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A few years ago, the IUPUI Physics Department decided to introduce computational methods in its undergraduate curriculum to enhance student learning outcomes and engagement. The overall goal is for our graduates to consider computations as a complement to traditional analytic methods, and to develop the judgment and intuition to use a judicious mix of computational and analytic methods to investigate a problem. Since the project is in its infancy, the onset of the pandemic required some adjustments to the implementation plans. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to get buy-in from every faculty member in the department, training faculty members who were not facile with computations, implementing computations in every course, and developing an assessment instrument. I will also discuss some on-going and future work that is supported by an NSF-IUSE grant to advance the goals of the project and how the pandemic provided some unexpected silver linings.

AAPT SM 21

Normalizing Computations across the Physics Curriculum

department change

computing in the curriculum

evaluation

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. 

technical paper

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.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

If you are registered please note that you need to be logged in with your AAPT email / credentials in order to get access.

Because electric fields cannot be touched or seen, simulations are often utilized to build students' understanding of them by providing them with a visual representation of electric fields and the motion of test charges through them. We developed a game to address these challenges. The goal of the game is to guide a test charge through a racetrack using an electric field that the player creates. As a student plays the game, they will see dynamic electric field lines created by the charges they place on the screen, as well as the trajectory of test charges through the electric field. Our aim in the gamification of a more traditional electric field simulation is to improve motivation and engagement in the material. Both the game and the simulation that we built before it are built in JavaScript, so they will run on most browsers on a computer or mobile device.


Gamification of Electric Fields to Improve Students’ Understanding and Engagement

In this study of a large enrollment introductory physics course, I investigated students' use of free online resources (YouTube, Khan Academy, Chegg) and newly-implemented class resources since the Covid-19 transition to remote learning. In my mixed-methods approach, I surveyed and interviewed students on their perceptions and use of expanded course resources which include: pre-lecture module with introductory videos, quizzes with instructional feedback, tutorial assignment with low-stakes grading parameters, and demonstration videos. Students also engage with weekly activities similar to pre-Covid-19 but adapted to the remote setting, including synchronous remote lectures and active-learning recitations, asynchronous recitation quizzes as exam-like practice, and online homework assignments. The survey data suggest students value the expanded course resources as helpful to their learning, and report little use of solutions sites like Chegg. Despite increased accessibility of virtual meetings, students still do not engage frequently with course office hours or the University Learning Centers.

Resources in Introductory Physics: Multiple Modes of Engagement and Feedback

We examined the prevalence of rapid answer copying among university students completing online homework for an introductory level calculus-based physics course taught remotely during the COVID pandemic. We first compared the attempt duration distribution of 26 problems, between 42 students who self-reported as having completed the homework by themselves against the rest of the class. Significant differences were detected for 3 out of 26 problems. We then identified abnormally short problem attempts indicative of potential rapid answer copying, by fitting the attempt duration distribution of each problem with finite-mixture models, using mixtures of either normal or skewed distributions. We detected a significantly smaller fraction of short attempts from self-reporting students on only 3 out of 26 problems, and found no statistically significant difference in percentage correct of short attempts between the populations. In conclusion, our analysis did not find evidence indicating wide-spread rapid answer copying among students. We also explored differences in learning behavior between the two populations by applying process mining to the event logs of one of the homework learning modules, which reveals that some students may have copied answers after spending longer time or using multiple attempts on a given problem. However, this form of answer copying is also unlikely to be prevalent since the percentage correct on normal attempts are also similar between the two populations on most problems.

A data driven study of students' completion of online homework

This talk will introduce a modern Open Education Resources (OER) flipped classroom curriculum developed for an introductory algebra-based physics sequence. These resources were created by the Project BoxSand PER group at Oregon State University with support from OSU’s Ecampus. This curriculum is unique in its ground up design from hundreds of fine grain learning objectives, powerful built in research framework to which resources are coded, and suitability for both in person and remote delivery. The development process, curriculum examples, and how to access the resources (including direct LMS integration) will be presented. The currently available OER includes pre-lecture, lecture, and post-lecture activities. A laboratory curriculum with modern learning objectives, designed with remote learning in mind, will soon be available. OSU has partnered with Vernier to provide the OER lab manual with physical lab kits for rent or purchase. Other resources, including a sizeable question database will be available soon.

