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As a part of our larger research on students’ conceptions on fluids, our group has been developing a taxonomy categorizing alternate conceptions about buoyancy and giving assessments in various introductory courses to determine the prevalence of selected taxonomy items.&amp;nbsp; This talk will focus on the results of selected assessment questions given to multiple introductory physics courses at Grove City College; some questions were also given to students at the University of Washington.&amp;nbsp; The prevalence of each alternate conception probed will be discussed, along with similarities and differences between the populations.&amp;nbsp;

AAPT WM 21

Prevalence of Selected Alternate Conceptions about Buoyancy in College Populations

student research

assessment analysis

floating

sinking

buoyancy

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As a part of our larger research on students’ conceptions on fluids, our group has been developing a taxonomy categorizing alternate conceptions about buoyancy and giving assessments in various introductory courses to determine the prevalence of selected taxonomy items.&nbsp; This talk will focus on the results of selected assessment questions given to multiple introductory physics courses at Grove City College; some questions were also given to students at the University of Washington.&nbsp; The prevalence of each alternate conception probed will be discussed, along with similarities and differences between the populations.&nbsp;

technical paper

Often the skills required to use the Unix/Linux command line are perceived as old-fashioned, difficult to learn, and unnecessary. However, the Linux command line is an extraordinarily flexible environment for programming, data reduction and analysis, simulation, and visualization, and is thus in wide use throughout the physics research community and beyond. These skills are surprisingly accessible to students. In this talk, I will argue that the command-line environment is a pedagogically beneficial environment for students to learn computational physics, with advantages both within the classroom and beyond it, and demonstrate some of the tools and methods the computational physics students at Syracuse use for simulation, visualization, animation, and data analysis.

The Friendly Command Line

While the classic brachistochrone problem is too complicated to solve in an introductory course, students should be able to understand the qualitative features of the problem. We asked the students a number of questions about this problem. For this talk,&nbsp; we will focus on the following question "Explain how it is possible for the mass to start from rest at different points along the cycloid and still reach the bottom at the same time."&nbsp; Their answers display a wide variety of misconceptions and we will highlight some specific answers during this talk.

Introductory Students' Qualitative Analysis of the Brachistochrone

We will present our experience assigning specific roles to each member of student groups to assist them with group dynamics when working through cooperative laboratory tasks. The initial implementation was inspired by an introductory POGIL seminar given to science faculty. Connections will be made to the work done by the Hellers from the University of Minnesota on Group Problem Solving Strategies in introductory physics classes. We will also present results of informal polling of our Faculty Online Learning Community (FOLC) on techniques for forming effective groups. This is part of a series of talks stemming from the NextGen PET FOLC project. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NSF DUE-1626496.

POGIL-inspired Roles for Small Groups and Other Group Management Techniques

Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) is an instructional model which originated in Chemistry education and provides students opportunities to develop and carry out their own experimental designs while engaging in argumentation and peer review. In 2019, we adopted a modified ADI instructional model into our Introductory Physics Labs for Life Sciences (IPL 2 S) courses to include a more formal structure for student engagement in scientific practices as part of three-dimensional learning. In this talk, we introduce the ADI instructional model, discuss integration of the ADI instructional model into our reformed lab course, and describe recent impacts it has had on our course. Specifically, we present how our modified ADI model has: 1) enhanced student engagement in scientific practices, specifically experimental design planning and scientific argumentation; 2) aided in the shift to online instruction while maintaining course learning outcomes; and 3) provided pedagogical consistency in a course with rotating instructional faculty.

Bringing Argument-Driven Inquiry into IPLS labs

Students reflect all rays parallel with the main axis in a spherical concave mirror to draw with a focal&nbsp;point that called real focal. In this paper we prove that the geometric method with a primary focus of rays parallel with&nbsp;the main axis of a spherical surface, is not a point.

Association of Concave Spherical Mirrors

In our algebra-based introductory physics sequence, we have had exams consisting of multiple choice questions and traditional math problems. The multiple choice questions were more conceptual in nature and would come at the beginning of our exams. Then we would have all of the math problems. Unfortunately, a single multiple choice question that potentially covers a number of topics at an arbitrary level of difficulty doesn’t allow an instructor to determine a student’s level of understanding of any single topic. To better assess students’ levels of understanding, we designed sets of questions and problems with increasing difficulty, as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. This new way of structuring exams benefited the instructor in documenting levels of student understanding. It also allowed weaker students to show mastery at some level and possibly boost their confidence with the more challenging questions. In general, the students have rated this new assessment positively.

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to Develop New Assessments

One of two complementary panels dedicated to raising awareness about improving the accessibility of undergraduate physics laboratory courses. In this panel, former physical science students talk about their previous experiences in physics and other science labs, and they make suggestions for improving accessibility of labs.] Physics labs are an exciting opportunity to teach and learn about physics by collaboratively planning, building, and carrying out experiments and interacting with advanced phenomena, apparatus, and software. Students, staff, and faculty with disabilities deserve full access to these learning environments, and it is everyone’s responsibility to recognize and mitigate the specific barriers to participation posed by space, technology, and pedagogical constraints that are unique to labs. To that end (and with support from an AAPT Special Projects Grant), the AAPT Committee on Laboratories assembled a task force whose charge is to issue an open call for increased investment in accessible physics labs.

Making Physics Labs More Accessible: Perspectives

After presentin therical evolution and basic entities starting with the qubit&nbsp; it goes to a simple practical demonstartion using common components (magnets atraction and repulsion) the six qubit states. Completing these ideas finalizes with a quantum teleportation of one

The qubit and quantum computing- A simulation in the classroom

We encounter variables with little variation often in PER due to the demographics of physics and the questions we ask. For example, in course completion studies, most students will earn high enough grades to pass the course. Yet, little work has examined how to analyze such data. Therefore, we conducted a simulation study using logistic regression, penalized regression, and random forest. We systematically varied the fraction of positive outcomes, feature imbalances, and odds ratios. We find the algorithms treat features with the same odds ratios differently based on their imbalance and the outcome imbalance. While none of the algorithms solved the problem, some reduced the scale of the problem. Our results suggest that PER studies may contain false negatives when determining which variables are related to an outcome. We propose recommendations for researchers and then illustrate these by predicting which applicants will be admitted to a graduate physics program.

Addressing Rare Outcomes in PER Quantitative Studies

While efforts have been made in undergraduate science content courses to specifically support pre-service elementary teachers’ skills, knowledge, and pedagogical disciplinary knowledge of experimental design, much of this work predates the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). To date, few, if any, assessment instruments are well correlated with the NGSS practice Planning and Carrying Out Investigations (PCOI). To meet this need, a team including four faculty members from physics, a social scientist, and a science education faculty member developed an appropriate instrument for measuring students’ knowledge of PCOI and, particularly important to pre-service teachers, their students’ pedagogical disciplinary knowledge of this practice. The instrument was developed by mapping items to relevant PCOI sub-practices at the elementary grade level, since it was developed for pre-service elementary STEM teachers. In this presentation, we describe the process of developing items in preparation for validation of the instrument.

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