United States

Standards based reform has been one prominent feature of the current educational landscape in the US since 1980s. High-stakes testing (HST) is key to the administration of standards as it holds schools accountable to meet the standards, changes the behavior of teacher and students in desirable ways, and monitors student achievement required by standards. High-school physics education (HSPE) in China is driven by the HST of college entrance examination, also known as Gaokao. I will compare HSPE between the US and China in reference to sample questions from Gaokao in China and their counterparts in the US. I will illustrate how HSPE in the two systems prepare students for the tests. Finally, I will analyze the longitudinal impacts of the two systems on students’ physics learning in college. I intend to give an insight into what is taught and how it is taught about physics in an HST-oriented context.

AAPT WM 21

Examine high-school physics education driven by high stakes testing

high school physics

high-stakes testing

physics identity

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- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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technical paper

Undergraduate research is a high-impact practice, shown to engage STEM students and increase retention, especially in underrepresented populations. Providing educational access to a diverse student population, community colleges are a vital part of the STEM pipeline, so it is critical to develop research skills as early as possible in their academic career. Colorado Space Grant Consortium has allowed our students and faculty access to excellent research opportunities at an affordable price, including payloads on high altitude balloons and sounding rockets. However, the cost of doing research on suborbital rockets, even through COSGC, can be prohibitive. In order to facilitate a student designed and built payload flown on a sounding rocket, Red Rocks Community College and Arapahoe Community College partner, combining resources both financial and advisory. The project is extra-curricular, allowing a wide range of student backgrounds and interests to participate and acquire a wide array of engineering and scientific skills.

Undergraduate Suborbital Research: Increasing Student Engagement Through Community College Partnerships

We all know what student behaviors lead to success in the long run: work steadily, review homework solutions and in-class problems, organize equations and concepts, work practice problems.&nbsp; The challenge is that some of our students enter with particularly weak backgrounds in science and mathematics. &nbsp;If&nbsp;these strategies don't work quickly enough to allow students to succeed in their introductory course, they drop out and switch majors.&nbsp; The solution: give students an alternate path, a “grade guarantee.”&nbsp; Students who complete all these successful behaviors are guaranteed a grade of C on each test, and therefore have a clear path to success in the course, and exit the course well prepared for the next course. &nbsp;This talk will describe how this grade guarantee can be put into effect without creating an undue burden on students or faculty.

Providing a Path to Success in Introductory Physics

Building an inclusive culture takes time and training.&nbsp; This is a curriculum using the strageties proposed&nbsp;in Sue et al's 2019 paper "Disarming Racial Microaggressions" (American Psychologist 74, 1, 128-142).&nbsp; The goal of the training is to practice responses to microagressions that are likely to occur in physics and future job settings.&nbsp;&nbsp; The goal is to give students options when they encounter a microaggression occurring in the future.&nbsp; In this presentation, we explain the pre-class set up, trigger warnings, in class discussions, and post-class practice and reflections.&nbsp; It is particularly important to remove the expectation that students of color are somehow responsible for educating the rest of the class, this is an unfair burden that will take away from their study of physics.

Training Physics Students to Diffuse Racial Microaggressions

For over 30 years, research-based materials developed by the physics education research community have helped transform introductory physics instruction.&nbsp;&nbsp;Many of these materials focus on the development of student conceptual understanding and place considerable emphasis on qualitative inferential reasoning.&nbsp;&nbsp;An emerging body of research, however, suggests that poor student performance on certain physics tasks – even after research-based instruction – may stem more from the nature of student reasoning itself than from specific conceptual difficulties.&nbsp;&nbsp;As part of a larger, multi-institutional effort to examine and support student reasoning in physics, we have been developing methodologies to probe student reasoning and designing and testing interventions to better support productive reasoning.&nbsp;&nbsp;New research tasks, informed by dual-process theories of reasoning, and associated results will be discussed.

