United States

The COVID-19 outbreak has introduced unexpected barriers and uncertainty for prospective graduate students and physics departments. Chief among concerns are the safety and health of students, and the economic shortfall resulting from reduced enrollment.Such concerns may significantly disrupt the application and admittance processes; of particular concern is the impacts on the diversity of incoming graduate cohorts. Using&amp;nbsp; exploratory survey data collected from physics departments in Fall 2020, we will report on how COVID-19 has impacted the processes, pressures, and demographics of physics graduate programs, including the effects of various departmental responses and preparation. We will present practices implemented by departments, with special attention paid to those that have been successful in maintaining the size, diversity, and preparedness of the 2020 graduate cohort. The findings of this study will inform on actions related to recruiting, admissions, and/or post-admissions that will support graduate admissions in the coming years.

AAPT WM 21

Practices that Maintain Excellence and Diversity in the COVID-19 Era

admissions covid diversity

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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The COVID-19 outbreak has introduced unexpected barriers and uncertainty for prospective graduate students and physics departments. Chief among concerns are the safety and health of students, and the economic shortfall resulting from reduced enrollment.Such concerns may significantly disrupt the application and admittance processes; of particular concern is the impacts on the diversity of incoming graduate cohorts. Using&nbsp; exploratory survey data collected from physics departments in Fall 2020, we will report on how COVID-19 has impacted the processes, pressures, and demographics of physics graduate programs, including the effects of various departmental responses and preparation. We will present practices implemented by departments, with special attention paid to those that have been successful in maintaining the size, diversity, and preparedness of the 2020 graduate cohort. The findings of this study will inform on actions related to recruiting, admissions, and/or post-admissions that will support graduate admissions in the coming years.

technical paper

There is currently a push by researchers and disability advocates to introduce inclusive teaching strategies and universal design principles into physics classrooms. With this push, it is important to study how the attitudes and actions of instructors vary as they consider implementing these guidelines. We used a modified version of the Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory (ITSI) to survey 249 physicists recruited at American Physical Society conferences and through physics-specific listservs. This study presents how practicing physicists’ responses varied across different identity markers, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and personal disability experience. We will compare our findings from the physics community to findings from general populations of both students and faculty.&nbsp;

Variations in Practicing Physicists' Beliefs about Inclusive Teaching Strategies

In this talk, we share preliminary findings from a study of teachers' ideas about equitable-based instruction and how it can be integrated with energy-focused physics instruction. During a one-week professional development workshop, we observed high school physics teachers’ (n=24) conversations focused on formulating ideas to integrate equity and energy within their classroom curriculum, pedagogies, and settings. Data was collected through video recordings and the data analysis was multidimensional. We found that as teachers considered integrating equity into their energy instruction, they raised concerns about relationships with students and about balancing past and present systematic factors. They also articulated a number of strategies and possibilities that they had tried or wanted to try to address these systematic factors&nbsp; This study has implications for merging energy and equity through a culturally-relevant lens that is essential to addressing educational disparities.&nbsp;

Secondary Physics Teachers’ Ideas about Integrating Equity into Energy Instruction

Research shows that by the time female students reach high school age they are much less likely than male students to see themselves as “physics people,” which contributes to the persistent underrepresentation of women in physics. To this end, physics teachers can play a critical role in changing young women’s negative self-perceptions with respect to physics and help develop their physics identity by disrupting traditional cultural messaging and norms. However, the long existing culture of power in many physics classrooms may not provide a safe space for female students to enact physics identities in ways that are personally meaningful. Thus, counterspaces beyond existing classrooms are needed to create and sustain such changes. In this study, we describe how an informal physics club initiated by a high school physics teacher and run by his female students has become a counterspace that promotes physics identity development among students, particularly for female students.

Physics Club: A Counterspace for Developing Female Students Physics Identity

Physics&nbsp;has been perceived as a highly individualistic discipline with little value placed on communal goals.&nbsp; As such, students who have communal goals may not see themselves as “physics people”.&nbsp; In this study, we examine the role of agentic goals (focused on self) and communal goals (focused on others) on students’ physics identity.&nbsp; As part of the STEP UP project, data was collected in Fall 2018 from the high school physics classes of 16 teachers across three regions of the US.&nbsp; In total, 1,979 students completed surveys which included questions on their values/goals and physics identity.&nbsp; This talk will present the results of a model used to predict physics identity with agentic and communal goals, while also considering gender and race/ethnicity effects.

