United States

Computer programming is an essential skill for physics majors seeking employment in a highly technological world. The advent of “big data” in business, engineering, and traditional STEM fields requires graduates proficient in data acquisition, storage, manipulation, and analysis. Physics departments are responding to this trend by integrating computational instruction into their undergraduate programs, but questions remain regarding the effectiveness of this training. In the Department of Physics and Astronomy at James Madison University, we have developed a set of learning objectives related to computational skills and integrated these objectives throughout our curriculum, primarily in laboratory courses. Our team has also developed an assessment tool, consisting of multiple choice and free response questions, that can quantitatively measure students’ computational skills within the context of physics. This presentation will discuss both the successes and challenges we encountered as we seek to enhance computational instruction and evaluate student learning improvement in our department.

AAPT SM 20

Enhancing Computational Instruction for Physics Majors: Developing Tools for Assessment

undergraduate physics curriculum

computational skills

programming

assessment

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.


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. 

technical paper

All industrialized countries are facing the same problem of declining student interest in pursuing STEM careers. In physics education, the typical response is to examine issues of appropriate and effective pedagogy, as well as gender and cultural inclusion (both in and out of the classroom). While it is appropriate that the physics community examine what it can do to make physics education more accessible to a greater diversity of students, there are some boundary conditions concerning student interest and motivation that need to be considered in parallel. In this presentation I will examine some issues related to student interest in science, and how the broad student interest in space science can be leveraged to recruit and especially retain students in STEM majors. NASA has established a National Space Science Education center that is partnering with AAPT to capitalize on the leverage that student interest in space science provides. I will present the current status of the effort, plus outline how the AAPT team is launching a project to create a network of space science educators in 2-yr colleges, in collaboration with NASA’s Space Grant program.

Space Science, Physics Education, and the NASA-AAPT Collaboration

General relativity is one of the most modern, powerful, and beautiful theories in all of physics. Yet, it's also complex and rarely taught in high school physics. This session will share some cheap, simple, hands-on activities for introducing high school students to general relativity. Building on what students already know about Newtonian gravity, the activities including modelling curved spacetime with stretchy fabric and tape and introducing the equivalence principle by dropping a bottle of water into freefall.

Teaching General Relativity via Hands-on Activities

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. Positive Psychology can be used to improve positive learning environment and promote active learning in physics. It can be useful to inspire physics students to have fun with science activities.

Implementing Positive Psychology in Teaching Physics

Other than traditional lecture demonstrations, there are also many everyday life events, such as car crashes and lightning strikes that also aptly demonstrate concepts in Physics but cannot be easily recreated in class. Today, many of these events are captured on video and are easily available on the internet. To facilitate teachers to find what they need, we classify online videos useful for Physics teaching into six broad categories. Not only are these carefully selected videos useful for illustrating the relevance of Physics to daily life, they also allow students to practice making sense of their observations and identifying the underlying Physics principles at work. Sense-making is key to the learning of Science. We will discuss four key strategies for designing class activities to help students exercise sense-making of the underlying Physics in the videos.

Uncovering Physics Examples from Internet Videos for Physics Lessons

Parallel Pedagogy simultaneously introduces and develops the four mechanics concepts of Momentum, Energy, Dynamics, and Kinematics. We report on how our free, online comprehensive resources supported a first-time mechanics instructor to smoothly adopt this pedagogy. These resources include 100 public videos and a free online textbook/workbook, both of which are interactive through student access via PlayPosit and Perusall, respectively. The flipped format and online interactive resources are also ideally suited for conversion to virtual instruction with Zoom class meetings facilitating peer instruction and relationship-building. Student acceptance of this new model is built by transparently motivating practices with physics education literature and openly sharing the student adaptation experience. We’ll show some positive learning outcomes. Consistent with this learning model, before our presentation please prepare (but come anyway if you can’t): 1) See the video of our model for learning physics: https://api.playposit.com/go/share/225308/32670/0/0/Different-Way-to-Learn-Physics 2) Look over the most recent class: https://canvas.calpoly.edu/courses/22072

