United States

AAPT SM 20

Social positioning and consensus building in two contentious “board” meetings

contentious

board meeting

social positioning

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

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AAPT SM 21

poster

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. 

Developing an Interactive Tutorial on a Quantum Eraser

Self-efficacy is an important predictor of intention to continue in physics and is influenced by students’ experiences in the classroom. In this study, students in AP Physics 1 were interviewed at the end of the course to identify the kinds of classroom experiences that impacted their beliefs about their ability to do physics. Labs were mentioned by nearly all students as an important factor, though whether students saw labs as having a positive or negative impact on their self-efficacy depended on certain characteristics of the lab. Many students, especially boys, also discussed peer interaction while working problems as an experience that improved their self-efficacy. Many students also discussed assessment feedback as evidence their teacher believed they are good at physics, though boys focused on assessments where they scored well while girls discussed assessments where they scored poorly.

Gender, Self-Efficacy, & Classroom Experiences in AP Physics 1

Physics education is full of instances of those who have abandoned reforms because they did not seem to work. Surprise: A talk or even a workshop is not enough to provide instructors deep conceptual understanding of how students learn physics! Courses are complicated systems that must be well designed to provide the best learning experience possible and significant learning can take place in many different types of courses. The science of teaching begins with understanding what student behaviors lead to learning. Many of the elements behind effective reformed courses have the same student behavior goal. Focusing on these goals may help faculty implement effective reformed instruction. I will present some of these important behaviors. Getting students to engage in them leads to improved learning. The art comes in with the question: Can we get the students to like it?

The basic science of teaching to improve practice and outcomes

Computational thinking (CT) is still a relatively new term in the lexicon of learning objectives and science standards. In 2013, the authors of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) included “mathematical and computational thinking" as one of eight essential science and engineering practices that K-12 teachers should strive to develop in their students. (1) There is not yet widespread agreement on the precise definition or implementation of CT, and efforts to assess CT are still maturing, even as more states adopt K-12 computer science standards. (2) In this presentation, we will try to summarize what CT means for a typical introductory (i.e., high school or early college) physics class. This will include a discussion of the ways that instructors may already be incorporating elements of CT in their classes without knowing it. Our intention is to provide a helpful introduction to this topic for physics instructors.

Computational Thinking in Introductory Physics: High School and Early College

Interactive video-enhanced tutorials (IVETs) involve web-based activities which lead students through a solution using expert-like problem-solving approaches, such as those needed for solving problems involving conservation of energy or linear momentum. Under NSF funding we have been developing and evaluating multiple IVETs for use with college students in introductory physics. This presentation will showcase our research methods and the impact of various IVETs on student problem-solving abilities.

Interactive Video-Enhanced Tutorials Impact on Student Problem-Solving Abilities

Representing Torque with Oriented Parallelograms

How Force And Energy Notation Affects The Way Students Say It

We present the design and initial implementation of two data-driven Astronomy courses at the University of Oklahoma. Both courses focus on data analytics skills acquisition using the Python coding language and Jupyter notebooks, and are aimed at providing students with experiences and skills for a wide range of careers. Astronomy 3190 is a elective course for sophomores. The emphasis is on repeated exposure to the data life cycle: data wrangling, visualization, statistical thinking, modeling, computational thinking, and communication skills. Astronomy 5900 is a graduate course taken by upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. The course provides an ambitious romp through statistical inference, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, cluster analysis, regression, principal components analysis, classification, and time series. Both courses use freely available astronomical data from various sources including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A discussion of the learning goals and examples of specific activities will be included.

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Social positioning and consensus building in two contentious “board” meetings

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