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Practice exams with immediate feedback and video solutions are among the highest rated learning resources by students taking introductory physics at the University of Illinois. These ratings align with a research showing the positive impact of formative assessment and the testing effect. Despite this alignment, data on our student use of practice exams suggests a majority of students are missing the most important benefits. In particular, the large fraction of students choosing to complete their first practice exam less than 24 hours before the exam, suggests they are primarily being used for cramming. During the Spring 2021 semester we introduced a “mock” proctored exam one week prior to the actual exam. We look at how performance on the mock exam impacted student predictions, preparation and performance on the actual midterm exam. Our results show that despite the valuable formative assessment available from the mock exam, students were resilient in their dependence on cramming. 


AAPT SM 21

Practice exams impact on student exam preparation and performance

metacognition

exams

assessment

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technical paper

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

The Latest and Greatest from Get the Facts Out

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.

Normalizing Computations across the Physics Curriculum

Computational modeling can provide a hands-on interactive component in a course that is otherwise entirely Zoom-based. In the introductory, calculus-based course, students can build and explore principle-based models of both hypothetical and real-world systems. They can explore the effect of varying parameters, and can construct models to help determine whether videos of physical phenomena are real or faked. However, the challenges of teaching basic computational ideas to students with no previous computational experience are also magnified in this environment. Creating pre-lab activities to teach basic concepts; ensuring that computational activities are adequately scaffolded, and convincing students to interact with each other in breakout rooms have proven central to success.

Integrating computation in a remote introductory course

There is a national push to better prepare our physics students in computation. How did these efforts translate to the rapid adaptation to virtual learning in response to the pandemic? In this talk, I will outline 1) computational tools that enabled remote learning of computation in my classes and 2) modifications to how I traditionally integrate computation to address the accommodation and empathy necessary as the students navigate the uncertainty of the pandemic. I will discuss using Jupyter and JupyterHub for various courses, Gradescope for real-time code feedback, and CodeCollab for collaborative coding.

Computational tools and humane instincts: computation in a pandemic

This study investigates what college-level and high-school-level variables significantly predict FMCE (Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation) pretest scores and whether differences in these variables explain gender differences observed in FMCE pretest scores. The sample consists of students attending a large eastern land-grant university in the US who are enrolled in the introductory calculus-based mechanics class (N=1060). Variables examined include college performance, high school preparation, and non-academic variables such as sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and personality. Correlation analysis and linear regression were used to understand relations between these variables. 



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