United States

This talk describes a two-week module on astrodynamics developed for incoming STEM students. The goal of the module is for students to design and simulate a mission from Earth to Venus using the Hohmann transfer---a space maneuver used to travel between two planetary orbits. This application was selected because it utilizes a variety of introductory physics topics. The participants were all low-income, Pell-eligible college students; most were Black, Hispanic, and/or first-generation college students. This group is most at risk of leaving STEM, yet 80% of students who took this course were retained in STEM. In this talk we will present the course learning objectives, details of the Hohmann transfer simulation in VPython, and student outcomes including grades, retention rates, and survey results. This module could be replicated at the high school or college levels to help students achieve proficiency in programming while learning basic physics and astronomy content.

AAPT WM 22

Summer Short Course on Astrodynamics for Incoming STEM Majors

orbital mechanics

hohmann transfer

vpython

summer program

modeling

The annual UI conference has grown from a meeting to a community of more than 6,000 researchers, program officers, evaluators, program directors, training faculty, and others within STEM, and now operates with a mission to mutually inform scholarship and practice, develop and enhance the community interested in educational interventions, and provide professional development for all STEM persons. UI held its first Virtual conference in December of 2020 in response to Covid-19 restrictions that forced the cancellation of the original March 2020 in person meeting. Born out of necessity, the virtual conference introduced a format that provided pre conference availability of symposia, Deeper Dives and Poster presentations. The 13th Annual Understanding Interventions Conference will continue with that design and we foresee future conferences adopting aspects of that format in reaching a virtual audience as well as those who attend the conferences in-person.

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.

The cost to attend the conference is $150. There are special rates for post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, as well as conference grants that can be provided for those with need. Registration for the conference is open, with additional information to come.

13th Conference on Understanding Interventions 2021

The annual UI conference has grown from a meeting to a community of more than 6,000 researchers, program officers, evaluators, program directors, training faculty, and others within STEM, and now operates with a mission to mutually inform scholarship and practice, develop and enhance the community interested in educational interventions, and provide professional development for all STEM persons. 

technical paper

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.

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.

The Growth of a Physics Learning Assistant over Four Semesters

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.

Students mentoring students eases diversity conversation and increases success rates

One of the broad concerns about the future of physics education research is a relative paucity of active PER groups at colleges and universities that are not primarily focused upon research. Yet, institutions that are primarily focused on teaching need to replicate these studies directly, whether to confirm that results at different university types are similar, or to identify differing outcomes that are connected to institutional type. Differences in institutional focus attract different student populations, and hence, different student motivations, which can directly affect data results from long-recognized quantitative and qualitative measuring instruments. This poster outlines a preliminary “lay of the land” view from the perspective of a solo PER researcher working at a regional comprehensive state university – both as an example of a non-research university and looking at other teaching-focused institution types – in order to determine the current outlook of PER’s growth outside the research university.

PER outside Research Universities: A Solo PER Perspective

Amazon Prime's much-anticipated television adaptation of The Wheel of Time book series premiered in November 2021. The series is based on broadly acclaimed source material and features a talented and diverse cast and writing staff. With a market continuing to demand high-fantasy entertainment, the show is expected to entertain for years to come. This premiere also presents an opportunity for physics educators to engage with students, as the original series author, the late Robert Jordan, majored in physics and consistently incorporated his physics background into the story’s setting. I review some of the history of this series and outline thoughts for how we might use this material to engage our students in discussion of physics concepts and representation in the physics community.

Engaging Physics Students with The Wheel of Time

The standard view is that space and time act together, putting&nbsp;aside the energetic component, leaving STR to paradox over it. GTR clears this up and deals, inclusively, with accelerated frames, where energy acting over spacetime is the essential part of the GTR equation. Still, the primary attention is over, the challenged to imagine Minkowski's 4-dimensional spacetime. Their representation commonly expresses a curved space & time consequence of energy over spacetime instead from its origins, the equivalent moving space by the presence of proper energy and the surrounding ones.

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