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Students in algebra-based introductory physics often struggle with foundational algebra skills, such as manipulating equations to solve for a particular variable. Instructors aim to help students develop these skills, but constraints on time and curriculum limit these opportunities. How can we support students in developing these algebra skills in a physics class? To address this question, we have developed Solve-It, a choice-based assessment (Schwartz &amp; Arena, 2013) that allows us to simultaneously support and study students’ algebra skills development. In Solve-It, students choose what operations to apply to an equation to solve for the relevant variable, getting visual feedback on their progress toward a solution. We report on a pilot study in which undergraduate students in two sections of introductory physics (N~60) used Solve-It during the semester. We analyze logfiles of students’ choices within Solve-It and their correlations with pre-post gains on a survey of algebra skills to look for evidence of learning during the semester. In particular we corroborate pre-post survey data with logfile analysis to examine whether some students learned how to “undo” a misstep by applying the inverse operation.

PERC SM 21

Supporting and Studying Introductory Physics Students’ Algebra Skills with Solve-It

algebra

technology

assessment

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

Students in algebra-based introductory physics often struggle with foundational algebra skills, such as manipulating equations to solve for a particular variable. Instructors aim to help students develop these skills, but constraints on time and curriculum limit these opportunities. How can we support students in developing these algebra skills in a physics class? To address this question, we have developed Solve-It, a choice-based assessment (Schwartz & Arena, 2013) that allows us to simultaneously support and study students’ algebra skills development. In Solve-It, students choose what operations to apply to an equation to solve for the relevant variable, getting visual feedback on their progress toward a solution. We report on a pilot study in which undergraduate students in two sections of introductory physics (N~60) used Solve-It during the semester. We analyze logfiles of students’ choices within Solve-It and their correlations with pre-post gains on a survey of algebra skills to look for evidence of learning during the semester. In particular we corroborate pre-post survey data with logfile analysis to examine whether some students learned how to “undo” a misstep by applying the inverse operation.

poster

The Teaching Practices Inventory (TPI) was modified to be valid for both face-to-face and online course modalities. The original TPI was found to lack face validity based on responses collected from 90 instructors teaching general education science, mathematics, and social science courses primarily online at a midwestern research university during the anthropogenic disaster of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Several TPI items were rewritten by a team composed of discipline-based education researchers in the sciences and social sciences and education researchers. Further refinement and final content validity was established through external review by experts in online education and a diverse group of instructors. The resulting survey was administered to 92 instructors representing 12 departments and teaching via a variety of modalities (online, hybrid, and face-to-face), establishing face validity across modalities and disciplines. Concurrent validity was established via alignment of modified TPI items to items from the Online SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR) rubric. The resulting inventory provides a generalized self-report on the prevalence of high-impact practices valid for science, mathematics, and social science courses whether offered online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of the two.

Modification and Validation of the Teaching Practices Inventory for Online Courses

We report our preliminary efforts to evaluate a departmental project: the inclusion of computational methods across our undergraduate curriculum. Our overarching goal is for students to consider computational approaches as a “normal” way to solve physics problems, on par with analytical approaches. In this paper, we focus on our efforts to evaluate the development of our students’ attitudes and self-efficacy with respect to key computational methods. We describe our efforts to develop and deploy a survey instrument students complete each semester. This allows us to study, e.g., the points in the curriculum at which students gain confidence with particular methods, or adopt more expert-like attitudes regarding computation in general. We investigated the reliability of our instrument using a split-half process and found the Spearman-Brown coefficients for unequal length were r = 0.818, r = 0.895, and r = 0.917 for the three constructs in our survey. We also provide preliminary data from the early use of the survey and outline next steps for the project.

