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As part of a project to develop a written instrument for assessing learning assistants’ (LAs’) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the context of questioning (PCK-Q), we are experimenting with questions in a Likert-style format. Previously, we have developed and validated questions in free-response format. We are now using those questions as the basis for Likert-style questions. Likert-style questions are different because they require the LAs’ to evaluate possible LA responses to students in classroom scenarios. They are also beneficial because scoring can be automated. The instrument will examine a LA’s ability to identify appropriate responses that provide evidence of the application of PCK-Q in the classroom. We will discuss problem development, present sample problems, and outline ongoing plans regarding validation, reliability testing, and dissemination efforts.

AAPT SM 22

Development of a Likert-style instrument to assess LA’s PCK-Q

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.



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Concise, specific, and measurable statements of desired student learning, often called learning objectives, can aid instructors during curricular development. Similar statements, which we call assessment objectives, can aid researchers in developing and validating research-based assessments. In this talk, we discuss the benefits of articulating assessment objectives during the development of two assessments, one for upper-division thermodynamics and one for lower-division physics labs. Specifically, assessment objectives helped us identify concepts and practices that are important to instructors, aided in the development of targeted assessment items, provided an additional means for establishing face and construct validity, and can serve as a way for instructors and researchers to determine if these assessments are appropriate for use in their courses and research studies in the future.

Affordances of Articulating Assessment Objectives

We present a citizen science campaign, Dark Energy Explorers, aiming to improve the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX will collect at least one million galaxies that are 9 - 11 billion light-years away, yielding one of the largest maps of the universe. We created Dark Energy Explorers on Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science platform to help us classify these astronomical objects. With Dark Energy Explorers we train participants, of any background, to be able to distinguish different galaxies by swiping left or right on their smartphone. Initial analysis has shown that citizen science is an efficient and effective tool for classification most accurately done by the human eye. Since launching in late February 2021, we have reached 3.5 million classifications by 8,000 volunteers in 80 countries! Dark Energy Explorers has proven to be a uniquely powerful tool for science advancement and increasing accessibility to science worldwide.

Dark Energy Explorers: Using Citizen Science to Enhance the Hobby-Eberly-Telescope-Dark-Energy-Experiment

The radio sky is accessible at low cost with the RadioJOVE Project, a dual-dipole with receiver that is used by educators, students, and amateur radio astronomers to detect solar flares and radio bursts from Jupiter. In 2019, a short course on radio astronomy was designed by four undergraduates at Saint Anselm College as part of Access Academy, an afterschool program for immigrant, refugee, and underrepresented high school students in Manchester, New Hampshire, through the Meelia Center for Community Engagement. The project has been revived with a new undergraduate instructor for Access Academy and the course developed to go beyond construction of the telescope to data analysis. We will provide an update on the Saint Anselm RadioJOVE featuring new solar flare detections made by high school students and plans to incorporate RadioJOVE 2.0, a spectrograph that will facilitate more sophisticated science.

Discovering Solar Flares with High School Students

Linearizing data and extracting information from linear regression are skills that are commonly taught as part of the laboratory curriculum in introductory physics. In this presentation I describe how I have adapted a series of standard experiments ranging across several topics in introductory mechanics and electricity to involve plotting input energy as an independent variable and output energy as a dependent variable. In each case, this analysis yields a linear graph with slope equal to the efficiency of the energy transfer in the experiment. This shifts the goal of these experiments away from using the linear regression to confirm a predicted value and instead asks students to use the regression to determine an unknown parameter. This approach also allows the students to compare the relative efficiency of various methods of converting stored energy as they progress through the courses.

Graphing Energy Efficiency in Introductory Physics Labs

Until recently, COVID-19 had forced most traditional colleges to switch from in-person physics labs to labs based on computer simulations and video analysis. At two-year colleges, online physics classes are a large fraction of the physics courses, with laboratory equipment requirements satisfied by commercial lab kits. These are expensive and of little use after the course ends. Building their labs at home with household materials created a less expensive, more engaging laboratory experience for our distance education students. Our students used prescription pill vials, braided fishing line, U.S. coins (as calibrated masses), rulers, and, of course, paper clips to build their experiments. Initially students were given detailed building instructions but more leeway with each succeeding experiment. The students showed ingenuity in building their experiments and enhanced course engagement. We will present examples of these experiments in this poster.

Simple Home-built Laboratory Experiments for Remote Learning

As our society continues to venture into a newfound age of technology, educators must continuously adapt to the ever-changing lens through which students learn. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the need for such a paradigm shift has been made abundantly clear. The Smart Physics project aims to provide educators and students new ways of investigating the physical world through common sensors built into almost every smart device. These investigations can be performed in both traditional classroom settings and in asynchronous online courses. We analyze the way in which our team has gone from “board to screen” and follow the process of developing an investigation that can be conducted by students in introductory physics courses. Specifically, we look at the development of an investigation measuring the time intervals between the bounces of an object using an acoustic stopwatch in order to measure the energy lost through a series of inelastic collisions.

Smart Physics: Bouncing from the Board to the Screen

Collaboratively, we studied a project-based research methods course called STEM-199 at Mott Community College, taking observational fieldnotes, soliciting weekly student journal reflections, and interviewing students. In collaboration with the instructors, we identified themes across those data sources. The main theme we found was the prevalence and impact of instructor support for their students, emotionally, logistically, and technically. This support helped students develop a sense of resilience in the face of research difficulties in a class that was highly student-driven with students having high project ownership. We share lessons learned from the course to provide guidelines for other teachers, particularly at two-year colleges (TYCs). We focus on characterizing the key components of STEM-199 that helped the course run successfully at the TYC and could help a similar course work at other institutions; including: high teacher-student ratio; and student-driven projects with restrictions to limit the scope of instructor work.

Lessons Learned from Embedded Research Course at a Community College

Electric energy production and use affects every person in the USA, and teaching energy in high school physics should enable students to participate in public decision making about energy resources. In a large high school in a major metropolitan area, the “City of Berkland” project empowers students to be able to participate in future decisions about power production and use. After instruction in energy and electricity, the citizens of the (fictional) City of Berkland call a City Council meeting to discuss the possibility of a nuclear power plant in the city. “Residents” of the City of Berkland and surrounding areas argue for or against nuclear power in their city from the point of view of their position in the city and its environs. The project is highly engaging for students and supports them to connect their learning about electricity and energy to decisions that matter in their community.

Engaging students in energy learning by practicing community decision making

We investigated a new approach to physics curriculum focusing on student growth using interleaved practice. While the current physics curriculum focuses on the mastery of a single topic in a short time, we reorganized our curriculum to interleave several topics starting with basic conceptual questions and gradually increase the difficulty of problems students face throughout the semester. With early feedback from students taking a second-semester calculus-based physics class, we can show that the restructuring of the course has led students to become more confident in their problem-solving abilities and are more capable of long-term retention of material.

Reorganization of Physics Curriculum with a Focus on Student Growth

Like many other physics departments in recent years, we have worked to integrate computational activities into our physics curriculum. Our integration has focused on second-year physics courses, where we have adopted a centralized approach: The computational strand is interwoven through multiple courses and is administered independently of the course instructors. Our goal has been to provide regular, cohesive exposure of computation, contextualized to their courses, without overburdening any one course/instructor. We will present the structure of the computation exercises and their evolution, the coding assessment & feedback tool that we have developed, as well as student growth and reflections over the past four years.

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Development of a Likert-style instrument to assess LA’s PCK-Q

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