A Free, OER, PER-based, PER-focused Curriculum for Introductory Physics

Remote laboratory work has greatly expanded due to in part the recent global pandmeic. Many departments transitioned into remote learning without much previous experience with remote learning practices. I present here a study examening students social learning experiences in in-person and remote physics laboratories as they relate to their interactions with their peers and their instructors. I also examen their physics laboratory self-efficacy. These factors were compared using an analysis of variance to examen potential differences between groups. Remote students experienced weaker levels of connection to their peers and their instructors than their in-person counterparts. Remote students who connected with one another had lower self-efficacy than their in-person counterparts. Correlations between factors were also tested. I present findings of this study as well as recomendations for the implimentation of future virtual remote laboratory learning environments.

Building social networking and communities in remote physics laboratories

With the support of a PhysTEC Recruitment Grant, Bridgewater State University (BSU) is working with two of our feeder community colleges to provide Get the Facts Out (GFO) and early teaching experiences. Due to the pandemic our community college partners are 100% online and asynchronous. The asynchronous aspect makes it very difficult to reach the students, so we re-invent how to present GFO to the introductory physics classes. Our solution was to develop video homework problems that embedded parts of our GFO presentation. BSU’s TIR Allison Daubert developed the videos which feature students in the BSU’s Physics Education Group. The video homework problems are in a central youtube channel allowing for easy assignment by the community college professors. The community college professors assign the video homework as a graded part of the course assuring all the students view the videos.

Video Solution to GFO for Asynchronous Community Colleges Courses

Changing the conversation around the grade 7-12 teaching profession is at the core of the “Get the Facts Out” (GFO) campaign. To do so at institutions without explicit aim to recruit or train secondary teachers displays the potential reach of GFO itself. An example institution fitting that description is Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU): a private, aeronautical, engineering-focused university. Though strides are being made at ERAU to highlight pathways to secondary teaching, much potential remains in changing the conversation. This presentation will provide an expanded update to previous data collected, plans for spreading GFO-related materials, and pressing obstacles.

GFO implementation at an aeronautical university

There are numerous benefits to taking undergraduate students to AAPT meetings for the students themselves, their professors, and the AAPT organization as a whole.

Why Physics Professors Should Take Undergads to an AAPT Meeting!

As part of the Get the Facts Out project, we have developed the Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession in Higher Education better known as the PTaP.HE (P-taffy), which measures faculty’s perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching as a career choice. This spring we conducted a new reduced-basis factor analysis on version 2 of the instrument and found a substantial change in category structure from version 1. Here, we will share the new categories as well as present results from our national data sample which reveals themes in faculty thinking about the grade 7-12 teaching career. These results can help guide the improvement of physics teacher recruitment in colleges nationwide. This project is supported by NSF DUE-1821710.

Factor analysis of the PTaP.HE

The Get the Facts Out project, which is entering its fourth year of funding, has an aggressive research arm that studies the effectiveness of every resource produced by the project as well as perceptions of students and perceptions of faculty at over 50 U.S. institutions. In this presentation we will share several exciting results from the project this year including a blog article that went viral, the impact on students as a result of simply sharing the facts with colleagues, and some critical differences between the challenges within mathematics, chemistry and physics departments. Finally, we will share a couple of new resources including professional STEM teacher recruitment videos and A Teacher’s Life by the Numbers. This project is supported by NSF DUE-1821710 & 1821462

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Normalizing Computations across the Physics Curriculum

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Gamification of Electric Fields to Improve Students’ Understanding and Engagement

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