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Our open-source textbook, Exploring Physical Phenomena: What Happens When Light from the Sun Shines on the Earth? is now available at https://open.oregonstate.education/physicsforteachers. Each unit begins by identifying student resources for learning, developing central ideas based on evidence from exploring phenomena with everyday equipment and materials, using central ideas to explain intriguing phenomena, developing mathematical representations of the phenomena, using those representations to predict or estimate a quantity of interest, and making connections to educational policies such as the Next Generation Science Standards. All units include examples of student work by prospective elementary and middle school teachers while exploring light and thermal phenomena, considering the influence of light and thermal phenomena on local weather and global climate change, and exploring astronomical phenomena in the context of the Sun/Earth/Moon system. Supplemental materials include instructor guide for each unit, equipment lists for both on-campus and remote instruction, student handouts, and example homework assignments.

AAPT SM 21

Exploring Physical Phenomena: A Physics Course for Prospective Teachers

open source textbook

global climate change

elementary teachers

exploring phenomena

AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
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- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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AAPT WM 21

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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.

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Research-based tutorials---worksheets that guide students in constructing physics knowledge for themselves---have repeatedly proven to be a highly effective complement to lectures in physics courses. Our collaboration has created a collection of tutorials for middle-division quantum mechanics (QM), which has been successfully adopted by QM instructors nationwide. However, many instructors lack the resources and/or institutional support to run tutorials; it can be difficult to find time, space, and personnel to facilitate these activities. As an alternative, we are developing online versions of our QM tutorials that students can work through without instructor facilitation. We are designing the online tutorials to guide students through the worksheets in ways that encourage sense-making and allow students to progress without revealing the answers. For example, they include adaptive guidance pathways based on students’ responses. Early beta versions are available, for free, at acephysics.net.

Online Tutorials for Middle-Division Quantum with Adaptive Guidance

The Tennessee Technological University - STEM Majors for Rural Teaching (TTU - SMaRT) Noyce program has partnered closely with TTU's Millard Oakley STEM Center. IN this poster we describe how this mututally beneficial partnership has provided a low-stakes environment in which Noyce students gain authentic instrucitonal experiences, exposure to pedagogical innovations, menaingful interaction with practicing teachers, and early integrations with the local STEM teaching community. This partnership has also enabled the STEM Center to offer more outreach opportunities than it otherwise could. Lessons developed by scholars have contributed to a 'library' of standards-based activities that have also broadened the scope of what can be offered.

Affordances of a Noyce Program -STEM Center partnership

Understanding the basic concepts of electricity represents a major challenge to most students in K-12 education. Learners find it particularly difficult to develop a robust understanding of potential and potential difference and often believe that the electric current is “used up” by devices. A promising way of making circuits more accessible to students in introductory electricity lessons is offered by the use of analogies in combination with simulations. We therefore developed a new, analogy-based simulation of simple electric circuits. The simulation is intended for use in combination with the bike chain and the air pressure analogies, the implementation of which has been shown to support students’ development of a conceptual understanding of simple DC circuits. Teachers and students can access the 3D simulation free of charge using a modern browser.

An Analogy-Based 3D-Simulation for Teaching Simple Electric Circuits

This poster will address development and initial implementation of a NSF grant funded biomedically relevant active-learning curriculum in my second semester Physics for the Life Sciences course. This NSF grant funded curriculum provides students with a biomedically relevant curriculum that stresses the importance of physics as a basic science relevant to their future medical/healthcare careers. I will provide insight as to how I contributed in the development process and adapted curricular materials of Rotational Kinematics and Torque in a flipped classroom setting and how this benefited me in my pedagogical growth in teaching physics. Further, pre-post analysis of attitude survey results will be addressed to show the effectiveness of the curriculum. This work is supported by the grants DUE- 1934038 and DUE- 1933984 from the National Science Foundation.

Implementation of a biomedically relevant active-learning Physics curriculum

We report on a three-year grant aimed at improving the oral communication skills of STEM graduate students. By teaching storytelling techniques, playing improv games and recording podcasts, eight STEM storytellers per cohort took a year-long class to develop their skills as speakers. Funded by the NSF Innovations in Graduate Education program, (#1735124) we used formative and summative assessments for determining students’ levels of anxiety before giving talks, apprehension for public speaking, and we calculated how much jargon each student employed while discussing their thesis work for a general audience. We collected data on all three cohorts, with 22 of the 24 completing a full year of coursework related to communication skills. Quantitative and qualitative results will be shared in this poster, demonstrating that the publicly available STEM Storytellers curriculum is a powerful method for improving the oral communication skills of STEM graduate students.

Improving the Communication Skills of STEM Graduate Students

Building a positive and inclusive cohort feel among students of physics is challenging when their first postsecondary experience is in large lecture-style courses. To this end, this poster will describe the range of different communication technologies and tools that my Department has used to increase our formal and informal communication with undergraduate students of physics at different stages of their degree programs. Comparisons focus on three aspects: the instructor/administrator’s intended goal for usage, the actual usage patterns by students during (pre-COVID) in-person learning, and the actual usage patterns by students during (COVID-necessitated) remote learning.

Beyond email: effective communication strategies to engage students of physics

We implemented a fully online full year introductory physics sequence for life science and pre-health students at Portland State University during the 2020- 2021 school year. Curricular materials such as videos by experts in the medical field, content, activities, simulations, and assessments around medical examples and applications were developed. These were delivered through an adaptive, personalized, and interactive online platform Cogbooks. We plan to offer this course in-class in the upcoming school year and further study student learning and the impact of the curriculum on student attitudes.

Implementation of a Full Year Introductory Physics Sequence Pre-Health Students

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics. Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both. In this poster we will describe the process of how we selected the fluid statics constructs and the process of writing and refining the statics-related questions. Instructors interested in serving as a field test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of statics questions for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics. Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both. In this poster we will describe the process of how we selected the fluid dynamics constructs and the process of writing and refining the dynamics-related questions. Instructors interested in serving as a field test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of dynamics questions for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

Digital worksheet questions based on health and life scenarios were developed for students in an introductory physics for life science course, to practice conceptual and algebraic modeling and quantitative analysis. Many of the quantitative values used were students’ own estimations or data or choice of scenario parameters from authentic data tables and graphs provided. Students would get different numerical answers depending on their details of choice, and possibly different evaluations of what their numerical answer inferred about the scenario. These materials were meant to support student transition into exploring the physics mechanisms underlying their own health/life scenarios.

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Online Tutorials for Middle-Division Quantum with Adaptive Guidance

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Open Source Textbook: Exploring Physical Phenomena