United States

Upper division thermodynamics courses require students to develop proficiency with several combinatorial topics. While little research has been done to establish student comfort and proficiency with these topics within physics, anecdotally, instructors of these courses report that students experience unaddressed challenges when working with combinatorics. Through examining student solutions to questions on homework assignments and examinations, we identified some common student difficulties with combinatorics in the context of an upper-division thermodynamics and statistical mechanics course at a large research university. Some of these common challenges include identifying how to work with distinguishability and order, checking formulas against a specific case, and combining the multiplicities of multiple systems.

PERC SM 21

Understanding combinatorics challenges in an upper-division thermodynamics course

combinatorics

thermodynamics

upper-division

**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

poster

The Physics and Astronomy Department at San Francisco State University is undertaking a comprehensive reform of our introductory physics laboratory courses, including training graduate teaching assistants, reflective journaling, and a move away from the previously used verification-style labs. As we make these changes, we have been administering a variety of surveys to gain insight into students’ skills, attitudes, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging in the lab environment. The survey used for this study is the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) assessment, which measures students’ performance in numerical skills commonly used in STEM (eg. graph reading, table reading, arithmetic, proportional reasoning, estimation, percentages, etc.) as well as their attitudes surrounding quantitative reasoning. Between Fall 2018 - Spring 2021 we collected roughly 5000 QuaRCS responses across the following courses prior to instruction: a three-semester calculus-based physics sequence targeted toward engineering, computer science and physical science majors; a two-semester algebra-based physics sequence targeted toward students in the biosciences; a one-semester conceptual physics course; and a one-semester conceptual astronomy course. Through factor analysis and mediation analysis of these data, we identify factors affecting students’ quantitative skills performance, such as numerical self-efficacy, numerical anxiety, numerical relevancy, school math affect, daily life math affect, and course motivation. Through this analysis, we can better understand the attributes of students at SFSU that contribute to their success. By leveraging these attributes in the introductory labs we hope to better support the diverse population of students in our courses.

Factors Affecting Introductory Physics Students’ Quantitative Reasoning Skills and Attitudes at a Large, Hispanic-Serving University

The Paradigms @ OSU team developed a kinesthetic representation for complex numbers where individual students use their arms to embody an Argand diagram. This representation can be expanded to have groups of students working together to represent complex-valued state vectors in quantum mechanics. We conducted group teaching interviews about the relative and overall phase of 2- and 3-element state vectors to uncover how students understand geometric relationships using the Arms Representation. We interviewed nine students in the second week of a junior-level, spins-first quantum mechanics course after they had been introduced to complex numbers via the Arms Representation, but before quantum mechanical state vectors had been addressed in class. This poster will discuss how the Arms Representation supported students in understanding that an overall phase does not change the relative phase. In particular, we will attend to the conceptual support offered by the Arms Representation, the geometric interpretations of phase, and the ways students translate between the Arms Representation, Argand diagrams, and algebraic notations.

Teaching Relative & Overall Phase with the Arms Representation

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

We report on an investigation in which we compare the conceptual performance of upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, who worked on two different validated Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorials (QuILTs). One of the QuILTs incorporates mathematical reasoning while focusing on helping students develop a good conceptual understanding of quantum optics using a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer with single photons and polarizers. Performance of students who engaged with this “hybrid” (integrated conceptual and quantitative) QuILT is compared with those who engaged with a conceptual QuILT focusing on the same topics without quantitative tools. Both QuILTs use a guided inquiry-based approach to learning and are based on research on student difficulties in learning these challenging concepts as well as a cognitive task analysis from an expert perspective. We find that the posttest performance on conceptual questions of physics graduate students who engaged with the hybrid QuILT was generally better than those who engaged with the conceptual QuILT. For undergraduate students, the results were mixed.

Impact of introducing mathematical reasoning on students’ understanding of quantum optics

This study investigated the impact of an instructional intervention on student scientific reasoning skills and general attitudes toward science. The intervention consisted of nine PhET simulations introduced to a general education physics class. Students manipulated the simulations while completing worksheets testing their comprehension of the concepts and the scientific reasoning being displayed. Completion of each PhET simulation activity took students about 50 minutes to complete. Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning was administered to assess improvement in student scientific reasoning skills, and the CLASS was used to assess changes in student attitudes towards science. Pre-to post Lawson results show gains in scientific reasoning. CLASS pre to post indicated overall shifts to expert-like responses. Qualitative data in the form of student surveys was collected and showed approval of use PhET simulations in the class.

