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Regional institutions that serve local populations are ingrained in the culture and community in which they are located. Local and national views about education and politics surrounding education play a major role in how communities, internal and external, view teaching and learning. This can affect instruction, how resources are used, and how students view the practice of teaching. In 2016, Illinois and Chicago faced severe political and funding issues that threatened and impacted education and services throughout the state, sending strong messages about how education is valued. Despite challenges and ongoing resource needs, institutions are able to leverage the community of students and faculty to enact successful efforts. We provide some historical context around teaching and learning at Chicago State University and describe how community can come together, in the context of the Learning Assistant Model, to establish support for teachers (LAs and faculty), creating the best possible learning spaces.

AAPT WM 21

Leveraging the community of students and faculty to support teachers

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AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
- meet and greet other physics educators
- form networks nationally and locally
- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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technical paper

Most smartphones when placed in a simple $10 plastic viewer become incredibly capable devices for providing virtual reality (VR) experiences. Unfortunately, the learning curve is steep for creating smartphone-based VR content for physics using various software platforms. The Ohio State University led BuckeyeVR group created two free smartphone apps to help teachers create and deliver 3D content using student’s smartphones. Importantly these apps produce stereoscopic 3D content so that the visualization provides the viewer with a sense of depth perception. In this talk I will share the BuckeyeVR electric field app which provides VR views of electric field configurations. I will also describe the BuckeyeVR plotter that allows students and teachers to define and view vector fields, curves and surfaces. I will also briefly describe some of the education research we have done using these visualizations at Ohio State.

Smartphone-based Virtual Reality for physics with BuckeyeVR

In this session, participants will learn how to use various forms of technology to enhance their classroom instruction. The first is Zappar, this is a platform in which you can create your own augmented reality content.&nbsp; You will see some examples in how students have enhanced their instructional materials and you will learn how to do this yourself.&nbsp; Next is an augmented reality simulation utilizing merge cubes that you can download for free.&nbsp; You will learn how to use this simulation in your own classes.&nbsp; Finally, you will learn about how you can create an alternative to the typical back of the book assessment problems. Utilizing video games as a motivational tool you will learn how to not only still practice the content but also to enhance problem solving skills.&nbsp;

Adding Augmented Reality and Video Games to your Course

Most of the physics concepts taught in introductory courses seem very obvious to the teacher. However, the lack of physics "literacy" makes them often very difficult for some students. Simulations can be used to provide simple interactive models to&nbsp;elucidate these concepts. We will demonstrate several examples of how simulations can be used for this purpose.

The Value of Using Simulations to Clarify Simple Concepts

The Novel Observations in Mixed Reality (NOMR) project at the University of Washington applies modern virtual reality technology to teach experimental physics skills by simulating phenomena that do not exist in our universe. By exploring and characterizing unheard-of and Google-proof physical phenomena, students are able to practice experimental physics skills on a level playing field and in absence of a "right answer" to work toward or be judged against. These phenomena are designed with analogy to electrostatics, varying the number of charge types as well as the functional forms and relevant variables in the force laws governing the interactions between each pair of "charges." In this session we discuss the design of NOMR labs, their adaptation to remote usage in a sophomore-level experimental physics course, and initial research findings.

Teaching Experimentation With New Physics in Remote Virtual Reality Labs

&nbsp; Due to the rapidity of the transition to remote learning, instructors had to significantly — if not completely — change their instructional style on very short notice. In this presentation, we report on student experiences and reactions to the switch to emergency remote learning at two large, land-grant, research intensive universities. We aimed to explore how students have received and dealt with the shift to remote learning that began in March 2020, specifically in introductory physics and astronomy courses. To explore how students responded to these changes, we developed and administered a questionnaire gauging the impacts on students' motivation and interactions with their courses, peers, and instructors during the Summer 2020 semester. We also examined how student responses depended on various demographic factors.

Student Responses to Emergency Remote Learning in Introductory Physics

The ability to engage in evidence-based decision making is an important outcome of modern education. Over the past decade, we have developed and evaluated a lab curriculum, Inquiry for Student Thinking, Analytics, and Reasoning (iSTAR), which explicitly promotes essential reasoning abilities for scientific inquiry and critical thinking. All activities are grounded in a curricular framework based on operationally defined reasoning sub-skills; including controlling variables in multi-variable contexts, data analytics, and causal reasoning. Due to the pandemic, we have redeveloped the curriculum for synchronous online delivery, whereby students complete lab activities working in lab groups via Zoom breakout rooms. This talk will briefly showcase the curriculum, lessons learned for online delivery of labs, and impact on student outcomes with a comparison to data previously gathered in face-to-face settings.

Teaching Scientific Reasoning through Synchronous Online Physics Labs

Due to the current pandemic many changes were made in instruction of an introductory physics for life sciences. Among these changes were the implementation with an open-source textbook, using a standards-based grading system and using a hybrid class format where students are in class somedays, while working online other days. In order to evaluate student experience and learning student feedback will be obtained by administering open-ended surveys on these changes. The goal of open-ended surveys is to provide a space for students to comment on their behaviors, opinions, and understanding of these changes. The responses to the open-ended surveys will be analyzed to determine what the students think of the changes and follow-up studies will be conducted bases on the responses. This presentation will report on students’ experiences to these approaches.

Evaluating Perceptions of Teaching Changes in Physics for Life Sciences

Physics has greatly impacted society, both in solving problems and perpetuating harm. Yet we rarely train students to grapple with their responsibilities to society. The absence of classroom discussions about these impacts reinforces the idea that physics is removed from society. At Texas State University, we have designed and implemented units about ethics, science and society in a modern physics course, an observational astrophysics course, and a multi-disciplinary course focused on this topic. In each of these contexts, we have scaffolded student discussions around large-scale ethical issues related to STEM. In this talk, I will draw on my experiences participating in this work as an instructor and a researcher. I will use video data to highlight factors that enable student engagement, such as curriculum and pedagogy that elicit, push on, and validate student opinions, as well as limiting factors such as students’ perceived lack of agency in the physics community.

Lessons Learned from Classroom Conversations about Ethics, Science, and Society

Quantitative modeling is an integral learning outcome of many introductory physics labs. One important aspect of quantitative modeling is covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how one quantity changes with another, related quantity. For example, one might ask ‘by how much does the spring force change when the spring is stretched a little bit more?’ While covariational reasoning has been studied extensively in mathematics education research, little work has been done in physics education research to better understand and characterize how students’ reason covariationally in physics courses. In this presentation, we present features of introductory physics students’ emergent covariational reasoning while developing or testing symbolic models in their lab courses. In addition, we compare student and expert physics covariational reasoning to illustrate some potential areas where direct instruction may be improved.

Student Emergent Sense-making about Quantitative Modeling in Introductory Physics Labs

Many teachers have struggled to connect quantum principles to the traditional high school curriculum.&nbsp; Often these ideas are part of off-topic discussions in which they are simply asserted or partially explained in a hand-waiving manner.&nbsp; This presentation introduces a QuarkNet activity in which high school students analyze simple momentum and position data collected from a 2001 diffraction experiment to empirically discover the famous inverse relationship known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal.

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