United States

There is a rich literature investigating the impact of physics pedagogy on student learning. Significantly less, however, is understood about the fundamental neural mechanisms that accompany learning across physics classroom environments. In this study we provide the first neurobiological evidence demonstrating physics instructional approach yields large-scale reorganization in student’s brain networks. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure physics-related brain activity in University students and probed for differences resulting from a semester of Lecture or Modeling physics classroom instruction. Students underwent pre- and identical post-instruction fMRI sessions where we assessed their brain activity during physics reasoning and identified regions more engaged post- relative to pre-instruction. We describe key project findings, including consistent brain activity associated with physics-related cognition, evidence that different knowledge organizations are paralleled by differential engagement of physics-related brain networks, and the characterization of neurobiological changes associated with classroom learning across contrasting pedagogies.

AAPT SM 20

Toward a Neurobiological Basis for Understanding Learning in Physics Courses

educational neuroscience

modeling instruction

pedagogy

fmri

brain networks

active learning

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

Racial and ethnic minority students rarely see themselves and their cultural backgrounds reflected in undergraduate STEM courses. In response, education research scholars have presented a broad vision for inclusive teaching in the form of culturally relevant pedagogy. However, implementing culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom requires significant, intentional work from curriculum designers and instructors, and there is no single blueprint for designing for cultural relevance. In this talk, I will describe the collaborative development process for a new upper-division Observational Astrophysics course in the Physics Department at Texas State and the work we have done to make the course more culturally relevant to our student body. I will highlight what we have learned from students during the development and first implementation of the course.

Designing for Cultural Relevance in Observational Astrophysics at Texas State

To examine the potential changes in attitudes and approaches to problem solving over a semester, we administered a previously validated Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS) survey both at the beginning (pre) and at the end of instruction (post) in eight large enrollment calculus-based introductory physics classes at a large research university in the United States. We found that all classes exhibited a decline in score on the AAPS but that classes which involved significant use of evidence-based active engagement methods exhibited statistically significantly better scores on the AAPS survey at the end of the course. Equally importantly, unlike broader epistemological surveys, female students were found to exhibit less of a decline in AAPS scores than did their male counterparts in all classes and the AAPS scores were always higher for female students at the end of the course.

Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving: Gender and Instructional Method

One week is not enough time to design an entire course, especially a course with unfamiliar subject matter. Yet many educators find themselves in similar or more daunting situations. This talk will describe two iterations of an introductory biomechanics course designed for undergraduates in the field of occupational therapy (OT). More importantly, it will also highlight the ways that the physics education research community aided the course design, both in pedagogical stance and in terms of specific activities and materials. The course itself leads students with no physics background and little math skills through basic mechanics and allows them to productively use and analyze biomechanical models of various "activities of daily living" (ADL's). Largely project based, the course draws from materials posted on the Living Physics Portal in addition to exposing students to published research in OT and asking them to blend their OT perspectives into the course content.

Creating a Biomechanics Course for Future Occupational Therapists - Twice!

Some physics questions prove difficult for students even after research-based instruction and demonstration of relevant conceptual knowledge. Recent studies have indicated that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to conceptual understanding may be responsible for these difficulties. These studies also suggest that attending to these bottom-up processes during instruction may improve performance to a greater degree than attending solely to top-down, analytical reasoning. It is important to leverage these findings to produce meaningful improvements to instruction. Towards that end, we have investigated the impact of a training targeted at reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes on questions related to balanced forces and compared results to a more standard, top-down approach to the same topic. This talk will relate the findings and suggest implications for future work.

Investigating the impact of a bottom-up training on Newton’s 2nd Law

The STEM Guitar Project has provided professional development institutes for K-16 faculty for the past 11 years. Over 450 teachers have been trained, which has resulted in over 20,000 students impacted by the project. The STEM Guitar Project instructs participants on how to build an electric guitar, acoustic guitar, or design and cut out a custom guitar body with a CNC, as well as provides training for how to teach integrated STEM concepts using the guitar. A summary of the lessons learned from over a decade of faculty workshops will be presented. Evaluation methods, research results, and next steps will be discussed.