Effect of PhET simulations in a general education physics course

Homework lets students practice the problem-solving process. The focus on process, rather than final answer, is particularly important. Unfortunately, many online homework systems, and some traditional pencil-and-paper strategies, grade based on the correct answer rather than students' written thought process. This can shift student focus away from the process. We have scaled a homework structure that emphasizes the problem-solving process and metacognitive reflection. Students are required to follow a problem-solving format developed previously, which has been shown to increase student metacognition.* In our procedure, students self-grade the completeness of their homework, and instructors perform a specific spot-check to increase student accountability. The spot-check takes minimal instructor time to administer and therefore can be scaled to large courses. Additionally, this homework structure shows high student satisfaction by the end of the term.

Scalable, pencil-and-paper homework with metacognitive student outcomes and minimal instructor time

Research-validated clicker questions as instructional tools for formative assessment are relatively easy to implement and can provide effective scaffolding when developed and implemented in a sequence. We present findings from the implementation of a research-validated Clicker Question Sequence (CQS) on student understanding of the time-development of two-state quantum systems. This study was conducted in an advanced undergraduate quantum mechanics course. The effectiveness of the CQS was determined by evaluating students’ performance after traditional lecture-based instruction and comparing it to their performance after engaging with the CQS.

Using a clicker question sequence to teach time-development in quantum mechanics

Two-year colleges (TYCs) have unique opportunities to support their students, for example through close student-teacher relationships due to small class sizes, and we studied one such class in a cohort program at a TYC for natural science majors intending to transfer. This course was a STEM research methods course that we observed by taking field notes, administering written journal reflections to the students throughout the course, and by interviewing some of the students at the end of the course. In this poster, we will discuss the ways instructor support helped the students feel higher self-efficacy for scientific research and a greater tolerance for obstacles.

Methods for Observing and Characterizing a TYC Research Methods Course

An emerging body of research suggests that, even after research-based instruction, poor student performance on certain physics tasks may stem primarily from domain-general reasoning phenomena rather than from a lack of conceptual understanding. The reasoning patterns (and inconsistencies) reported in these studies may be explained by dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR). In order to help students strengthen their reasoning skills and support increased cognitive reflection, there is a need to design and test instructional intervention strategies that leverage DPToR and that may ultimately guide the development of research-based curricular materials that attend to the nature of human reasoning more explicitly. This investigation focused on an intervention designed to support analytical processing in which students were asked to set aside their own reasoning and engage in alternative lines of reasoning. In the intervention, students first responded to a qualitative physics task, then constructed reasoning chains in support of answers to that task given by two fictitious students, and finally revisited the original physics task. Analysis revealed that this intervention was successful at improving student performance. Furthermore, it appears to have supported students regardless of their cognitive reflection skills, and its effectiveness may potentially be correlated with the quality of reasoning chains generated in support of the correct fictitious student's response.

Supporting student construction of alternative lines of reasoning

Engaging with models has been considered central to the practice of doing science as it facilitates sensemaking of the world around us. Therefore, engaging students in the practice of using models is an important component of their science education. But to do so effectively, we also need to understand how students use models in their work. Consequently, we require a way to analyzing students' use of models. In the current work, we present an analytical framework which characterizes students' use of models by considering common themes from the existing literature on modeling in physics. These themes present themselves as five components: (i) Presence of a real-world phenomenon, (ii) Use of representation(s) depicting the phenomenon, (iii) Invoking of conceptual knowledge organized around representation(s), (iv) Presence of explanation/prediction about the phenomenon and (v) Linking the explanation/prediction to a representation through appropriate reasoning. Analysis of students' written and verbal responses to physics problems through these components indicate that students seldom link the predictions made to the representations through reasoning, and, when they do, representations are often mathematical equations even though diagrams are present in their solution.

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Understanding combinatorics challenges in an upper-division thermodynamics course

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