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The recent AAPT recommendations on the laboratory curriculum and on computational physics, as well as the Phys 21 report from the APS and AAPT Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs, encourage physics programs to prepare students for a range of opportunities after graduation through a curriculum that develops and reinforces of a set of transferrable skills and knowledge. The laboratory is an ideal venue for developing many of the skills discussed in these documents, including design, technical, analytical, and communication skills. This talk will address innovative ways to implement these recommendations throughout the upper level laboratory curriculum, examples of revised curricula from Lewis University and other institutions, methods of evaluating skill development in the lab, and opportunities for developing new assessments.

PERC SM 20

Skill Development in Physics Labs Beyond the First Year

scientific writing

skill development

laboratory

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AAPT SM 21

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Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

The talk highlights photovoice, a participatory method that gives power to creators of images to capture experiences that are central to their life. Black and Latinx students verbal considerations of success in the context of their urban charter school is included, as is a sample of students visual data about what success is outside of their schooling context. The study reveals the school's no-excuses orientation to teaching and learning fosters an oppressive definition of success in the context of classrooms. However, photovoice reveals students are able to resist the limited view as four emergent findings reveal how students (re)imagine success. Lastly, implications about what educators and school communities may learn, if students were seen as active co-constructors in the design and implementation of their own education is discussed.

(Re)imagining success through photovoice: Highlighting a research and teaching strategy that could be useful in physics/STEM education

Teaching assistants (TAs) across the United States play an important role in the education of students, as they often teach laboratories, recitations, and discussion sections. Due to increased recognition of the importance of student-centered instruction and active learning, TAs are often required to implement instructional strategies they are unfamiliar with. Thus, professional development programs designed to help TAs implement student-centered instruction effectively are very important, and one central component of any successful program is integrating formative assessment throughout. In this talk, I will describe such a program with a focus on how formative assessment is used, not so much to evaluate the TAs, but to provide feedback and support to help them grow into effective educators.

Using formative assessment to improve the teaching effectiveness of teaching assistants

Developed by Larry Michaelson, a management professor at the University of Oklahoma, Team-based learning (TBL) details a pedagogical approach designed to improve learning outcomes, increase student engagement, and create a sense of community. Unlike group-work used in other fields this approach explicitly has several key elements: teams of 5-7 students stay together for the entire semester, teams participate in a Readiness Assurance Process and in-class team activities, individual team members evaluate their members' contributions, and course grade weighting includes team components. After attending a workshop led by the Council on Teaching and Learning in 2017, four professors at Siena College in upstate NY began incorporating this pedagogy into their physics courses at all levels. In this talk, I will describe team-based learning in upper-level physics classrooms at Siena College. To evaluate this innovation, we are conducting a series of qualitative case studies of student experience of team-based learning in our upper-division physics courses. The implementation of team-based learning in physics courses and a preliminary report of the qualitative analysis will be described.

Modernizing Upper-Division Mechanics: Preparing Students for a Complex World

Undergraduate teaching evaluation systems often poorly measure teaching effectiveness and lack processes for formative development of teaching quality. In response to these concerns, the Teaching Quality Framework Initiative (TQF), a Center for STEM Learning project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is creating a process for transformation of teaching evaluation toward a more scholarly and evidence-based approach. The TQF, as part of the Bay View Alliance and multi-institution TEval collaboration, focuses on teaching evaluation in order to improve instruction and enhance student outcomes, among other long-term institutional objectives. Departmental-level and stakeholder meetings are combined with outreach to administrative officials and cross-departmental sharing of resources to create campus-wide change. We present tools and processes associated with departmental-level and campus-level change, explore how departments move through this process, share example tools developed by teams, and engage in conversations around mechanisms to create sustainable campus-wide change and disseminate tools/processes beyond our campus.

