United States

For over 30 years, research-based materials developed by the physics education research community have helped transform introductory physics instruction.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Many of these materials focus on the development of student conceptual understanding and place considerable emphasis on qualitative inferential reasoning.&amp;nbsp;&amp;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.&amp;nbsp;&amp;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.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;New research tasks, informed by dual-process theories of reasoning, and associated results will be discussed.

AAPT WM 21

Examining and Supporting Student Reasoning using Novel Methodologies*

intervention

dual-process

introductory

cognition

reasoning

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.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


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. 

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.

technical paper

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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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?

Supporting Students with Technology During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In our physics discipline’s continual effort to integrate computational problem solving into all levels of our curriculum, videos and accompanying documents were created to help new users learn the computer algebraic and numeric system Maple(tm). Undergraduates are expected to solve computationally based problems each week in their courses. &nbsp; Based upon recommendations from research in the field of educational, each video possesses the following attributes: * a length of twelve minutes or less, * the inclusion of intentional pauses, *&nbsp;a limit of three major concepts, *&nbsp;minimal amount of syntax and functions, *&nbsp;integration of practice&nbsp;/ example physics problems, * a&nbsp;section on troubleshooting, This talk will cover the challenges and successes of 1) designing and generating the videos, 2) the implementation of the desired attributes into each video, and 3) the assessment by new users in introductory and upper division undergraduate physics courses. &nbsp;

Design, Construction and Use of Instructional Videos on using Maple™

Scientific literacy is now an important topic for the global society dealing with issues such as pandemics, climate change, etc. At most post-secondary institutions non-science majors outnumber declared science majors. However, it is argued that non-science major students and classes may be more important to the scientific culture of a given institution than declared science majors. So how do we nurture scientific literacy in all students? The focus of the Physical Science department (Physics, Chemistry, Geology) at EMCC is a student-centered inquiry-based approach where students gain the skills necessary to be successful in their chosen fields. The geology courses are typically 95% non-STEM majors. Geology classes made science content accessible to non-science majors and the skills associated with scientific investigation can be applied to any chosen career path. The skills I want my student to gain or grow include, critical thinking, problem solving, group dynamics, public speaking, and scientific literacy.

How Non-Science Majors Can Change Science Culture of Post-Secondary Institutions

Knowledge about scientific inquiry and the Nature of Science (NOS) is deemed an important part of students’ education in the USA as well as in Europe and China (OECD, 2016). We have conducted a field study to explore the development of lower high school students’ views about NOS during one school year in the region of Hesse, Germany. We found that often students do not achieve an adequate perception of how creativity and empirical evidence are entwined in scientific inquiry. This is hardly surprising, as preservice teachers already feel ill-prepared to convey scientific inquiry in the classroom. Therefore, we have taken first steps towards implementing a NOS module in the newly created “networking area”, a highly innovative enrichment of the teacher training program at TU Darmstadt allowing&nbsp;for STEAM approaches. The talk will give an insight into our research findings, describe initial experiences with the NOS module and “networking area”.

Creativity and Empirical Evidence: A STEAM Approach Towards Scientific Inquiry

Science is supposed to create solutions to the problems our world is facing, and we do a lot to foster scientific knowledge with out students towards this end. But how might we teach to be "creative" and put solutions together using the building blocks of Math, Science, Technology and Engineering? Internationally, there is a growing movement to re-focus on the idea of the&nbsp;STEAM Curriculum that is driven&nbsp;from the Maker Movement, the Ardiuno Community and educators of the Asia-Pacific area that understands the "A" for "Arts" as a mission to design and create artificats with the needs of human beings at the center. We demonstrate creativity methods such as Design Thinking, Human-Centric Design and Lean Start-up and how they can be integrated with inquiry&nbsp;learning in classrooms. We will compare STEAM teaching to ISLE and 5E teaching methods and compare the differences from the perspective of students. &nbsp; &nbsp;

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Examining and Supporting Student Reasoning using Novel Methodologies*

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