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Teaching astronomy remotely is a challenge. While many activities and programs are available on-line, students are not guaranteed to have the needed Internet access or bandwidth. Active learning also becomes a problem if students cannot interact with fellow students or instructors in person. A modern version of an ancient instrument called the astrolabe can be used for several backyard projects, from analzying the orbit of the Moon to the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. We show how to construct and use an astrolabe and discuss potential lessons.&amp;nbsp;

AAPT WM 21

Backyard Astronomy during a Pandemic

backyard

astrolabe

astronomy

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Teaching astronomy remotely is a challenge. While many activities and programs are available on-line, students are not guaranteed to have the needed Internet access or bandwidth. Active learning also becomes a problem if students cannot interact with fellow students or instructors in person. A modern version of an ancient instrument called the astrolabe can be used for several backyard projects, from analzying the orbit of the Moon to the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. We show how to construct and use an astrolabe and discuss potential lessons.&nbsp;

technical paper

Even before the current pandemic, astronomy labs at Saint Anselm College had to plan for the many cloudy nights that would prevent a trip to the observatory. In the fall semester of 2019, the indoor lab component centered around the educational video game, “At Play in the Cosmos,” which lets students simulate performing astronomical measurements from their spaceship. This was incorporated into the labs using spectral tubes and simulations to introduce new concepts before they came up in the game. With the shift to online learning in 2020, the video game became the centerpiece of the labs once again, providing the students with guidance that is not available in an asynchronous teaching environment. In this session, I’ll share some of the techniques used to assess student learning with the video game in the lab and online.

Cloudy Night? Astronomy Labs Using Physics Demonstrations and a Videogame

As one of the oldest sciences taught, astronomy penetrates to all aspects of society:&nbsp; science, culture, religion, timekeeping, and exploration.&nbsp; And the topic coverage in the domain of astronomy is grand, the entire universe in fact.&nbsp; In this sense, there could be a whole lot to memorize as a novice astronomy student. In fact, there is so much material one could memorize, that an effective astronomy class should probably have a highly constrained amount of memorization at all because,&nbsp; at its very essence, astronomy is not something you memorize, astronomy is something you do.&nbsp; In short astronomy is a verb.&nbsp; The folk wisdom of how to teach astronomy as a culture-encompassing science that is action oriented has been developed over many generations, but by and large that wisdom gets lost. AstroNotes is decades long archive of the collected wisdom for teaching astronomy as something students do rather than memorize.

AstroNotes: Where Astronomy is a Verb

Scientific researchers across all disciplines are routinely faced with ethical dilemmas in their work. To help strengthen their ethical reasoning skills, they are encouraged to take online training programs (e.g. CITI program, the Office of Research Integrity’s “The Lab”). We argue that these programs will be more effective if they are better aligned with how working scientists think about these dilemmas. The main goal of this study is to investigate how research professors think about ethical issues in their own work. In this study, we interviewed fifteen scientists from several disciplines asking how they conduct their research and then presented several different case studies involving ethical dilemmas. We analyze these interviews by focusing on the goals and values the scientists express in their ethical reasoning about these cases. This work will inform future development of ethics education programs.

Scientists Views on Ethics in their Research

In the Spring of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges and universities transitioned to a new modality of teaching that we refer to as `emergency remote teaching' (ERT). As ERT is likely to continue through the Spring of 2021, we seek to learn about the student experience with ERT in order to better inform ERT instruction. Building from student responses to a survey administered in the Spring of 2020, in this talk we discuss the development of and student responses to a new ERT survey administered in the Fall of 2020 and sent to hundreds of physics departments across the US. We asked students to share their experiences with lectures, labs, exams, and other elements ERT in their physics courses to hear from students about what worked well (and what didn’t), and what got better since ERT in the Spring (and what got worse).

Student Experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching in Fall 2020

The APS Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) project team surveyed department chairs nationwide to assess the status of physics-degree-granting departments (modeled in part on the DELTA survey design pioneered by Ngai et al 2020). These results inform the development of the EP3 Guide on effective departmental change, assessment practices, and program review. The respondents (N=310) reported perceiving the assessment of student learning and departmental program outcomes as currently largely driven by compliance and not leading to valuable change. The chairs also indicated that their vision for an ideal department was significantly misaligned with their current modes of operation. The change strategies with the most potential for improvement were 1) engaging multiple stakeholders and 2) using data effectively. These gaps highlight opportunities for growth where leaders’ motivation to align their department practices with their ideal values may be channeled toward supporting cultures of assessment and effective change.