Eleven Years of Faculty Professional Development in STEM: Lessons Learned

The absence of direct discussions about the intersections of science and society in classrooms reinforces the idea that physics is purely objective and removed from societal impact or influence. This messaging can justify students’ disengagement from social responsibility, leave them unprepared to use ethical reasoning in their careers, and isolate students who feel commitment to their communities. At Texas State University, we developed two units to scaffold student discussions around ethics in physics classrooms: a unit about The Manhattan Project (in Modern Physics) and a unit about the Thirty Meter Telescope (in Observational Astrophysics). This talk will discuss the motivation and development of the units, then share some emerging themes from the Manhattan Project implementation. Using video-recordings of classroom interactions, I will highlight group dynamics that limit and enhance students’ engagement, consider why these dynamics may have emerged, and discuss their implications for facilitating complex ethical reasoning among students.

Facilitating Ethics Discussions in Physics Classrooms at Texas State University

Over 5000 diagnostic tests consisting of about 20 high-school-level mathematics problems were administered in part or in full to introductory physics students at four campuses of three large state universities; topics covered were trigonometry, algebra, geometry, and graphing. Despite substantial performance differences among the four population samples, response patterns were consistent; they showed error rates ranging from 20-80% on problems involving mathematical skills normally taken for granted by college physics instructors. Performance on algebra problems consistently declined when symbols were substituted for numerical coefficients. Both written and interview data indicated that many errors were due to difficulty in combining basic operations in more complex problems, or perhaps by simple "carelessness" in doing so. Despite the wide variety of diagnostic topics, results on a very small subset of items predicted overall scores with high accuracy. We will report initial results of testing an on-line instructional tool aimed at improving student performance.

Response Patterns by Introductory Physics Students on Mathematics Diagnostic Tests

In many universities, all quantum-mechanics based courses are intended to introduce to the student fundamental topics and theory that includes wave particle duality and obtaining exact analytical solutions to the Schrödinger equation for simple systems such as the hydrogen atom. The transition from a solvable quantitative Schrödinger equation-based model in the hydrogen atom to a more sophisticated qualitative model involving non-hydrogenic atoms and molecules introduces many misconceptions to students. Such misconceptions can become a major barrier to students’ capability of understanding and solving further analytical problems in quantum chemistry, throwing both the instructor and the student in a ‘threshold concept arena’. We show how computational chemistry can be integrated into a typical undergraduate quantum chemistry lecture curriculum to assist in learning nontrivial topics such as Franck Condon principle and Born Oppenheimer approximation.

Utilization of Computational Quantum Chemistry in Addressing Misconceptions and Threshold Concepts in Traditional Quantum Chemistry Curriculum

Communication is an important skill in all fields of STEAM learning environments, including physics lab courses. The AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Curriculum identify ‘communicating physics’ as one of six major learning outcome focus areas for undergraduate physics labs. But, to whom? Traditionally, physics classrooms (including labs) are a black-box where the learning process is shrouded from stakeholders such as policymakers, practitioners, and families. My research investigates the pedagogical method Letters Home (Lane, 2014), which provides students with the opportunity to communicate beyond the borders that constrain practical lab reports. In my implementation, the Letters Home method tasks students with writing letters to a non-physicist then gradually to a graduate student or a physics professor. We used the AAPT Recommendations to inform development of a coding scheme. However, the recommendations still contain ‘communicating physics’ within the boundaries of a black-box. In this talk, I will present about my implementation of Letters Home as a foothold into exploring the question, How can we develop writing activities that extend beyond the traditional borders of the classroom and communicate with all stakeholders? Lane, W. B. (2014). Letters home as an alternative to lab reports. The Physics Teacher, 52(7), 397-399.

Letters Home: Transcending the Boundary Between Lab and Family/Friends

Students find difficulty visualizing 3D concepts in our physics courses. In our introductory calculus-based physics and upper-level electricity and magnetism courses, students struggle to visualize electric and magnetic fields, electric flux, Gauss’s law, electromagnetic induction, three-dimensional integration, and the divergence theorem, to name a few of the E&M topics that are well suited for visualization using augmented reality. For example, when teaching Gauss’s law, the mathematical formalism tends to hide the geometrical meaning of Gauss’s law, more than explain it. Therefore, an AR hands-on visual representation can greatly help in rendering the concepts of flux through a surface or charge density in a given volume, so as to help students understand the physics behind it. In this poster presentation, we will demonstrate the AR applications and activities that we’ve developed and plan to use in our courses.

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Toward a Neurobiological Basis for Understanding Learning in Physics Courses

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