United States

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.

AAPT SM 20

Serving as an External Consultant for a Department Review

external consultant

department review

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. 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. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

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AAPT SM 21

technical paper

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. 

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.

The Influence of Christianity on 19th-Century Physicists

One of my favorite first day activities is to ask students to share rumors that they heard about the course, instructor, or Physics in general. After some general awkwardness and reassurance, students begin to open up about familiar fears such as heavy workloads, harsh grading, and very abstract concepts. But they may also attempt humor and playfulness, providing a unique opportunity to build community and paint the instructor’s role as a coordinator rather than an authoritarian voice in the classroom. Soliciting rumors can help the instructor explain course policies and expectations with an accessible tone that helps to break down barriers in the classroom. Some caution needs to be taken when using this activity because it opens the instructors up to criticism and makes them vulnerable (but is that so bad?). This activity was initially designed by Robert Beichner.

Psst! Did you hear about this course we're taking?

Low retention rates in physics Ph.D. programs are an unpleasant reality. There have been many efforts to study and report doctoral attrition and most studies have focused on students’ attributes and mentoring relationships. However, not much work has been focused on examining the interconnection between individual attributes and departmental practices. Last year, using survey data from 19 physics graduate programs, we identified 31 students that were not intending to complete their degree. About half of these students were enrolled in two institutions. In this talk, we use survey and interview data to describe factors related to why these students did not complete their doctoral programs. For example, students who dropped out often described feeling that they did not belong in the department and that they needed to figure things out on their own. We discuss how these results can inform policymakers’ decisions towards improving retention of doctoral students.

Why physics graduate students do not persist? An analysis from 19 departments

Many speakers’ bureaus exist to provide lists of potential speakers for important events. Scientific bureaus tend to provide lists of speakers with specific expertise in science related topics. The AAPT Speakers Bureau was established early last decade to provide AAPT members and sections with information on available speakers for physics related events. The list can be used for local or national meetings and contain a wide variety topics related to physics and physics education. It is searchable, by geography (sections), topics or speakers names. I will give a small sample of two popular talks that I have given in many locations as an example of what the speakers’ bureau can provide. These are “Physics of Music” and “Physics of Cats”. The AAPT Speakers’ Bureau can be found at: https://aapt.org/Resources/speakers_bureau-landing.cfm.

History and Motivation for the AAPT Speakers Bureau

The curricula of interdisciplinary introductory physics courses for life science programs such as Physics of Sports, Physics of Human Body etc. have a big component of Kinetics in general. Equilibrium is one of the most important chapters with a variety of applications of fundamental physics knowledges including force analysis, Newton’s laws and the conditions of equilibrium for translation and rotation. In order to better engage students to learn statics, we start to develop interactive simulations of equilibrium problems on human body and implement the simulation activities in the course Physics of Human Body, which is mainly for students majoring in Physics Therapy, Health Sciences and Rehabilitation Sciences. A couple of the simulations will be shared in the presentation and later in Living Physics Portal.

Interactive simulations of equilibrium problems on the human body

Interactive video-enhanced tutorials (IVETs) involve web-based activities which lead students through a solution using expert-like problem-solving approaches, such as those needed for solving problems using Newton’s Second Law. The IVETs, which are based in part on the tutorials created at the University of Pittsburgh, are designed using multimedia principles of learning and research on human learning and memory. The tutorials are adaptive and provide different levels of scaffolding depending on students’ needs. They are also affect-adaptive, such that additional guidance is provided to students who indicate they are confused, frustrated, or bored while completing the IVET. This presentation will showcase one of the IVETs and its various design features.

Interactive Video-Enhanced Tutorials: Design to support effective problem-solving strategies

Instructional pragmatism is essential for successfully adopting and adapting evidence-based active engagement (EBAE) approaches in that instructors should view improving teaching and learning as a process and not get disheartened if a particular EBAE approach does not produce the desired outcome. Instructional pragmatism entails keeping a variety of EBAE methods in one’s instructional toolbox and using them flexibly as needed to improve student learning and continuously refining and tweaking one’s implementation of the EBAE approaches to make them effective. Here we illustrate an example of instructional pragmatism in which a quantum mechanics instructor did not give up when an EBAE method involving implementation of a sequence of clicker questions on addition of angular momentum did not yield expected learning outcomes even though it was found effective earlier. Instead, the instructor remained optimistic, viewing improving teaching and learning as a process, and pulled out another EBAE method from his tool box that did not require him to spend more time on this topic in class. In particular, the instructor created an opportunity for students to productively struggle with the same problems they had not performed well on by incentivizing them to correct their mistakes out of class. Student performance on one of the addition of angular momentum problems posed on the final exam suggests that students who corrected their mistakes benefited from the task and learned about addition of angular momentum better than those who did not correct their mistakes. Encouraging and supporting physics instructors to embrace instructional pragmatism can go a long way in helping students learn physics because it is likely to increase their persistence in using various EBAE approaches flexibly as they refine and tweak their implementation for their students. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

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Serving as an External Consultant for a Department Review

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

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