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Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially for a student’s introductory year in physics. For students who don’t plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more on achieving a better grade. For this reason, students want to study as efficiently as possible by using the most optimal study methods. We’ve taken surveys over the past three years to determine how students study for exams and compared that to their exam grades. We found that students who studied using methods that they rated as more helpful did better on the exams. By utilizing the study results, we are able to present our current, as well as future, students with study methods that have been rated as being more helpful and give them advice on ways to optimize their study time for their exams.

AAPT WM 21

How Helpful are Different Study Methods for Physics Exams?

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technical paper

For many large-enrollment introductory physics classes, the COVID-19&nbsp;pandemic&nbsp;raises the question of how to ensure academic honesty in online assessments. &nbsp;Short quizzes may help prevent&nbsp;student utilization of third party ``tutoring'' services to receive solutions. However, short quizzes could be vulnerable to students&nbsp;sharing quiz information.&nbsp; Given the pervasivenes of&nbsp;social media, smart phones, and other messaging services such as GroupMe, sharing of information could represent a significant source of cheating.&nbsp; In this investigation, the prevalence of this kind of cheating&nbsp;was explored by way&nbsp;of planted ``correct'' answers. The frequency of use of the plants&nbsp;was&nbsp;measured to determine a baseline level of students who received unauthorized quiz information from classmates.&nbsp; Interventions to promote academic honesty were then administered and a subsequent quiz&nbsp;was used to measure the effectiveness of these interventions.&nbsp; Finally, the prevalence and ways in which students provide quiz information to other students was probed.

Prevalence and Prevention of Cheating in Online Introductory Physics Quizzes

Educators teach concepts in exciting ways to mask the extent that students think they are learning ostensibly uninteresting or inapplicable material. “Head-fake learning” (“HFL”) describes the means by which material can be taught wherein students think they are learning one thing, but in fact are learning another––for example, this means that they learn academic material while playing games or engaging in seemingly non-academic work. Two physics courses, one at Gustavus College and another at UNC Chapel Hill, have trialed HFL mechanisms through the playing of games and study of game shows in class and we have prepared instructional databases which house educational material, and examples of games which can facilitate the delivery of this material. We provide instructions for their use in this presentation and analyze the effectiveness of such material in the classroom–– holistically, students reported high learning efficiency and appreciated the ability to enjoy the learning experience.

Utilizing Head Fake Learning to present Introductory Physics Concepts

I report on two synchronous online courses: an algebra-based introductory Applied &nbsp;Physics I course to a broad-spectrum of non-physics majors, and an algebra-based Physics II course to post-baccalaureate pre-Health students. Active learning has been established in these courses in the form of small group problem solving sessions with Teaching/Learning Assistants. Additionally, I developed an active, graded discussion board. Experienced learning assistants worked with me to post open-ended questions for students, approximately once a week for the first few weeks. The aim was to get a dialogue going among students themselves after the initial weeks of prompting. They were encouraged to help one another with tips on homework questions. &nbsp;Part of the aim was to get students to use physics terminology. &nbsp;This resulted in several interesting threads revealing areas of misconception. I will highlight some of these discussions and report on how peer-discussion can enhance learning outside of class time. &nbsp;

Enhancing Student Engagement via a Monitored Student-Student Discussion Board

The measurement of the wavelength of a monochromatic source of light with the Fresnel’s biprism is a fundamental experiment in most Universities. In this experiment, the determination of distance between two virtual light sources is necessary for the calculation of the wavelength of light. However, the presence of the aberration of lens results in an erratic distance between virtual source by using conjugate foci method, which leads to an erratic wavelength. To solve this, we used a CMOS detector to record magnified images and diminished images. The accurate distance between two virtual light sources was obtained with digital images processing, thereby reducing the uncertainty of measurement of the wavelength. The deviation between the measured wavelength of sodium light from CMOS imaging analysis method and the average wavelength at 589.3&nbsp;nm calculated by two wavelengths of&nbsp;sodium yellow light is only 0.3%, which is smaller than the deviation from traditional method.

