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Many instructors are working to transform their traditional labs to better develop scientific thinking, reasoning, and decision-making abilities. Traditional labs, defined as being highly structured (students follow a predetermined protocol) and confirmatory (that protocol is supposed to demonstrate a predetermined physics principle), have long been criticized for not engaging students with authentic experimentation. As defined, students have very little opportunity or incentive to make decisions or think critically about the experiments or results. In response, we often default to reducing structure and affording more agency so students can practice making experimentation decisions. Research is suggesting that this response may be overly simplistic. In this talk, I’ll discuss the nuances of structure and agency in teaching scientific decision-making and argue that the role of confirmation may actually be the more critical issue than structure.

AAPT SM 20

The role of structure &amp; confirmation in developing scientific thinking, reasoning, &amp; decision-making abilities

scientific decision-making

agency

labs

Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

PERC SM 20

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

The role of structure & confirmation in developing scientific thinking, reasoning, & decision-making abilities

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. 

PiA - Physic in Advent https://www.physics-in-advent.org is an Advent calendar of a special kind: a physics Advent calendar. From 1st to 24th December, small physics experiments using household material are presented every day as youtube videos by Mr. Santa or Ms. Santa. Participants do the experiments and answer a question on the PiA website. On the following day, there will be a solution video and possibly a point. After 24th December, all participants receive individual certificates. Among the best participants, prizes will be raffled off in the categories individual, school class or school. „PiA - Physik im Advent" is aimed at children and pupils aged between 11 and 18 years. It is intended to awaken the joy of experimenting and offer education, entertainment, and fun at the same time. In 2019, a new record was set with 43,500 registered participants, 49% of whom were girls, and 1.7 million visitors overall.

PiA - Physics in Advent, a hands-on physics advent calendar

Machine learning algorithms represent an exciting new class of quantitative methods to understand physics classes and students. Recent work has applied these algorithms to classify students as those likely to receive an A or B or students were likely to receive an C. D, F in a physics class. The metrics used become unreliable when the outcome variable is substantially unbalanced. This talk further explores the classification and extends those methods to predicting whether a student will receive a D or F. This study also investigated the previous finding that demographic variables such as gender, underrepresented minority status, and first-generation status had low variable importance for predicting class outcomes; down sampling revealed that this result was not due to the underrepresentation of these students in the class studied.

Extending Machine Learning to Predict Unbalanced Physics Course Outcome

This work examines peer-quizzing with metacognition in calculus based introductory physics. Students take individual quizzes and then redo part of the quiz with a partner. Because the students to choose which problems to redo, they must reflect on their confidence level on different concepts (questions). The results show there is a clear benefit to introducing weekly quizzes. While peer quizzes do not result in a clear improvement in the final concept assessment score, there is improvement in the normalized gain. Further, there is a clear signal that students who score above average on their quiz redos will also show above average assessment gains. These results show that while the intervention does not improve the overall grade, it helps individual students at all grade levels improve their understanding in relationship to their peers. It also suggests that interventions for students with low redo scores will have significant impact.

Utilizing Peer-Instruction and Metacognition on Quizzes to Improve Concept Learning

Science education studies framed around funds of knowledge, mental models and student resource framework appear to have three general characteristics: they are learner centered, tend to deviate from the deficit student model of teaching that present learners as empty vessels, but rather present learners as individual beings with different sets of skills and needs. However, there is not a consensus on the ways, as far as we know, in which these three concepts relate with each other. We conduct a systematic inquiry of the literature available for how funds of knowledge, mental models, and resource framework are respectively used in science education, and present a scheme relating these three frameworks that can be utilized when evaluating students’ ideas about physical concepts such as energy. Considering how those frameworks connect with one another might provide additional avenues to further explore how students' conceptual understanding of the physical world are formed.

Characterizing Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Physics using Funds of Knowledge, Mental Models and Resource Framework

You and/or your department are interested in introducing computational modeling into your introductory physics courses, but want some concrete ideas of how to accomplish this. You want it to be student friendly; i.e., not requiring much prior student programming experience. You want it to be instructor friendly; i.e., not requiring huge time investment for the faculty to implement. You want it to be affordable; i.e., not requiring a huge investment by the department, faculty or student. This presentation will illustrate a way to accomplish introducing computational modeling into introductory physics courses.

