United States

Successful programs build support among department colleagues and university administration. Ideally building a teacher preparation program begins with institutional commitment before the first proposal is written. University strategic plans often include sentiments like: “Enhance our ability to recruit new students of excellent quality and support their success” and “Provide students the tools for success in the job markets of the future.” Showing your efforts are aligned with administrative priorities is necessary to ensuring institutional support. Department support is also easier to gain and maintain when teacher preparation is cast in terms of departmental priorities such as an improved undergraduate program and significant positive attention from administration. Related efforts around launching two PhysTEC programs will be discussed.

AAPT SM 20

Building Institutional Support: Lessons Learned from Two Physics Sites

institutional support

teacher preparation

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

technical paper

Analysis of institutional data for physics majors showing predictive relationships between required mathematics and physics courses in various years is important for contemplating how the courses build on each other and whether there is need to make changes to the curriculum for the majors to strengthen these relationships. We use 15 years of institutional data at a large research university to investigate how introductory physics and mathematics courses predict male and female physics majors' performance on required advanced physics and mathematics courses. We used Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) to investigate these predictive relationships and find that among introductory and advanced physics and mathematics courses, there are gender differences in performance in favor of male students only in the introductory physics courses after controlling for high school GPA. We found that a measurement invariance fully holds in a multi-group SEM by gender, so it was possible to carry out analysis with gender mediated by introductory physics and high school GPA. Moreover, we find that these introductory physics courses that have gender differences do not predict performance in advanced physics courses. Also, introductory mathematics courses predict performance in advanced mathematics courses which in turn predict performance in advanced physics courses. Furthermore, apart from the introductory physics courses that do not predict performance in future physics courses, there is a strong predictive relationship between the sophomore, junior and senior level physics courses.

In a physics curriculum only introductory physics course grades show gender differences

Students who take lab courses engage in active, collaborative learning that has the potential to teach scientific thinking skills while also stimulating students’ interest in science. In order to understand the impact of collaboration on student learning and experiences in introductory labs, we surveyed more than 450 college physics students about their beliefs and experiences regarding working with a lab partner. While students want a “fair split” of the work, they learn most when they participate equally in all aspects of the lab. Thus, lab courses should be designed to ensure that students participate equally, rather than just splitting up the work.

What Makes a Good Lab Partner?

Two wheeled carts are identical except that one has its wheels taped so that it slides on them with kinetic friction. The other cart rolls frictionlessly. Both carts are placed at the bottom of identical side-by-side rails and propelled up them using identical spring launchers. The carts turn around and return to their starting location. Which gets back first? Or is it a tie? Video of an experimental demonstration will be shown, along with theory and computer simulations, to explain the interesting results.

Who Wins This Race?

The Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors program at The Ohio State University actively engages first-year students contemplating engineering in realistic engineering experiences. This helps solidify their understanding of what engineering is, the kinds of activities engineers engage in, and the elements of engineering design. The most popular second-semester course includes a substantial robotics project which includes planning, budgeting, documentation, teamwork, and of course the technical aspects of designing, programming, constructing, and testing a robot. This course is now in its 25th year. Instructors have based course refinements on results in the science education literature and also assessed the impact of course modifications on the student and teaching assistant experiences. This presentation will give an overview of the project and share multiple examples of the varied ways students are made to be active in their learning process.

Active Engagement and Real Applications: Ohio State's Honors Robotics Project

The discipline of physics suffers from low diversity at all educational levels. Our research seeks to understand the issues related to representation of women in physics related fields and to enhance diverse groups of students to advance and succeed in physics and related fields. In this talk, we will describe the role of students’ motivational characteristics in introductory level calculus-based physics courses. These studies aim to understand observed gender differences in students’ motivational factors that may arise, e.g., from societal biases against women’s ability to excel in physics. We will also discuss the link between prior knowledge and students’ learning outcomes across different student demographics and how motivational factors can explain this mechanism. We will describe how we use quantitative tools, such as Structural Equation Modeling, to evaluate complex models of student characteristics, attitudes as well as student learning outcomes. Finally, we will also describe how small and large-scale interventions can mitigate the representation issues, and can create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Why it is critical to explicitly focus on making physics classes equitable and inclusive