Cultures of Assessment and Change in US Physics Departments

To improve the teaching practices used by STEM graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who lead student-centered lab and recitation&nbsp;sections, STEM departments need to improve the training GTAs receive. In our study, seven physics “mini-studio” (combined recitation and lab) GTAs participated in three to four practice teaching sessions with a mixed-reality classroom across two semesters. During each practice session, GTAs were prompted to practice implementing student-centered teaching strategies into their discussion about a lab or recitation (tutorial) activity&nbsp;with a virtual class of five avatar-students. To assess the effectiveness of the simulator training, we also observed GTAs teaching in their real classroom two to three times each semester. In this talk, we investigate which teaching strategies GTAs implemented in two different classroom settings (recitation&nbsp;and lab). We also discuss the frequency of each teaching strategy used and provide examples to inform GTA professional development.

Comparing GTAs’ use of teaching strategies in recitations and labs

The APS Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) project team surveyed department chairs nationwide to assess the status of physics-degree-granting departments (modeled in part on the DELTA survey design pioneered by Ngai et al 2020). As part of this survey, department chairs were asked to reflect on threats, unrelated to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the continuity of their programs. These threats included financial strain, reductions in personnel, and deprioritization by administration. Of the survey respondents (N = 310), 45.2% reported experiencing a moderate or severe threat, which is substantial and concerning. A majority of departments facing threats were unlikely to consult outside resources when addressing the threatened actions. Resources developed by professional societies paired with collective responses from the larger physics community may be needed to support these departments in addressing threats.

Prevalence and Nature of Threats Facing U.S. Physics Departments

Access to high-quality, advanced physics instruction in high school can open pathways for students to attain university STEM degrees by preparing them for gate-keeping undergraduate physics courses. However, access to advanced high school physics instruction is not universally available. In response, the Physics Education Research Group at University of Illinois at&nbsp;Urbana-Champaign&nbsp;created the&nbsp;partnership program&nbsp; Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS), bringing together Illinois high school physics teachers to participate in intensive PD experiences structured around award-winning, university-level instructional materials (such as the iOLab wireless lab system, and web-based, “flipped” platform, smartPhysics ). Within the framework of a community of practice, teachers adapt, adopt, and integrate high-quality, university-aligned physics instruction into their classrooms, with the goal of opening more equitable, clear and viable pathways for students into engineering. This talk provides an overview of the partnership program and presents preliminary findings from the first intensive summer teacher PD session.

Opening Engineering Pathways: A University and High School Physics Partnership

Teaching is rewarding but lot of hard work for new teachers. It makes it more difficult for immigrant teachers who speak English as a second language. I will address different teaching practices in Sri Lanka in comparison to the US. Physics is a natural&nbsp;science where there are many real-world examples that one can bring into the classroom when teaching a certain Physics concept. However, this can be challenging if you are a person who didn’t grow up in the US. In my personal story, I will address the challenges I have faced and also my successes, how I was able to incorporate my traditional background and language into teaching and relationship building which is often difficult for some non-American teachers. I will also address actions I have taken to improve my teaching and to adapt to US styles of teaching and learning.&nbsp;

My Journey as a Physics Educator in US

Inquiry-Based Learning is a trend in science classrooms. However, bringing Inquiry-Based Learning to Colombian classrooms has been a slow process. Most of the professional development programs for teachers in Colombia are large, short-duration workshops with very ambitious goals and with a focus on tools (such as Moodle, sensors in smartphones, etc.). Only a few workshops are about methodologies, and most of these are focused on theory with reduced context.&nbsp; Over the past few years, we have designed and delivered teacher workshops in several Latin-American countries, as well as the United States, to support teachers to integrate Inquiry-Based Learning. This presentation will summarize insights from these experiences and discuss the design of a new teacher professional development program to support teachers in Antioquia, Colombia in the adoption and implementation of Inquiry-Based Learning methodologies in K12 science classrooms. The activities designed include the use of free PhET simulations and low-cost experiments. &nbsp;

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