Preliminary efforts to evaluate an initiative introducing computation across the undergraduate physics curriculum

We present an ongoing qualitative analysis of twenty-six interviews about computation in introductory mechanics courses. The interviews are part of a longer term project to develop an assessment protocol for computation in introductory physics. Interviews were coded into twenty-seven different nodes. Sub-nodes and themes were then found and developed. This paper focuses specifically on the node, and its sub-nodes and themes, with the most anecdotes (197): "Important Computational Topics". This node is mainly comprised of computational skills or ideas that interviewees expect students to gain during the course of taking an introductory physics course with computation integrated. This node was broken into five themes with 44 sub-nodes. The five themes are: technical programming skills and knowledge, program environment best practices, physics and programming, barrier reduction strategies, and restraints. The sub-nodes with the most agreement between subjects are:"Read Code", "Scaffolding Incomplete Code","Quality Plotting", "No Code From Scratch", "Identifying Core Physics", and "Code Commenting"

Identifying important computational skills in introductory physics: An interview analysis

Pre-assessments are common tools for research and pedagogy in higher education, but they may pose risks that are largely unexplored. To investigate potential risks to students, instructors, and researchers, we conducted ten semi-structured interviews with college students about their experiences taking pre-assessments. The students unanimously found pre-assessments to be non-threatening and their performance on them to be inconsequential. 

They did not interpret pre-assessments as a predictor of success or indicator of their inherent ability. Instead, the students attributed their pre-assessment performance to having previously taken a relevant course with similar assessment items.

As a result, half of the students were not motivated at all to put effort into taking the pre-assessment.

The students believed that pre-assessments are intended to inform the instructor in making tailored course revisions to meet student needs. 

Students valued pre-assessments more if they believed that the instructor uses the pre-assessment results to make course revisions, but half of the students disbelieved that their instructor does so.

Taken together, our findings suggest that pre-assessments do not pose a direct risk to students, but they may indirectly affect students' learning experience or relationship with the instructor if the use of pre-assessments undermines the instructor's credibility. Moreover, students' lack of motivation to complete pre-assessments can render them an inaccurate measure for instructors and researchers. We therefore encourage instructors and researchers to clearly communicate the specific uses of a pre-assessment to students before assigning it.

Student perceptions of pre-assessments: "It's basically just guessing anyways''

Recent research on faculty adoption and adaptation of research-based instructional materials suggests that development and dissemination of such materials should center instructors’ productive ideas about teaching and learning and should build on instructors’ current instructional practices. We are focussed on the development and dissemination of resources-oriented instructional materials—materials that elicit and build on students’ productive ideas. To inform this work, we interviewed 17 physics faculty members to understand their current ideas and practices, and what might make these materials appealing. In this paper, we illustrate three specific themes that we identified in physics faculty members’ resources-oriented perspectives of students’ ideas and learning. We find that faculty are captivated by the novelty of students’ ideas; notice consistencies between students’ prior knowledge and physics concepts; and identify contexts in which students’ ideas are correct. These themes inform curriculum development and dissemination efforts as well as research-based implementation materials that support instructors in their use of resources-oriented curricular materials.

Centering physics faculty ideas about resources-oriented instruction

Answer checking is widely recognized as an important part of the problem-solving process. Yet, many instructors find it difficult to teach students to adopt successful and sophisticated answer checking strategies, such as dimensional analysis or checking the limits of resulting expressions. An open question is whether students’ difficulty with answer checking is purely due to cognitive barriers, or whether motivation or epistemological framing also plays a role. In this study, we examined students’ epistemologies when engaged in an answer checking task. We found that more advanced students not only used more sophisticated strategies to check an answer to a static equilibrium problem but that they were also more likely to view answer checking from a conceptual frame while more novice students viewed answer-checking as an algorithmic task. We also found that more advanced students spent more time forming and checking predictions, while more novice students spent their time accumulating pieces of information. Unlike previous work on student epistemologies, our work suggests that answer-checking requires frequent shifting of epistemological frames, which could plausibly explain the difficulty that more novice students have to engage in this task. Our findings generally align with expectations but point to the need for more work studying student epistemologies when engaged in different types of physics tasks.