The Teaching Quality Framework Initiative: Valuing and Improving Teaching and Teaching Evaluation

Given the growing importance of dynamical systems in science and technology, it is important to give students an up-to-date foundation for their future careers, embedding topics of modern dynamics--chaos, synchronization, network theory, neural networks, evolutionary change, econophysics and general relativity--within the context of traditional physics founded on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian physics. The goal of this approach is to modernize the teaching of junior-level dynamics, responsive to a changing society, while retaining the core traditions and common language of dynamics texts. The modern perspective is based on geometric aspects of dynamics and state space, providing a unifying context and environment for learning. The class and textbook using this approach has been pursued for the last 5 years at Purdue University, providing case studies in student reception of this method.

Team-Based Learning in Physics Courses

After working as a Physics Education Researcher for nearly 15 years, I received the opportunity to serve as an American Association for the Advancement of Science - Science and Technology Policy Fellow (AAAS-STPF) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Division of Undergraduate Education. I pursued this fellowship to explore the role of policy in STEM Education. In this talk, I will present lessons I have learned through this fellowship including ways that policy effects education and education research, and the roles policies play in leading change in education. Additionally, I will reflect on what I have learned about how funding agencies like NSF enact change through policy and reflect on ways that the Physics Education Research community could use this to be more impactful change leaders for science education.

The Roles of Policy in Educational Change

Technology has always been a medium to help teachers provide the best educational experiences for our nation's youth. Augmented and Virtual Reality is becoming more common in the classroom which brings unprecedented opportunities. Our team created an Augmented Reality (AR) application to use with the Merge Cube that focuses on Forces and Motion. This application is used with multiple in-service and pre-service teachers for two reasons. The first is to enhance their understanding of mechanics. The second is that they allow us to asses both the usability and willingness to use not only that application, but ARVR in general. We found that after modifications they were extremely receptive to the application, learned from it and would implement it in the future.

Teaching Force and Motion in Augmented Reality

There is a serious shortage of secondary science and math teachers across the United States. Part of this shortage can be attributed to a lack of research-based recruitment materials. To this end, we have developed written and visual materials for recruiting future STEM teachers as part of the Get the Facts Out (GFO) project. We have tested and refined our materials through faculty and student focus groups at several demographically and geographically diverse US universities over the last two years. Recently, we collected large-scale data via a national online survey that will be shared here for the first time. Our findings provide insights into optimal recruitment strategies, and we will share our unique considerations for different locations, demographics, and target audiences. We will also discuss our testing and refinement strategies through interactive activities.

Research-based, User-tested Materials for Recruiting STEM Teachers

We present a study of a large-scale intervention designed to shift lab instruction away from tightly prescribed lab norms. The intervention was implemented in a network of Professional Learning Communities of Israeli high-school physics teachers (N=250) operating in a high-stakes exam setting with limited resources, and catering to diverse groups of students. An introductory questionnaire examined the lab goals that the teachers valued, revealing a gap between teachers' optimal lab goals and prevailing ones, in particular as concerns experimental design. The intervention addressed both teachers' interest in change as well as the constraints imposed by the setting in which they work, by: a) modest restructuring of traditional labs: encouraging students to reflect on the considerations underlying the experimental design; b) involving teachers in collaborative reflection on classroom enactments of the restructured labs. Indeed, most teachers chose to carry out the restructured labs. We will describe barriers and affordances that the teachers identified when reflecting on their experience.

Re-defining Lab Norms via Professional Learning Communities of physics teachers

Conceptual blending has been used to study student reasoning at the math-physics interface, but the current emphasis is mostly on the product of student reasoning, while information about the reasoning process is missing in the analysis. Therefore, we adapted the blending diagrams to also include the dynamics of student reasoning. In this session, we will use data from an interview study that focused on undergraduate students understanding of boundary conditions for the heat equation. We demonstrate the construction of a dynamic blending diagram (DBD) and its use as an analytical framework. We show that by using a DBD, we can judge the degree to which students integrate their understanding of mathematics and physics. The DBD also enables the reader to follow the line of reasoning of the students. Moreover, a DBD can be used to diagnose difficulties in student reasoning.

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(Re)imagining success through photovoice: Highlighting a research and teaching strategy that could be useful in physics/STEM education

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