United States

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.

AAPT WM 21

Physics Club: A Counterspace for Developing Female Students Physics Identity

counternarrative

counterspace

physics identity

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.

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AAPT SM 20

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. 

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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.

An Improved Model for Measuring the Speed of Sound

Higher education institutions play a critical role in preparing students to be future STEM leaders, yet significant inequities remain in which students persist and thrive in STEM. Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) have both an outsized opportunity to support racially minoritized STEM learners and distinctive structural challenges that need to be considered. In this talk, I will share practical recommendations for cultivating lasting STEM instructional change at HSIs. These recommendations are distilled from my experiences designing and starting to implement a $2.5 million college-wide change effort with a team at my home institution, as well as my participation in the institutional change research community. They include the importance of creating a theory of change, coordinating multiple change strategies, drawing on targeted research about supporting racially minoritized learners, forming and building up positive relationships with administrators, fostering communities of practice among&nbsp;faculty and students, and constantly keeping your long-term goals in mind.

Practical Recommendations for Cultivating Sustained STEM Instructional Change at HSIs

California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB), a HSI located in Southern California’s Inland Empire, recently underwent a relatively unique opportunity to transform the physics curriculum as part of the university’s transition from quarters to semesters. This afforded our department to take a close look at our student population, learning outcomes, and overall mission in order to create new programs focused on student success and preparing them to enter a variety of fields, serving both local needs and a national priority of diversifying the STEM workforce. In this talk I will detail and reflect on our process of transformation and give specific examples of new courses (e.g. first-year seminar, new upper division labs) or approaches to teaching that we hope will benefit our departmental community. I will also discuss external funding programs and other resources we have tapped into to enhance opportunities available to our students.

Progammatic Transformation for Student Success at a Southern California HSI

This poster presentation focuses on the balanced mix of lecture-based teaching and project-based learning in introductory college physics courses for life science majors. Students naturally resist active learning approaches because they put more responsibility on the learner to master the content. If the lectures still cover the content, the accompanied labs practice the concepts hands-on, and instead of final exams, students are charged with final projects, they apply all of the learned concepts into problem-solving and trouble-shooting with a final product available at the end of the process. Students learn more than the physics concepts: they also learn patience, trial and error, time management, and many other life lessons

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Physics Club: A Counterspace for Developing Female Students Physics Identity

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