How Goal Endorsement Predicts Physics Identity

Both&nbsp;traditional and modern approaches&nbsp;are used to training physics teacher at Hubei University. In traditional ways, we are going to&nbsp;talk about micro-teaching and teaching competition. The former is used for&nbsp;training the basic teaching skills of our normal students, and the latter is used for&nbsp;further training their comprehensive teaching skills. We will focus on the latter, because that is probably special to the&nbsp;US&nbsp;counterparts. In modern approaches, we will focus on&nbsp;the application of digital simulation technique and&nbsp;mobile phone sensor in the process of teacher preparation. The introduction of digital simulation and digital sensor technologies can not only greatly improve the effect of physical experiments, but also improve students'&nbsp;operational ability as well as innovation ability.&nbsp;In addition, as an influential instructional assessment tool, RTOP’s practical use in teacher preparation at Hubei University will be introduced.

Physics Teacher Preparation at Hubei University:

The essence of student-centered teaching is an awareness of how our students experience learning. Brookfield 2017, highlights that personal experiences of learning are intertwined with teaching practice and considers it as one of the lenses in his critical reflection framework. This study investigates the reflective practice of seven Irish pre-service physics teachers in the final year of their four-year concurrent science education degree. The significant guidance, support and feedback from teacher educators that is required to support deeper levels of critical reflection will be discussed in detail. Thematic analyses of seventy reflective journal entries have been carried out to make connections between themes and build a coherent argument supported by the data. Findings from this qualitative study outline the wider implications of reflective practice on deepening teacher knowledge and professional learning.

Reflective Practice and Pre-service Physics Teachers’ Critical Thinking in Ireland

A parental care for students&nbsp;works magic – as verified by the feedback I have received from numerous students in many countries. The students’ experience of a genuinely caring attitude from the teacher&nbsp;gives them extra energy for their learning-journey. Further, it facilitates relationship and interaction , which are very helpful in the learning process.&nbsp;The famous behavioral scientist Carl Jung&nbsp;has this to say: “The curriculum is so much raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child .”

A Powerful Factor in Teaching and Learning

The project “Teaching MINT D ” at the University of Education Schwaebisch Gmuend (Germany) aims for an increase in physics and technology teacher students with a multimethod approach to adapt and complete the current curriculum with diversity oriented and gender sensible contents. To identify appropriate methods and contents in the field the project acquired in-service STEM teachers to look into their current teaching and to develop contents for four special teacher training workshops. The PhD project focuses on the physic teachers and looks into the success of professional development on an individual subjective level with structured guideline interviews after each workshop and surveys the students with a questionnaire about their physic classes. The theoretical background is about the effects of teacher trainings on four levels (Lipowsky &amp; Rzejak, 2012, 2015, 2017). The presentation will show the state of physic classes and first results from the interviews.

Effects of Advanced Teacher Trainings Regarding Diversity Aspects

The National core curriculum prepared by the Finnish National Agency of Education is the statutory norm that guides teaching. The revised upper secondary school core curriculum will come into effect in August 2021. According to the new core curriculum, upper secondary school physics consists of eight modules, two of which are compulsory for every student. I will present the contents of the modules and general guidelines behind the curriculum. The physics part of the National Matriculation Exam that tests how the goals set by the core curriculum are met is also discussed briefly. I have worked as an advisor in the planning process of the physics core curriculum, have been preparing problems for the matriculation exam, and currently I belong to a team that will publish a set of textbooks and digital materials following the new standard.

The New Physics Curriculum in Finnish Upper Secondary School

Measuring the speed of sound in water is a typical experiment in undergraduate physics laboratory courses. The resonance of ultrasonic waves can be used to determine the wavelength, thereby calculating the speed of sound. It is generally considered that the ultrasonic wave reflected on the surface of the receiver interferes with the incident ultrasonic wave. Resonance occurs when the distance between the two transducers is an integer multiply of the acoustic half-wavelength. However, the residual distribution of the experimental data and the abnormal raising of receiving signal amplitude show that the simple standing wave model is not enough to describe this experiment. Considering the multiple reflections of ultrasonic waves between the transmitting and receiving transducers, and the reflection of ultrasonic waves on the water-air interface, an improved model is proposed. The simulation results show that the height of the water has a great influence on the abnormal experimental phenomena.

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