United States

The Physics graduate program of Stony Brook University attracts students from diverse backgrounds, and involves a very intense workload right from the begining. This made it clear that it is necessary for the department to provide help in adapting to the environment, which led to the creation of a mentoring program. In the past three years, this program has undergone significant changes, the foremost being that it is heavily student-led. Besides faculty mentors, very active student mentors are assigned. This has formed a basis for improved communication between the incoming students and the department, with various benefits which range from success in making through the program requirements to overall mental health. In this talk, I will present the main characteristics and results, obtained through anonymous surveys, of this mentoring program. In the end, I will also discuss possible extensions of these methods to undergraduate programs in the US.

AAPT WM 22

Students mentoring students eases diversity conversation and increases success rates

minority in stem

peer mentoring

mental health

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.

poster

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.

Introductory physics students routinely learn about acoustical beats as a consequence of wave interference. This example is sometimes used to gesture toward heterodyning in commercial radios. Introductory physics students also learn about the overtone series as a consequence of standing waves. Overtones are then used to explain musical timbre and to hint at the importance of Fourier methods. Yet acoustical beats and the overtone series are rarely linked in introductory physics, despite the fact that musicians habitually listen for beats to tune their harmonies. Acoustical beats and harmonic overtones be can be related simply, without any extra physics background, and their relationship leads directly to the problems of musical temperament that have bedeviled musical theorists ever since Pythagoras. Such problems are outlined in this talk, along with suggestions for further reading.

Beats, Overtones, and Musical Temperament

In Spring 2018, I was approached by the Art/Communications/Theater instructors about the unhappiness of their students with the science course options at our school. After talking with them, I applied for release time at our school and was allowed time to build some lab activities that better connected Art, Theater, Music to topics studied in our conceptual physics course. The new lab activities were implemented, and we coordinated the offering of this course with the program chairs in the arts and saw a dramatic increase in enrollment numbers (enrollment increased by 220% in this course). I will present some lessons learned from this experience in building a successful general science course focused on interesting Art/Theater/Communication/Music students.

Building a Physical Science of the Arts Course

Here is an opportunity to build two modular Origami structures, an Octahedral Skeleton (OS) and a turbine. You will need 12 square sheets of paper. The OS represents 3D space, and the turbine can be used to practice rotational motion physics. The second goal is having conversations about framing, as it relates to attracting students to physics and supporting them in physics. For over a decade I have used paper model building to guide learning Physics and Mathematics. In classes for students with majors other than the sciences we use paper to learn physics concepts, skills, and work on design and Art. Teaching an Origami Science class online led to my use of GIFs for instruction. In the GIFs paper in 2D danced into a final 3D object. This dance inspired paper choreography framing of teaching and learning physics. Many students take the class to fold, and endup doing physics.

Paper Choreography Framing of Learning and Teaching Physics

In our modern society, science and art are often perceived as unrelated endeavors. However, the idea that artistic creativity and imagination can play an important role in natural sciences and engineering is finally gaining an acceptance. One of the big questions about the connection between art and science is what features make the work of art look realistic. Questions like this open the dialog between physicists and a public. For example, examining paintings, drawings, and photographs can be used to demonstrate the laws of optics. The presentation will demonstrate how the understanding of basic optics phenomena such as an absorption, scattering, reflection, refraction, diffraction, and polarization of light, is absolutely essential for creating realistic-looking paintings and drawings. Using arts in science and engineering education and outreach has a potential to attract and captivate the new audiences.

Harnessing Visual Arts to Teach About The Light And Color

Columbia College Chicago specializes in arts and media disciplines, and as a result, our most popular physics classes are "The Science of Acoustics" and "Science of Musical Instruments." Also, I have taught a course called "Physics for Filmmakers" (1) for over a decade where students create a final film project using topics and examples of their choice. I will discuss ideas from recent projects including some done over a recent remote term. I also will discuss plans to transition that course to a conceptual physics course which includes the best discussions and project prompts from "Filmmakers" but is also open to projects in music (2) and other forms of the arts.

Including art projects as part of physics courses

Logistic regression, random forest, and ensemble classification algorithms are used to predict students at risk of receiving a failing grade (D or F) in an introductory mechanics class. Institutional variables as well as student performance variables gathered from the first two weeks of class are used. Due to the imbalanced nature of the data, upsampling methods such as synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and alternative metrics such as balanced accuracy for evaluating model performance are examined. The importance of variables to the final classification is explored. The best performing models are found to achieve a balanced accuracy of around 80%.

Predicting At-Risk Students in Introductory Physics using Machine Learning

Over the last 25 years, educational researchers have encouraged practitioners to acknowledge and include culturally relevant pedagogy in physics learning. We examine current physics instructors’ views of objectivity in physics and their views of culturally relevant pedagogy. Instructors’ statements are analyzed using the conceptions of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) listed in Ladson-Billings’ (1995) framework: Conceptions of Self and Others, Conceptions of Knowledge, and Social Relations. We interviewed 11 physics instructors asking about their views towards CRP and objectivity in physics. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. We share two illustrations of instructors who had strong Conceptions of Knowledge that supported CRP: they focus on the knowledge of physics as being constructed and reconstructed - now and into the future. Findings from our study indicate that the third conception, Conceptions of Knowledge, is crucial to develop if we want physics instructors to truly and effectively use CRP.

How Perceived Objectivity in Physics Impacts Cultural Relevance in Teaching

Student understanding of measurement uncertainty is a common learning goal among introductory physics lab courses. In this study, we investigate the open-ended responses to the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) from students enrolled in the two-semester Design, Analysis, Tools, and Apprenticeship (DATA) Lab course at Michigan State University. Using an unsupervised natural language processing technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we were able to extract themes/topics from student responses to this assessment which were in line with the paradigms recently published by Pollard et al. The extracted themes from LDA were then compared to previously hand coded responses. Comparing the prevalence of the extracted topics to the frequencies of the hand-coded responses led to close agreement between the two analyses. Based on these results, topic modelling techniques may be able to provide insight into student understanding of measurement reasoning.

Investigating Open-Ended Responses to the PMQ using Natural Language Processing

The Learning Assistant Program is a relatively recent advancement in undergraduate education. The core tenet of the program aims to have undergraduate students use instructor-approved and research-backed group activities and discussions along with general peer support to encourage active participation in the course they assist in. Students requiring special accommodations make up a significant portion of students. In this poster, learning assistant anecdotes of interactions with these populations are presented. The use of learning assistants and dialogue between pertinent entities, the instructor, and the student as a means of allowing needed flexibility in these courses are explored. Sponsored by: Sujata Krishna, Ph.D.

Creating Connections

The Learning Assistant (LA) Program can be used as a pathway for students to develop pedagogical skills and gain independence in a variety of different learning environments. Here we describe the growth of a Physics LA over four semesters. Starting with a course in pedagogy along with the active facilitation of group learning, we can see the LA creating a strong foundation in their educational skills. Through diversity and inclusion trainings, the LA can start to cater to the different learning styles of students more effectively. As the LA becomes more adept in assisting students, they can take on more independent tasks like running discussion boards, providing exam reviews, and hosting office hours. After just four semesters, we can see the LA becoming self-sufficient in the classroom setting. Throughout their experience, the LA continually receives mentoring from professors and establishes rapport with peers of similar paths.

Students mentoring students eases diversity conversation and increases success rates

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Beats, Overtones, and Musical Temperament

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