The Fresnel Biprism Experiment Based on CMOS Imaging Analysis

We are conducting out a study to evaluate the effectiveness of structured peer review sessions on student writing skills in introductory physics laboratory courses.&nbsp; Preliminary data suggest that peer review sessions are more efficient for improving students’ technical writing skills.&nbsp; Previously, students were expected to write weekly lab reports over different experiments without peer communication or review.&nbsp; We have now implemented a writing instruction method in which students produce three reports throughout the semester that undergo peer review by fellow students, then are revised based on the feedback they receive, and finally submitted to the instructor for grading.&nbsp; Following a research protocol previously applied to non-peer review student writing, we will be able to compare the effectiveness of both methods.

Effectively Implementing Peer Review into Introductory Physics Laboratory Courses

Physics students generally encounter only rudimentary concepts of measurement uncertainty analysis in an introductory university physics course. This talk presents a physics-forward more advanced introduction to probability and statistics beginning with loaded dice and chaos concepts in a computational tutorial for first year physics and astronomy students. Subsequent tutorials provide a rigorous frequentist interpretation of nonlinear curve fitting parameters and uncertainties used throughout their laboratory data analysis. Other topics such as Monte Carlo techniques are touched upon. These tutorials and student lab data analysis makes use of MATLAB.

Advanced fitting and uncertainty analysis in introductory physics

In this joint study, we try to uncover the common misconceptions amongst the educators that result from a lack of understanding of the underlying principles involved in the construction of mathematical and scientific concepts. We seek to raise awareness to the issue to provide support to mathematics and science educators in correcting their own misconceptions as well as strategies for identifying and correcting misconceptions held by their students. Research shows that teachers who understand their student’s common misconceptions are more likely to design instruction that will increase student understanding in the subject than teachers who do not. Additionally, teachers with misconceptions themselves unknowingly contribute to the reinforcement of student misconceptions during the teaching and learning cycle. Data will be collected online and anonymously across the state and the country. The target participants include mathematics and science educators in universities, middle and high schools as well as pre-service Mathematics teacher candidates.

A Study on Misconceptions of Mathematics and Science Teachers

The Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) is a 31-question assessment designed to assess student understanding of basic principles of electricity and magnetism in an introductory, calculus-based physics course. This study develops a model of student knowledge measured by the BEMA. This is guided by a theoretical model of expert understanding of electricity and magnetism. Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) was used to investigate a large post-test dataset (N=9666) from a large, western public research university collected over the span of 15 years. An optimal model was found by exploring variations to the theoretical expert model and selecting the model with the optimal MIRT fit parameters.

Multidimensional Item Response Theory and the BEMA

Our investigation of introductory physics students' difficulties with pre-college mathematics has extended to five campuses at four universities, employing a 14-item diagnostic administered near the beginning of the semester.&nbsp;&nbsp;More than&nbsp;6000 students have taken the diagnostic&nbsp;over the past four years. We find (1) consistently high error rates (30-70%) on trigonometry, algebra, geometry, and graphing problems, (2) significant degradation of algebra performance when symbolic coefficients are substituted for numerical coefficients, and when Greek letters are substituted for Latin letters, and (3) high performance consistency among diverse question types, such that&nbsp;performance on a single test item can reliably predict overall diagnostic performance. A new online version of the diagnostic has been tested with small samples and seems to produce results that are largely consistent with the written version. Performance on non-mathematical conceptual physics questions, added&nbsp;to the online diagnostic, is significantly correlated with performance on the mathematics questions.

Consistency of Students' Mathematical Difficulties May Allow Reliable Performance Predictability

Over the past four years, we have administered over 6,000 mathematics diagnostics to introductory physics students at four large state universities. Previously, our hand-written diagnostic only included pure mathematics problems in graphing, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. While these problems have shed light on the severity and nature of students’ mathematical difficulties, our new online diagnostic aims to also measure performance on conceptual physics problems (Newton’s second and third laws). We find the mathematics portion of our online diagnostic shares the same characteristics as older hand-written versions with similar correct-response rates, internal consistency, and performance predictability.&nbsp;Our analyses show that overall mathematics performance is correlated with performance on the newly added physics problems (r=0.35). Here, we present our most recent findings while examining the observed relationship between math and physics performance.&nbsp;

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