Epistemological framing and strategy use during answer-checking

Research suggests that contemporary physics topics such as quantum mechanics are among the physics topics that garner the most interest from secondary students. However, introducing these topics in a secondary physics classroom is rife with challenges. Topics like quantum mechanics can be introduced in a strictly conceptual manner without the need of complex mathematical formulism, but its counterintuitive and nondeterministic nature often inhibits student comprehension and acceptance of quantum principles. As revealed from our recent study, students hold such a common perspective that quantum mechanics is a complex version of Newtonian mechanics. After a prolonged exposure to the Newtonian framework in K-12 education, students need an ontological shift to appreciate the stochastic nature of quantum physics. Students should have a chance to learn this subject matter in secondary school and not be limited to 19th-century physics. In this paper, we present some ontologically prominent barriers for secondary students and propose possible instructional approaches to facilitate students’ ontological shift.

Ontological barriers to contemporary physics instruction in secondary classroom

Active learning has been widely studied across secondary and post-secondary STEM contexts. One example of a well-researched student-centered pedagogy is modeling instruction, which has been taught at FIU in the introductory calculus-based physics courses for close to two decades and has been found to have significant, positive benefits both to students’ conceptual learning gains and their attitudes. In our current work, we seek to extend the pedagogical practices of modeling instruction into advanced physics courses, beginning with modern physics (a prerequisite to several advanced physics courses for physics majors and minors). We also added course modules based on the STEP UP project (stepupphysics.org) that engage students in a semester-long discussion on the range of careers accessible via the study of physics with the aim of supporting students’ professional and identity development. To assess the outcomes for students, we used pre-to-post measures of the Relativity Concept Inventory and the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey, as well assessments of students’ general science and physics identities. In this poster, we will present the findings of two semesters’ worth of this data, with implications for future offerings of this course.

Impacts of modeling physics-inspired pedagogical practices and career development activities on student learning and identity growth in modern physics

Students and experts engage in a plethora of sophisticated ways of thinking during modeling tasks, blending between mathematical and physical reasoning. This integrated way of reasoning about quantities and how they are related is ubiquitous to “thinking like a physicist.” One facet of this process is covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how changes in one quantity relate to changes in another quantity. In laboratory courses that engage students in experimental design, students commonly use covariational reasoning as they model changing quantities and the relationships between them. However, those without strong mathematical reasoning skills may unintentionally be perceived as also having less nuanced physics reasoning skills. To investigate the multifaceted ways students model in physics lab courses, we examined student discussions during remote, student-designed labs in which students interact with physical, but fictitious, matter in a virtual reality (VR) simulation. The VR environment allows for students to observe and measure novel situations for which the “answer,” in this case a mathematical model about the particles’ behavior, is not known. Using a conceptual blend analysis, we examine two lab groups that take different approaches to the task, despite beginning with the same observations and reporting on the same final model. One group demonstrates expert-like mathematical reasoning that is typically rewarded in physics courses, while the other engages in early signs of expert-like physics reasoning. Our analysis suggests that there are productive ideas emerging in both groups, and that of the less mathematically rigorous may be going unnoticed. We suggest that characterizing these features of physics covariational reasoning may provide an opportunity to move beyond data analysis techniques in lab courses towards incorporating more physics expert-like techniques. In doing so, instructors may recognize hidden strengths that may otherwise go undetected.

Emerging covariational reasoning student resources in physics lab courses

The University of Washington Bothell (UWB) STEM Public Outreach Team (SPOT) trains undergraduate students to give presentations and lead activities related to current STEM research topics. During 2020 and 2021 the SPOT program pivoted to online classrooms and events with adaptations that will carry forward. Access and availability for the SPOT Student Ambassadors as well as the participating schools and community groups has been expanded through online engagement options. The SPOT program collaborates with the UW Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) on Evaluating the Impact of Participation in STEM Outreach on Persistence of Diverse Students in Physics, Math, and Engineering.

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Supporting and Studying Introductory Physics Students’ Algebra Skills with Solve-It

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