Computational Physics in Introductory Physics

As a first step in a larger study of student difficulties in upper-division thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, we present the results of think-aloud interviews with graduate students on a set of entropy related questions. The four interview questions were developed to probe student understanding of entropy as a pressure towards equilibrium, as a quantity maximized in equilibrium, as a connection between microstates and macrostates, and as a macroscopic state-function. Exploring graduate students' understanding entropy and their ability to solve problems and reason with entropic arguments will provide insights into how physicists develop a mature understanding of entropy as a physical quantity. Specifically, we hope to see if new conceptual difficulties emerge as students progress to graduate school, and whether difficulties seen in undergraduate courses persist, evolve, or cease to present issues in the graduate setting.

Investigating how graduate students connect microstates and macrostates with entropy

Computers and algorithms have fundamentally reshaped our world in the last few decades. Data is the new oil. NGSS has codified computational thinking as a science practice. Yet programming has yet to penetrate compulsory K-12 schooling in a meaningful way. A number of high school Modeling Physics teachers have been teaching their students to program for two decades. Although teaching programming basics cut into the finite number of minutes they would otherwise have devoted to physics concepts, they valued the trade-off—equipping students with a tool for visualizing abstractions (e.g., EM fields), and for more tightly connecting mathematical, graphical and diagrammatic representations of conceptual models. Five years ago AMTA and AAPT joined forces to adapt HS physics teachers’ pioneering work in computing for use in 9th grade Physics First classrooms. This is a report on where we are presently and what we have learned along the way.

Computational Modeling Physics First: A Progress Report

The usage of toys to teach physics is an interesting approach to promote engagement and creativity. Traditionally, toys have been widely used in qualitative demonstrations. However, it is frequently difficult to extract quantitative results in physics experiments involving toys. One possible strategy to address this difficulty is the use of smartphone sensors. In this work we investigate the dynamics of a traditional toy, the yoyo, theoretically and experimentally, using smartphone’ sensors. In particular, using the gyroscope, the angular velocity was measured. The experimental results were complemented thanks to a digital video analysis. As the yoyo is a ubiquitous, simple and traditional toy this simple proposal could encourage students to experiment with everyday objects and modern technologies. More information: http://smarterphysics.blogspot.com/

The physics of a yoyo using a smartphone

Physics Resources and Instructional Strategies for Motivating Students (PRISMS) is a high school physics curriculum resource that has been used extensively in UNI teacher preparation and professional development. The original PRISMS materials were a collection of 130 high interest activities related to the real-life experiences of high school physics students designed to develop student conceptual understanding and to cultivate student scientific reasoning and problem skills. The enhanced and revised version, called PRISMS PLUS, focuses on complete learning cycles that provide fully integrated experiences that enable students to develop not only their problem solving and inquiry skills but also deep, long-lasting understanding of physics concepts. This presentation will focus on how PER has been used to develop PRISMS PLUS and adapt it to teacher preparation and professional development including alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards.

Using PER to Develop and Adapt PRISMS PLUS

Quantum mechanics is the centerpiece of modern physics. Teaching quantum mechanics have been difficult because of complex numbers, Hilbert space, and interpretations. We show that a real formulation of quantum mechanics without complex numbers and Hilbert space is included in Schrödinger’s 1926 papers. The legitimacy and advantages of such a real formulation were justified in 1960s. High-caliber quantum mechanics textbooks in real formulation existed since 1970s in France. Experimental observations of atomic and molecular wavefunctions using scanning tunneling microscopy necessitates a real formulation. Practically, in chemical physics and condensed-matter physics, real wavefunctions are sufficient, especially regarding to density-functional theory (DFT). Outlined here is a freshman-sophomore course of real quantum mechanics covering a wide range of applications to dispense with complex numbers and Hilbert space. As shown, the derivation of the real Schrödinger equations is transparent, the mathematics is elementary, and the interpretation is intuitive.

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