Periodic review by a department of its programs can be a rewarding opportunity for reflection, evaluation, and improvement; assisting a department with its review as an external consultant is also rewarding. This presentation will review how to find these rewards with a specific focus on the advantages to departments of using external consultants and suggestions for consultants on how they can be most effective. The advantages of a departmental review lie in taking a systematic approach that includes gathering relevant data on a regular basis, assessing the data regularly, and regularly assessing and revising departmental initiatives designed to achieve desired improvements. Though the detailed planning and development of strategic initiatives are the responsibilities of the department and its institution, external consultants can help a department pay closer attention to trends in their data and outcomes, ask critical questions that may have been overlooked, and direct them to examples of alternative practices and models, in addition to providing useful findings and recommendations. This presentation draws heavily on chapters of the new EP3 guide: Effective Practices for Physics Programs which provides advice and suggestions for both physics departments and external consultants during the departmental review process.

Serving as an External Consultant for a Department Review

A novel method is proposed for how LEGO race cars can help students increase their understanding of uncertainty and motivate them in physics labs. The intervention was developed for students in an introductory physics topic with a high early drop-out rate. This intervention was extended into the intro level physics topic the next year, for comparison and evaluation. A qualitative survey of the students was taken to gain insight into their perception of the incorporation of LEGO into physics labs. In this talk, I will discuss the results of the study and how variations in the delivery yielded better learning outcomes. We subsequently adapted the delivery of the LEGO labs for a large Engineering Mechanics cohort. For Engineering, the findings show that LEGO physics was instrumental in teaching students ideas of measurement and uncertainty, improving their lab reporting skills, and was a key factor in reducing the early attrition rate.

Race to improve student understanding of uncertainty: Using LEGO race cars in the physics lab

When assigning a computational activity, it's a common best practice for physics educators to provide students with a minimally working program (MWP) that the students modify, rather than asking them to code from scratch. On-line coding platforms such as GlowScript and Trinket make it easy to deploy MWPs and for students to share their completed work. I’ll discuss how we can supplement this best practice with pre-class video tutorials about our MWPs and outline a process for scaffolding student learning using MWPs. I’ll also describe some challenges one can encounter with MWPs (such as, “Do students really learn how the MWP works?” “Do skills and understanding really carry over from one activity to the next?”) and open the floor for discussion about how we might address those challenges.

The Opportunities and Challenges of Minimally Working Programs

Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals. There has not been much research on why and how we include writing in physics lab classes, and instructors may incorporate writing for a variety of reasons. Through a broader study of multiweek projects in advanced lab classes, we have developed a framework for thinking about and understanding the role of writing in lab classes. This framework defines and describes the breadth of goals for incorporating writing in lab classes, and is a tool we can use to begin to understand why, and subsequently how, we teach scientific writing in physics.

Framework of goals for writing in physics lab classes

The 19th-century was a period of giant leaps in physics. Young demonstrated the wave nature of light. Dalton developed atomic theory. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. The list goes on and on. At the end of the century, Lord Kelvin famously declared, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” Each of these discoveries were performed by human beings, who were influenced by their educational background, family upbringing, religious beliefs, and more. For example, Young stated: “For the talents which God has not given me, I am not responsible, but those which I possess, I have hitherto cultivated and employed as diligently as my opportunities have allowed me to do.” How did this belief in God’s gifts of talent impact his scientific work? This talk will focus on the religious views of significant physicists of the 1800’s. Particularly, we will examine how the Christian faith of many 19th-century physicists influenced their scientific endeavors and shaped the field of physics as we know it.

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Building Institutional Support: Lessons Learned from Two Physics Sites

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