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This study will inform the Physics Education Research (PER) community about patterns of partnerships and collaborations between authors and patterns of funding sources for the PER community over the last ten years. The study involves a text-based analysis of all Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) proceedings between 2010 to 2019 to identify funding sources and to determine patterns. PERC proceedings were selected given the central role of PERC to the PER community. PERC proceedings represent the community across scope of projects from small to large, across stage of projects from beginning to finished, and across investigator experience from new to established researchers. Findings are contrasted with those from the Learning Sciences community to provide context for understanding the significance of patterns. The goal of this work is to provide insight into the community&#39;s history and ten-year trajectory and thus enable the community to move forward in new and better directions.

PERC SM 20

Investigating partnerships and funding for the Physics Education Research community (PERC)

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.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

This study will inform the Physics Education Research (PER) community about patterns of partnerships and collaborations between authors and patterns of funding sources for the PER community over the last ten years. The study involves a text-based analysis of all Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) proceedings between 2010 to 2019 to identify funding sources and to determine patterns. PERC proceedings were selected given the central role of PERC to the PER community. PERC proceedings represent the community across scope of projects from small to large, across stage of projects from beginning to finished, and across investigator experience from new to established researchers. Findings are contrasted with those from the Learning Sciences community to provide context for understanding the significance of patterns. The goal of this work is to provide insight into the community's history and ten-year trajectory and thus enable the community to move forward in new and better directions.

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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 AIP TEAM-UP report identifies the structural and systemic causes explaining why African Americans have not experienced the growth in bachelor's degrees in physics the way they have in other fields or as other minority groups have experienced in physics over the past two decades. Solving these problems requires changing not only the way physicists train students, but how they think about training students. Research on change in higher education suggests the need for physicists and astronomers to recognize and question the norms, values, and culture of their fields. The TEAM-UP report, SEA Change, and the new APS-IDEA all seek to stimulate and sustain a cultural transformation in the profession.

Systemic Change: TEAM-UP and Beyond

Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Problem-Solving of the Work-Energy and Impulse-Momentum Theorems

Developing coupled, multiple-response assessment items addressing scientific practices

Practicing physicists’ knowledge about disability: Development of the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS)

Student Ownership of Physics Projects: Manifestation in Student-Project Interactions (PERC)

Physics education research (PER) studies of students understanding of kinematics have largely been focused on difficulties and misconceptions ideas that act as barriers to student understanding of formal physics. Our research takes an alternative perspective on students ideas. We offer insight into student resources for understanding kinematics ideas students have that we consider to be the beginnings of a more sophisticated scientific understanding of motion. Our analysis of 582 written student responses to several kinematics questions highlights four common resources students use when justifying their solutions to different problems. In this paper, we elaborate on these four resources and give examples from our preliminary research.

Identifying student resources for understanding kinematics (PERC)

Physics problems can be difficult for students, even after adequate instruction. Recent studies have indicated that reflexive reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to conceptual knowledge may be responsible for these difficulties. Attending to these reflexive processes during instruction may improve performance on difficult physics questions. We have therefore devised a training that aims to utilize reflexive processing to influence performance on difficult physics questions. Our findings have implications for improving physics instruction generally.

Investigating the Impact of Cognitive Training on Newton’s 2nd Law

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of advanced novices: students who have completed an introductory physics course but are far from expert-like in their reasoning. We find that students mostly use intermediate strategies that reflect an understanding of specific relationships between quantities, such as analyzing the units of an expression, to reason about mathematical expressions. Few students use more sophisticated strategies like checking limits, which require students to make predictions about how a system will behave. Our results show that there is a need to recognize and teach these intermediary strategies to enable more novice students to check their answers. The teaching of more advanced strategies like limit checking will require careful scaffolding, as students generally do not succeed when simply told to check limits.

Characterizing the mathematical problem-solving strategies of advanced novice physics students

One argument for keeping the physics GRE is that it can help applicants who might otherwise be missed in the admissions process stand out. In this work, we evaluate whether this claim is supported by physics graduate school admissions decisions. We used admissions data from five PhD-granting physics departments over a 2-year period to see how the fraction of applicants admitted varied based on their physics GRE scores. We compared applicants with low GPAs to applicants with higher GPAs and applicants from large undergraduate universities to applicants from smaller undergraduate universities. We find that for applicants who might otherwise have been missed (e.g. have a low GPA or attended a small school) having a high physics GRE score did not seem to increase the applicants chances of being admitted to the schools. However, having a low physics GRE score seemed to penalize otherwise competitive applicants.

The Physics GRE does not help overlooked applicants

We explore how students visual gaze changes as they tackle sequential and simultaneous synthesis problems. Sequential problems involve multiple events that occur chronologically, and simultaneous problems involve events that occur concurrently. Using eye tracker, we recorded students eye movements when they handled the tasks and verbalized their problem-solving strategies. These students (N = 22) were from an introductory calculus-based physics course. Results indicate that students made more gaze transitions between problem statement and diagram in simultaneous tasks than in sequential ones. However, they made more gaze transitions between different elements of the diagram in sequential tasks than in simultaneous ones. Further, for the sequential tasks, most students identified two concepts (regardless of correctness) but often invoked only one concept for simultaneous tasks. The results indicate that students tended to divide sequential problems into segments of smaller tasks but treated simultaneous problems as a single-step task.

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Systemic Change: TEAM-UP and Beyond

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Investigating partnerships and funding for the Physics Education Research community