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Modeling is an important skill in experimental physics and thus a learning outcome of many laboratory classes. One promising approach to help students develop modeling skills is to incorporate multi-week student-designed projects within lab courses. In order to assess the potential benefits of these projects towards students&#39; modeling abilities, we analyze student coursework and interviews in three upper-division lab courses at different institutions. We present a descriptive analysis of student engagement with modeling in student-designed course projects. We find that the projects in our dataset vary widely with different degrees of modeling and different ways model construction and revision appear as parts of the projects. We additionally investigate how the student engagement depends on features of the projects and observe correlations between features of the projects and the ways the students construct models and enact revisions.

PERC SM 21

Student Engagement with Modeling in Multi-Week Student-Designed Lab Projects

student-designed projects

modeling

labs

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.

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AAPT SM 21

Modeling is an important skill in experimental physics and thus a learning outcome of many laboratory classes. One promising approach to help students develop modeling skills is to incorporate multi-week student-designed projects within lab courses. In order to assess the potential benefits of these projects towards students' modeling abilities, we analyze student coursework and interviews in three upper-division lab courses at different institutions. We present a descriptive analysis of student engagement with modeling in student-designed course projects. We find that the projects in our dataset vary widely with different degrees of modeling and different ways model construction and revision appear as parts of the projects. We additionally investigate how the student engagement depends on features of the projects and observe correlations between features of the projects and the ways the students construct models and enact revisions.

poster

**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

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 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.

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

The Paradigms in Physics website provides a wide range of tested active engagement activities for upper division courses. Our team has been redesigning this site to add considerable "mortar" content between activities, to make the content more readily searchable, and to make more clear the connections between content. We have also been working to make it easier to keep the content fresh, and to give users a clearer perspective of how we use our own materials. This poster will introduce the features of the new site, and we will solicit audience feedback on how the site could better serve faculty seeking research-based content.

The new Paradigms in Physics Curriculum Website

To develop effective physics-based engineering curricula for K-6 classrooms, we need to understand the areas of support teachers need most, as well as their assumptions about their elementary students’ abilities to succeed in engineering activities. To understand teacher perceptions of the relationships between the teacher, the students, and the physics-based engineering content we analyzed semi-structured interviews with five 4–6th grade teachers who participated in a curricular module centered around the behavior of light as it passes through various materials. Teachers discussed how engineering modules led to more collaborative learning that was student-driven and created space for increased engagement for students who normally are reluctant to participate. On the other hand, teachers felt that materials required for the activities served as a barrier for implementation of the activities while the level of mathematics incorporated into the activities served as a barrier for younger students. These findings may inform future curriculum development to best support teachers in implementing physics-based engineering curricula in their classrooms.

Relations between Teacher, Student, and Content in Physics-based Engineering Activities

We developed a number of digital tools to support teaching quantum mechanics. The idea behind that is main concepts of quantum mechanics are non-intuitive to an uninitiated student due to the lack of daily experience with quantum mechanics: The basis of intuition is experience. Therefore, teaching quantum mechanics with a support of numerical experiments for all main topics of quantum mechanics appears to be essential for an efficient and quick learning process. The numerical experiments are prepared using PYTHON computer codes and a graphical interface. Students and instructors can use the graphical interface to change parameters of the suggested numerical experiments or they can download, modify and run the codes on their personal computers. Finally, a website, gathering overall numerical experiments, was designed. It can be used by universities and institutions in their different educations.

Next from PERC SM 21

Identifying important computational skills in introductory physics: An interview analysis

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Student Engagement with Modeling in Multiweek Open-Ended Lab Projects