Smooth Transition to Concept-Focused Mechanics, Covering Concepts in Parallel

Students know that a simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) has a ‘resonance curve’, and some students even know how to label the axes of a plot showing that resonance curve. The frequency (and amplitude) of a sinusoidal drive force are the main independent variables, and the steady-state amplitude of the SHO’s response is the main dependent variable. But a simple modification to a mechanical SHO can change it from ‘direct drive’ to ‘parametric drive’, and this subtle change has dramatic consequences. First of all, parametric resonance occurs when the drive frequency is not at the SHO’s natural frequency, but nearly _double_ that frequency. Next, there no longer emerges any steady-state amplitude of response, and the right dependent variable to measure is the rate of _exponential growth_ (or decay) of the system’s oscillations. There is also a _threshold amplitude_ for the drive required to give any growth in the response. This presentation features a torsional SHO with a non-contact parametric drive, and shows theoretical predictions and experimental data for its performance. Finally, we connect this parametric drive of a mechanical SHO to some glamorous applications of parametric excitation in modern physics.

What is 'parametric drive' of a simple harmonic oscillator?

We have co-authored a new textbook, “Experimental Physics: Principles and Practice for the Laboratory”, inspired by the 2014 AAPT report “Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum”. We discuss the philosophy and organization of the book, and the support that will be offered for remote education, assuming it is needed this year. We also detail aspects that differ from previous texts. For example, ours is written by a team of 17 research-active authors, allowing authoritative writing about techniques relevant to all major areas of physics; detailed instructor manuals are included so that you can confidently teach outside your area of expertise. As of abstract submission, development of remote instruction materials is only beginning. They will include a variety of approaches, such as modifications of some experiments so they can be done at home using modestly priced kits, as well as “choose your own adventure”-style video walkthroughs of other experiments.

A new advanced lab textbook, with support for remote instruction

What happens to aspiring engineers who do not pass their introductory mechanics class? At UIUC, approximately 11 percent of introductory mechanics engineering students earn a D, F, or W. Just 31 percent of these students go on to earn an engineering degree, compared with the 87 percent of students who pass the course on their first attempt. While most students who perform poorly in their introductory physics class choose a non-engineering major or leave the university altogether, there is a unique subset of initially struggling students who choose to persist in an engineering major. We interviewed engineering seniors in this group to learn about their experiences as engineering students who overcame an initial setback. In this talk, we will discuss big-picture outcomes for students who retake this fundamental course as well as insights into the difficulties some students face and what resources may help them succeed.

When the Gatekeeper Says No: Mechanics Students' Resilience and Success

We discuss a simple and novel method due to Müller-Plathe to compute the thermal conductivity and viscosity in a molecular dynamics simulation. The method is easy to explain and provides insight into nonequilibrium steady state processes. The method is discussed in the added chapter to the forthcoming second edition of our text on thermal physics.

Molecular dynamics calculation of thermal conductivity and viscosity

We address two major issues in the methods PER has historically used to interpret student outcomes on research based assessments (e.g., the FCI). First, PER has historically used normalized learning gain (g) as a normalizing factor to interpret student outcome scores. This is problematic because g has no statistical basis and is biased in favor of high pre-score groups. Second, instructors have been comparing their student outcomes to those in the published literature. This is problematic because the published literature overrepresents outcomes from courses in highly-selective institutions. In this talk we will offer two alternative methods for interpreting student outcomes based on our analysis of a large-scale dataset with representation across the spectrum of institution types. Specifically, we recommend interpreting student outcomes using either a scatter-plot of a large-scale course pretest and posttest scores or an effect size measure (e.g., Cohen’s d of Hedges g).

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Enhancing Computational Instruction for Physics Majors: Developing Tools for Assessment

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