Examining and Supporting Student Reasoning using Novel Methodologies*

Quantitative reasoning in introductory physics is characterized by using simple mathematics in creative and novel ways. Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL) is characterized by the blending of conceptual and procedural mathematics to generate and apply models relating physics quantities to each other. As part of developing a PQL assessment instrument, the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL), we characterized expert reasoning in three domains – proportional reasoning, covariational reasoning and reasoning with sign and signed quantities. Accurately characterizing student reasoning can help guide instructional interventions designed to help students develop more expert-like reasoning.&nbsp; In this talk, I will share ongoing quantitative analyses of student PIQL responses, and related qualitative studies. I will report on reasoning clusters revealed through module analysis, and hierarchical structure using item tree analysis. I will also share results that isolate emergent student resources associated with the three domains of expert PQL in introductory physics.&nbsp;

Finding Potential Pathways between Expert and Student Physics Quantitative Reasoning

Pearl (2000) described a formal methodology for characterizing and investigating cause-effect relationships, which included a formal diagrammatic representation for causal systems.&nbsp; This talk describes initial efforts to use these causal diagrams for modeling qualitative reasoning in introductory physics.&nbsp; Using causal diagrams to characterize students’ difficulties in physics, we have found a common causal structure that describes one class of qualitative reasoning error seen across several problem contexts.&nbsp; Causal diagrams also provide a new lens for understanding how students’ incorrect reasoning may contain productive resources for learning physics.&nbsp; These initial findings suggest that causal diagrams may be a useful lens for understanding existing findings in PER and guiding future investigations.

Using Causal Diagrams to Model Student Difficulties and Productive Thinking

Dual process theories model reasoning and decision making as comprised of both implicit and explicit processes. In these models, decisions can are made via explicit and deliberate thinking with potentially dominant influences from implicit and automatic “thinking”, such as strong tendencies for people to reply quickly, use the most available information, and make unwitting assumptions and observations aligned with beliefs and experience. While these implicit influences of human thinking may optimize every-day living and survival, they can also make normative scientific reasoning and understanding more difficult. I show some physics education-relevant examples based on students inferences from tables of data as well as examples from physics conceptual questions. To better conceptualize this process, I introduce a useful analogy to navigating a terrain. The question then becomes, how do we negotiate or change these natural and inevitable “cognitive contours” to help students more effectively learn science and reason scientifically?

Dual Process Model of Reasoning: Navigating a Terrain

For over 20 years, PER at Illinois has largely focused on leveraging technology and organizational structures to support research-based instruction in our large-enrollment introductory courses. In the past, we have referred to this process as 'parallel parking an aircraft carrier.' In response to the Covid-19 pandemic all components of the introductory courses were shifted to an online format. Many of our existing structures to teach physics at scale were transferable to an online setting. Yet, with the loss of physical proximity a new social dimension was added to the 'parallel parking' problem: How do we deliberately support engagement, collaboration, and community in our virtual classrooms? This talk describes our journey to incorporate this social dimension into our instruction in the Fall 2020 semester, highlighting the interplay between pedagogy and the affordances and constraints of online educational technologies, and sharing challenges and successes faced along the way.

Parallel parking an aircraft carrier in space

The PICUP Collection of Exercise Sets (https://www.compadre.org/PICUP/exercises/) contains over 60 peer-reviewed computation-infused activities for use in various physics courses from high school through graduate study. Each Exercise Set includes an instructor guide, student-facing exercises, and sample implementations for one or more programming platforms. I present an analysis of this collection based on Exercise Set traits such as course context, assignment topic, computational methods employed, course level, programming platforms, word count, and expected completion time. This analysis will highlight the strengths of the PICUP Collection (such as topics and programming platforms that are well represented) and where there is ample room for development (such as topics not yet covered and programming platforms currently underutilized).

Analysis of the PICUP Collection: Strengths and Areas for Development

For many years, I and my colleagues have used a variety of online tools in support of teaching large enrollment, introductory courses at an urban, public university. With the onset of COVID-19, the roles of these tools have changed dramatically. In addition to the LMS, we have used personal response systems, an online discussion forum, an online homework system, computational methods in Excel, and online simulations for years. We continue to use all of these and have added zoom and video recording of lectures to the mix. In this talk, I will focus on the differences between the present situation and the pre-pandemic world. How has our use of technology and our students’ responses to it changed? What can we learn about the value of technology and best practices for its use by observing these changes?

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