included “mathematical and computational thinking" as one of eight essential science and engineering practices that K-12 teachers should strive to develop in their students. (1) There is not yet widespread agreement on the precise definition or implementation of CT, and efforts to assess CT are still maturing, even as more states adopt K-12 computer science standards. (2) In this presentation, we will try to summarize what CT means for a typical introductory (i.e., high school or early college) physics class. This will include a discussion of the ways that instructors may already be incorporating elements of CT in their classes without knowing it. Our intention is to provide a helpful introduction to this topic for physics instructors.

Computational Thinking in Introductory Physics: High School and Early College

The AAPT Speakers Bureau provides AAPT members with an opportunity to share their passion, excitement and expertise in physics with the public as well as students at all levels. I have always enjoyed sharing my passion for quantum physics with the public and K-16 students. Quantum mechanics is a powerful and mysterious theory. It is our best theory for explaining everything we understand about the properties of matter and the world around us. This understanding has led to incredible transformation of science and technology in the last century. However, even Einstein was disturbed by some of its predictions. We are still doing experiments to understand the most unsettling predictions and foundations of quantum physics. At the same time, researchers are using the most bizarre aspects of quantum theory to create new technologies like quantum computers. It is never too early to learn about the fascinating mysteries of quantum physics.

AAPT Speakers Bureau: Mysteries of quantum physics

The meaning and representation of basis is fundamental to many quantum mechanics topics, including probability, measurement, and time evolution. Furthermore, students are often required to change the basis of a state in order to gain other information about a system. Data collected from “spins-first” courses across three institutions has illuminated a variety of challenges for students, related to procedures, interpretation, and notation. To help improve student understanding, we designed an activity that makes an analogy between spin basis vectors and more familiar two-dimensional Cartesian unit vectors. In this activity, students draw vectors for a state and discover that changing the basis is analogous to using a different set of coordinate axes to represent the same state. We provide evidence that this activity supported students in their understanding of basis representation and in the procedure of changing basis.

From Cartesian to Hilbert space: Improving understanding of quantum bases

There have been many recent calls to overhaul the introductory lab course. This is because it doesn’t meet a commonly stated goal of reinforcing lecture content (Holmes et al., Physics Today, 2018), nor is it focused on teaching experimental skills like designing experiments and analyzing data (Kozminski et al., AAPT, 2014). In addition, it doesn’t teach computational modeling—where students use computational tools to conceive, construct, or test models—even though the laboratory is where this modeling would naturally occur (Behringer et al., AAPT, 2017). One method to overhaul the course that is gaining traction is to have students engage in open-ended projects. I will discuss implementation of this method and how it can be used to teach computational modeling to introductory students without any computational skills. This discussion will include computational practicums, emphasizing modeling in the lab notebook, requiring students to vary two variables in their models, and building in iteration.

Adding Computation to the Introductory Physics Lab

To assist physics departments and faculty as they improve undergraduate education, the American Physical Society, in collaboration with the American Association of Physics Teachers, is developing a comprehensive guide for program improvement and evaluation, drawn from research findings and community knowledge. Scheduled for release in late 2020, the guide will provide concise advice on nearly all aspects of undergraduate education including suggestions on how to effectively evaluate impact. The EP3 guide will also offer departments guidance on how to produce detailed evidence of how they plan, evaluate, and improve undergraduate learning to help meet university accreditation requirements or prepare for or conduct external site reviews. This presentation will give a broad introduction to the guide and solicit feedback from the audience on how best to make these materials available to the community.

A Guide to Department Improvement: Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3)

Many instructors are working to transform their traditional labs to better develop scientific thinking, reasoning, and decision-making abilities. Traditional labs, defined as being highly structured (students follow a predetermined protocol) and confirmatory (that protocol is supposed to demonstrate a predetermined physics principle), have long been criticized for not engaging students with authentic experimentation. As defined, students have very little opportunity or incentive to make decisions or think critically about the experiments or results. In response, we often default to reducing structure and affording more agency so students can practice making experimentation decisions. Research is suggesting that this response may be overly simplistic. In this talk, I’ll discuss the nuances of structure and agency in teaching scientific decision-making and argue that the role of confirmation may actually be the more critical issue than structure.

The role of structure & confirmation in developing scientific thinking, reasoning, & decision-making abilities

PiA - Physic in Advent https://www.physics-in-advent.org is an Advent calendar of a special kind: a physics Advent calendar. From 1st to 24th December, small physics experiments using household material are presented every day as youtube videos by Mr. Santa or Ms. Santa. Participants do the experiments and answer a question on the PiA website. On the following day, there will be a solution video and possibly a point. After 24th December, all participants receive individual certificates. Among the best participants, prizes will be raffled off in the categories individual, school class or school. „PiA - Physik im Advent" is aimed at children and pupils aged between 11 and 18 years. It is intended to awaken the joy of experimenting and offer education, entertainment, and fun at the same time. In 2019, a new record was set with 43,500 registered participants, 49% of whom were girls, and 1.7 million visitors overall.

PiA - Physics in Advent, a hands-on physics advent calendar

Machine learning algorithms represent an exciting new class of quantitative methods to understand physics classes and students. Recent work has applied these algorithms to classify students as those likely to receive an A or B or students were likely to receive an C. D, F in a physics class. The metrics used become unreliable when the outcome variable is substantially unbalanced. This talk further explores the classification and extends those methods to predicting whether a student will receive a D or F. This study also investigated the previous finding that demographic variables such as gender, underrepresented minority status, and first-generation status had low variable importance for predicting class outcomes; down sampling revealed that this result was not due to the underrepresentation of these students in the class studied.

Extending Machine Learning to Predict Unbalanced Physics Course Outcome

This work examines peer-quizzing with metacognition in calculus based introductory physics. Students take individual quizzes and then redo part of the quiz with a partner. Because the students to choose which problems to redo, they must reflect on their confidence level on different concepts (questions). The results show there is a clear benefit to introducing weekly quizzes. While peer quizzes do not result in a clear improvement in the final concept assessment score, there is improvement in the normalized gain. Further, there is a clear signal that students who score above average on their quiz redos will also show above average assessment gains. These results show that while the intervention does not improve the overall grade, it helps individual students at all grade levels improve their understanding in relationship to their peers. It also suggests that interventions for students with low redo scores will have significant impact.

Utilizing Peer-Instruction and Metacognition on Quizzes to Improve Concept Learning

Science education studies framed around funds of knowledge, mental models and student resource framework appear to have three general characteristics: they are learner centered, tend to deviate from the deficit student model of teaching that present learners as empty vessels, but rather present learners as individual beings with different sets of skills and needs. However, there is not a consensus on the ways, as far as we know, in which these three concepts relate with each other. We conduct a systematic inquiry of the literature available for how funds of knowledge, mental models, and resource framework are respectively used in science education, and present a scheme relating these three frameworks that can be utilized when evaluating students’ ideas about physical concepts such as energy. Considering how those frameworks connect with one another might provide additional avenues to further explore how students' conceptual understanding of the physical world are formed.

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