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The Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation is commonly used to measure the conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Several studies have reported a substantial difference in pretest scores between men and women. This study examines the contribution of several prior preparation factors to explain the variance in pretest score and whether these factors explain gender differences in the pretest score. The study examined a large sample ($N=1060$) of students taking introductory calculus-based mechanics at the university level. Women outperformed men on most prior preparation and college achievement measures. No significant differences between men and women were found in high school physics taking patterns. Linear regression analysis showed only 23\% of the variance in FMCE pretest score could be explained using a linear combination of prior preparation variables. Controlling for these variables failed to explain the gender difference in pretest scores; conversely, the gender difference increased controlling for prior preparation.

PERC SM 20

What does the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation pretest measure?

prior preparation

conceptual inventory

gender

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AAPT SM 21

poster

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?

Bright Club is a public-facing event where academics from every discipline use stand-up comedy to communicate their research. Bright Club Ireland has been running for five years, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, and incorporates comedic theatre approaches to empower speakers and build community. High production values, venues associated with comedy, and professional videos of Bright Club sets on YouTube have all contributed to the perception of Bright Club as high quality entertainment rather than traditional outreach. We have found that comedy is effective at breaking down traditional silos of knowledge, upending status hierarchies, and including audiences who might not feel comfortable going to a university campus or attending events with science in the name. Here we describe the Bright Club Ireland program, who attends these shows and why, and analyse impact of participation on speakers using Self-Determination Theory.

Bright Club: Using Stand-up Comedy for Informal Education

Writing is an important aspect of experimental physics. Physics laboratory classes typically engage students in scientific documentation and writing in the forms of lab notebooks, reports, or proposals. Instructors of these classes may have a variety of motivations for incorporating writing. We previously developed a framework for thinking about the role of writing in physics lab classes that lists and categorizes possible goals instructors may have for writing. Here, we use that framework as a research tool to investigate students' views about, and experiences with, writing in lab classes, and experimental physics more generally. We present results of an analysis of student responses to weekly reflection questions throughout one semester of an advanced lab class. The results suggest that students think about writing in a variety of ways, and that the context and framing of the course may impact student thinking about the purpose of writing.

Investigating students' views about the role of writing in physics lab classes

In physics lab groups, students experience a wide range of equitable and inequitable interactions. After observing videos of students collaborating in an introductory physics lab, we defined that an equitable group is one in which every students bids are heard by their peers. We developed a methodology to characterize different lab groups by tracking students bid exchanges and assessing their levels of inchargeness. The analysis of equitable and inequitable groups showed that lab groups where one student is in charge can be equitable, as long as each group members opinions are acknowledged. We also found that gender and inchargeness do not sufficiently predict the equity of student groups. Based on these results, we argue that students that are in charge use their inchargeness to make their groups either equitable or inequitable. Future work will explore whether additional variables interact with inchargeness to predict levels of equity in group work.

How do gender and inchargeness affect equity in lab group interactions?

Student assistants (SA), which includes graduate and undergraduate teaching/learning assistants, are pivotal to non-traditional physics instruction in large classrooms. Despite its effectiveness, little is known about how SA-student interactions promote students learning. How should SAs respond to students questions? What support should SAs provide or refrain? What makes a SA effective or ineffective? We are particularly interested in SAs questioning skills. We propose a coding scheme to scrutinize SA-student interactions. For analysis, we segment a SA video into vignettes based on different situations SAs encounter and define activities like guiding questions, probing questions, and imparting information. From the pattern of activities, we code a vignette as one of the 6 levels on the hierarchy of students accountability. The frequency of certain levels in multiple vignettes could suggest a SAs performed knowledge of questioning, which will be compared with SAs narrated knowledge measured by a written test of their questioning skills.

Scrutinize SA-student interaction in inquiry-oriented college physics courses

Students' self-efficacy, their confidence in their ability to complete a task, is a good predictor for student success and persistence. Previous research indicates that improvements in learning methods can enhance self-efficacy and that classroom dynamics allow for different self-efficacy opportunities that may impact students' self-efficacy. In this study, we analyzed interviews from 12 students enrolled in a flipped integral calculus course to understand their perceptions of self-efficacy and how these perceptions were affected by classroom dynamics and activities. We found three self-efficacy opportunities mentioned in the interviews: mastery experience, vicarious learning, and verbal persuasion. Preliminary findings reveal that experiences in previous math courses, particularly high school, impacted students' perceptions of their self-efficacy in math both positively and negatively, active learning activities increased students' confidence in their ability to do math from their perspective, and verbal persuasion increased students' confidence and was seen as helpful in learning.

Qualitative analysis of student perceptions of their self-efficacy

Pre-class reading is especially important for the active-learning classroom. Some strategies for encouraging students to prepare for class include quizzing students, replacing readings with videos, using a social-annotation platform, or asking students to generate a question from the reading. In this four-year study of introductory physics courses at a small liberal arts college in Utah (N=132), students were surveyed about the frequency of their textbook reading and the perceived value of the textbook for their learning. Students who were asked to generate a question completed more of the pre-class readings, but were not more likely to see the value of doing the readings. There is a correlation between how often students complete the readings and how valuable they find the textbook; this correlation is still present, but slightly smaller, for those students who were assigned to generate a question compared to those who were not.

Using Student-Generated Reading Questions to Encourage Pre-Class Preparation in Introductory Physics

Research in physics education has shown that poor student performance on certain physics tasks may stem primarily from domain-general reasoning phenomena rather than a lack of conceptual understanding. The observed reasoning patterns are consistent with dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR). Efforts are ongoing to design intervention strategies that can guide the development of research-based curriculum to help students strengthen their reasoning skills and support cognitive reflection. In one new intervention, students are asked to set aside (at least temporarily) their own reasoning and engage in alternative lines of reasoning. Students first respond to a qualitative physics task, then construct reasoning chains that could have been used to reach the answers given by fictitious students, and finally revisit the original physics task. In this poster, we will discuss the preliminary results, how they relate to DPToR, and the implications of our findings for future curriculum development.

Examining and supporting student construction of alternative lines of reasoning

Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Students might generate diagrams to orient themselves to a scenario, to organize information to aid in solving a problem, or as a tool of communication to demonstrate their understanding of a physical scenario. By asking 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors to solve a number of multiple-choice physics problems (with no prompting regarding diagrams), and then explicitly asking them to generate diagrams of similar physical scenarios, we are able to compare elements of diagramming that students do spontaneously to aid in problem solving with those that they produce when the diagram is requested as an artifact for communication. We found that different types of physical contexts impacted how critical accurate diagrams are to getting the correct answer, and we explore implications for teaching and research.

Comparing Unprompted and Prompted Student-generated Diagrams - Poster

A choose-your-own-adventure online assessment has been developed to measure the process of modeling undertaken by students when asked to measure the Earths gravitational constant, g, using a simple pendulum. This activity forms part of the Modeling Assessment for Physics Laboratory Experiments (MAPLE), which is being developed to assess upper-division students proficiency in modeling. The role of the pendulum activity is to serve as a pre-test assessment with apparatus that students are likely to be familiar. Using an initial sample of student data from a development phase of the assessment, we show that the pendulum activity is able to discriminate between a range of student processes that are relevant to understanding student engagement with modeling as a scientific tool.

Capturing modeling pathways using the Modeling Assessment for Physics Laboratory Experiments

We report on an exploratory study in which we investigate the factor structure of an in-development survey on student experiences during group exams and subsequently examine how these factors can be modelled using performance and self-reported performance measures, while focusing on the role of group familiarity because it is a measure that we could influence with interventions.

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What does the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation pretest measure?