United States

One expected outcome of physics instruction is that students develop quantitative reasoning skills, including strategies for evaluating solutions to problems. Examples of evaluation strategies include special case analysis, unit analysis, and checking for reasonable numbers. To investigate students’ use of evaluation strategies, we developed and administered tasks prompting students to evaluate symbolic expressions, including the electric field due to three point charges, the velocity of a block at the bottom of an incline with friction, and the final velocities of two masses involved in an elastic collision. Written and interview data were collected at the introductory, sophomore, and junior levels. We classified students’ evaluation strategies into three broad categories: consulting external sources, checking through computation, and comparing to the physical world. We compare our categories to prior work in PER and examine the categories through theoretical lenses of epistemic frames, mathematical modelling, proofs and justifications, and metacognition.

AAPT SM 22

Perspectives on Evaluation Strategies

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. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



technical paper

The use of computation in undergraduate physics education is on the rise, but this implementation faces the challenge of attending to students’ varied degrees of experience with programming. To explore how students approach learning a new programming language, we employ the resources framework, which posits that students approach new learning situations by making use of information or skills (resources) they have already developed. We designed a series of introductory Python tutorials and conducted think-aloud interviews to identify the resources that students activated while completing the tutorials. We present a preliminary analysis of two extreme cases: a student with a rich mathematical background and no programming experience, and a student with a moderate mathematical background and a rich programming experience in multiple programming languages outside of Python. These observations will help inform the further development of these tutorials to explicitly activate helpful resources.

Observations of Student Resources in Introductory Programming Tutorials

With the growing ubiquity of computation in STEM fields, understanding how to teach computational thinking (CT) practices has become an active research area in the last two decades, with particular emphasis on developing CT frameworks. In this paper, we apply one of these CT frameworks and correlate the results with a task analysis to examine how CT practices relate to specific design features of an in-class problem. We have analyzed video data from two separate groups working on one computational class period, which utilizes a minimally working program to model magnetic field vectors. While still in the initial stages of the study, our preliminary results indicate that what is left out of the minimally working program will impact the CT practices students use, particularly around building computational models. Ultimately, we hope this work will help instructors to design activities that can target & build specific CT practices.

Relating Computational Thinking Practices and Problem Design Features

In an ongoing project, we have been using dual-process theories of reasoning to make sense of student difficulties and guide the design of instruction. A focus has been on qualitative tasks in which students give a quick answer, based on an intuitively appealing model, that contradicts physics principles emphasized in their course. We have recently found some success with a HW-based intervention to address a persistent difficulty with air resistance (see Rosen et al., this meeting), and are trying to adapt the intervention to a different content domain. An overarching goal is to identify domain-general curriculum development strategies based on dual process theories. Our target domain involves the balancing of extended objects – and the documented belief that the center of mass divides an object into two pieces of equal mass. In this talk, we describe the intervention strategy, as implemented in the balancing context, and share assessment data.

Adapting a dual-process informed intervention strategy across content domains

Collaborative learning can lead to students learning from each other and solving a physics problem correctly not only in situations in which one student knows how to solve the problem, but also when none of the students can solve the problem alone. In the latter situation, students are co-constructing knowledge that helps them solve the problem. In this study, we investigate student learning and frequency of co-construction in quantum mechanics when students work with peers during class but do not receive any feedback from the course instructor. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

How often can students co-construct knowledge in quantum mechanics?

In the fall of 2021, the Marquette University Honors Engineering Physics Class worked together with the Wandering Sword Project to measure the center of mass and moment of inertia for a variety of straight and curved swords. and pole-weapons. Results were compared to student work from previous semesters where the same methods were used to analyze other sporting equipment such as golf-clubs, baseball bats, and hurly sticks.

Swords for Science

A ball placed inside a hollow cylinder and spun around an axis perpendicular to the cylinder wall will roll back and forth along the cylinder wall, as expected, but it will also oscillate along the axial direction of the cylinder. These axial oscillations occur in horizontal, tilted, and even vertical cylinders. Here the connections of this system to the sports of bowling (gutterballs), golf (lip outs), and basketball (swirlies) are presented, along with ideas for video analysis experiments for undergraduate level physics labs.

Gutterballs, Lip Outs, and Swirlies

Un-grading is a method used in education that focuses on formative feedback. For example, many Un-graded courses have students set learning goals at the beginning and check in with the professor throughout. At the end of the course students are assigned a grade based on their learning goals. At our institution there are ongoing efforts to implement Un-grading in STEM courses, including introductory physics. Here, I present preliminary findings from qualitative research on these efforts. Students and instructors from three different courses utilizing this method were interviewed and the transcripts analyzed to identify benefits and drawbacks of Un-grading. The results of this study suggest Un-grading has a variety of benefits over traditional grading scales. For example, students felt Un-grading allowed them to learn in a style and pace that worked for them. The study also suggests ways to improve its effectiveness.

Education Research on Un-grading

Disability is a unique and multifaceted identity. It is made political simply by existing in the body and the mind of a disabled person. In a climate charged with politicality and identity discourse in the classroom, a framework for understanding disability and the transactional relationship disabled persons have with their environment in a political way is needed in physics education research. In this talk, I will introduce a framework scarcely used in education, Political Disability Identity (PDI). This framework is useful for understanding disability identity development in the physics classroom. I will discuss its utility in education research, particularly physics education research.

Political Disability Identity: A Framework for Physics Education Research

CourseSource Physics provides physics educators a place to publish their successful teaching practices and to engage in a community of fellow educators. Do you have a single lesson, unit, or whole class that's working well with student learning evidence to show it? This is the journal for you! I'll talk about our philosophy, our structure, and how you can get involved.

CourseSource Physics: A new practitioner journal for physics educators

Adapting Next Gen PET, an NSF-funded Engaged Student Learning project, sought to address two persistent problems in undergraduate education: the challenge of effective teaching resulting in useful learning in large lecture formats and the challenge of developing scientific understanding of physics principles by pre-service elementary teacher candidates. The goal was to provide a framework to both improve physics learning for future teachers and empower faculty to implement education research in their physics courses by providing a well-tested and refined version of the curriculum that fits the most widely used general education science class model (lecture and lab). We also sought to add the one science practice not emphasized in the PET curriculum, planning and carrying out investigations. These new curriculum resources and their impact on instructor evaluation and student learning will be presented.

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Observations of Student Resources in Introductory Programming Tutorials

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Next from AAPT SM 22

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What Do Large Introductory Physics ISLE-based Courses Look Like?

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