United States

In October 2016 the Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs issued its report, Preparing Physics Students for 21 Century Careers. This effort by AAPT and APS provided guidance to physics departments that seek to foster the knowledge and skills their students need to be successful in a wide range of careers, which might include (but are not limited to) graduate education in physics and related fields. Since that time many departments have taken up the challenge to serve their students in this way, and follow-on activities of the professional societies have provided additional resources. I will describe some of these efforts, including the EPIC (Educating Physicists for Impactful Careers) report produced by the Pathways to Innovation Physics Entrepreneurship: Launching Institutional Engagement (PIPELINE) project. I hope that learning about these activities will inspire more departments to take a piece of the PIE (Physics Innovation and Entrepreneurship).

AAPT WM 22

Phys21 in 2021: Progress in Implementation

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UI is excited to announce the rescheduled 12th Annual Conference on Understanding Interventions December 10 & 12, 2020! As you may recall, the original conference scheduled back in March 2020 had to be cancelled due the worsening global conditions, and further declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay tuned for details regarding the virtual conference.

On December 10, 2020 from 12:00-5:00pm (EST), and December 12, 2020 from 11:00am-5:00pm (EST), UI will host the Virtual 12th Annual Understanding Interventions Conference powered by Underline. Attendees will experience plenaries, workshops, symposia, and poster presentations on hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in STEM careers. The conference will continue to facilitate the dialogue among education, behavioral, and social science researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM fields who participate in intervention programs. Graduate students in these fields are strongly encouraged to attend. Workshops, sessions, and posters will communicate effective strategies from successful STEM intervention programs, present results from empirical research studies, and synthesize the translation of research findings into practice on STEM learning, undergraduate research, graduate education, and student retention.

12th Conference on Understanding Interventions 2020

12th Annual Understanding Interventions Conference continues to facilitate the dialogue among education, behavioral, and social science researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM fields who participate in intervention programs. Workshops, sessions, and posters communicate effective strategies from successful STEM intervention programs, present results from empirical research studies, and synthesize the translation of research findings into practice on STEM learning, undergraduate research, graduate education, and student retention.

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This meeting is a great opportunity to explore sessions and workshops designed with your professional development in mind. Present your research and exchange ideas on the latest in teaching and pedagogy. Participate in a wide range of events, activities, plenaries, and so much more, connecting you with peers and colleagues who share your commitment to excellence in physics education.

Physicists are likely to encounter ethical dilemmas during their careers. However, physics students are often not taught about ethics during their degrees. It is imperative that future physicists are introduced to the real-world implications of their work in order to develop their ethical reasoning skills. At Texas State University, we have developed and implemented an ethics unit for a new Observational Astrophysics course. The unit is centered on the potential construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. We video-recorded whole class and small group discussions via Zoom from Spring 2021 to study the responses of students throughout the unit. In this talk, I will share examples of how students respond to prompts that invoke their ethical reasoning skills within physics, and consider how they navigate ethical discussions with their classmates.

Analyzing Students’ Discussions about Ethical Dilemmas in Physics

The conversion of lecture-based physics and astronomy classes to online instruction is reported. The role of active learning techniques in achieving the transition and the results of incorporating active learning in the online courses is discussed. A significant increase in remote and online instruction has occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased popularity of distance learning. Sustaining student engagement and communication in online classes is critical and can be achieved using active learning techniques. How the active learning techniques were incorporated into the online curriculum, the types of active learning materials used, and the outcomes from the inclusion will be discussed. Pre to post gains from quantitative assessments made with the CLASS, CTSR, TOAST, and LPCI, and qualitative assessment results from interviews and free response surveys will be presented. There were good pre-post gains observed on the concept inventories and students reported satisfaction and improved conceptual understanding.

Teaching online courses with active learning techniques

Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) are an increasingly large set of higher education institutions. From 2010-2020 the number of HSIs went from 311 to 569. Within the PER community, research perspectives from HSIs have provided critical insights into how to support racially and ethnically diverse students in physics education. This presentation will investigate the number of physics education researchers at HSIs, the fraction of HSIs that have physics education researchers, and demographic data from IPEDS providing information about how HSIs contribute to the diversity of undergraduate physics students and graduate physics students in comparison to other institutions. In addition, we will examine themes from funded research and publications at HSIs to highlight how physics education&nbsp;researchers center their HSI’s unique student population in their research and what ways these unique populations advance physics education research.

Investigating the Impact of HSIs on Physics and PER

The physics gender gap is a well-known discrepancy in performance between male and female students despite having similar prior preparation. With an increase in the use of technology, new ways of instruction have been developed such as Interactive Video-EnhancedTutorials (IVETs). The IVETs involve web-based activities that lead students through a problem solution using expert-like problem-solving approaches. Several IVETs were evaluated by comparing the performance of students who completed the IVET with those who watched a non-interactive video solution (control group) which utilizes the same problem-solving approaches as the IVET on a paired problem on the same concepts. Results show that for the IVET group, women who had collectively performed worse on the previous exam, either reduced or reversed the gap between them and their male counterparts on the paired problem, while in the control group, there was no difference from the results of the previous exam.

Reducing the Gender Gap in Introductory Physics using Interactive Tutorials

I will report the results of using student story-telling as a pedagogical technique in physics that I have applied four college courses: a two-semester Introductory Physics course, Modern Physics, and Statistical Mechanics. Students were asked to research biographies of physicists and present 5-7 minute summaries that went beyond a narration of facts and events but provide context and connections. Students were asked to focus on what motivated physicists to study physics, what challenges they faced, their contributions and hobbies apart from physics, and how they interacted with other scientists in their time. A special effort was made to promote story-telling of the background and contributions of women and minorities in physics. I will report on student responses and reactions to this effort, based on blind surveys, exam results and general observations.

Student Storytelling in Physics Courses to Promote Engagement and Diversity

Goals for inclusivity can be met in physics classrooms that focus on self-advocacy and empowerment through disciplinary practices, foci that are critical in high school physics courses and pre-service teacher preparation programs. We’ve published work demonstrating that in such learning environments, learning gains are similar for students from minority and majority groups. These data provide the foundation for PEER Physics, a curriculum-driven professional learning community for both High School physics and teacher preparation. We now evaluate these courses from a new perspective by exploring student attitudes and beliefs towards physics and their physics learning experiences, as assessed using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and student reflections. Comparisons of student attitudes before and after their course experience suggest they came to see science in a way more similar to how experts do, and these shifts in opinion were greater among traditionally underserved student groups.

Student Attitudes When We Focus on Self-advocacy Through Disciplinary Practices

One of the important but challenging topics students face in introductory quantum mechanics is perturbation theory. Difficulties arise over questions such as validity, namely when a perturbation is considered ``small'', or what states are ``good'' in degenerate perturbation theory. We discuss a multipronged treatment of perturbation with analytical approach augmented with numerical and symbolic computation. In this approach we are able to compute and compare against exact results, sometimes analytical but most often numerical, to ascertain the effect of perturbation. Not only does computation help cut down mathematical drudgery, it also enables more in-depth study. For instance, one can find with ease good states beyond the standard 2-state treatment in degenerate perturbation calculations (see https://jwang.sites.umassd.edu/ for examples).

Perturbation: Analytical vs Numerical Treatment

Many curricula challenge students to explain discrepant events. Dual process theories can account for the tension learners experience between competing lines of thinking. When faced with a novel problem, the heuristic process generates an initial model, based on recognition. These models can be inconsistent with formal knowledge, such as Newton’s laws, learners have developed. In some cases, cognitive reflection initiates scrutiny of the initial model by the analytic process, with the possibility of formal knowledge being activated. But how readily can learners override a strongly appealing intuitive idea in favor of formal knowledge? In an ongoing collaboration, we have been developing “screening-target” question pairs that elicit normative reasoning in low distraction contexts, but trigger alternative models in related, higher distraction contexts. We have used selected pairs in interviews. This talk shares a case study of a student holding competing reasoning in tension, using dual process theory as an interpretive lens.

The Challenge of Evaluating Consistency of Competing Lines of Thinking*

Comparisons of the effectiveness of two instructional interventions in a general education physics class on improving students’ scientific reasoning skills and attitudes toward science were made. The first intervention was to have students watch short videos on scientific topics while completing worksheets. The second was to have students manipulate PhET simulations and complete worksheets based on those simulations. The instructional interventions were applied for two control semesters, three video treatment semesters, and two PhET manipulation semesters. The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey was used to assess the students’ attitudes about science and Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning was used to assess the students’ scientific reasoning skills. Pre and Post assessment results are presented and compared for the control semesters, video activity semesters, and PhET manipulation semesters. Initial findings showed improvements in both student attitudes toward science and students' scientific reasoning skills with both interventions.

Investigating Student Attitudes and Curricular Benefits from Two Instructional Interventions

This study investigates how college-level and high-school-level variables affect FMCE (Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation) pretest and post-test 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, personality, and demographics. Correlation analysis and linear regression were used to understand relations between these variables. High school physics preparation and student achievement in high school physics were consistently the most important variable in explaining pretest scores.

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