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Thermal physics encompasses thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content and is a core upper-division course requirement for most physics degrees. Thus, in order to improve student outcomes in these courses, it is important for both educators and researchers to have a validated method of evaluating student understanding of upper-division thermal physics content. For an assessment like this to be useful, it is crucial that the assessment tool can be easily implemented, easily scored, and provide insightful feedback. In this presentation, we discuss a multiple-response upper-division thermal physics assessment that was distributed in an online format. Initial validation results, average student performance, and feedback for instructors will be discussed.

AAPT WM 21

Initial Implementation of an Upper-Division Thermal Physics Assessment

upper-division

thermal physics

assessment

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.

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AAPT SM 20

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. 

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Assessment results provide valuable information about student learning. Accurately interpreting this information to modify courses is an essential step towards facilitating better student learning. Thus, as part of developing a standardized assessment for upper-division thermal physics, we design theory-based feedback for instructors in which they can trace how well their courses align with learning goals associated with scientific practices. This feedback provides instructors a ctionable information to operationalize scientific practices into their learning goals, thus encouraging not just content knowledge, but how to use that knowledge. In this talk, we lay out this feedback design process with specific examples from our data. This work highlights the importance of actionable feedback for instructors that facilitates explicit course modifications in physics classrooms. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Designing Research-based Assessment Feedback for Instructors

We report on the development of a rubric designed to analyze pedagogical content knowledge in the context of questioning (PCK-Q). The rubric is based on five components of PCK-Q: Orientation, Knowledge of Curriculum, Knowledge of Students’ Understanding, Knowledge of Instructional Strategies and Knowledge of Assessment (Magnusson, 1999). We are developing it to analyze 1) written responses to an instrument designed to measure PCK-Q and 2) video classroom observations of student assistants’ (SAs’) interactions with students. The classroom observations have first been coded by a coding scheme that analyzes levels of questioning and direct instruction in an inquiry-based classroom. We expect the strongest evidence of PCK-Q in video sequences of SAs using sequences of guided questions. Guided questions demonstrate evidence of instructor content knowledge, knowledge of students’ understanding and knowledge of common student difficulties, while helping students evaluate experimental evidence, solve a problem or come to a correct conceptual understanding.&nbsp;

Development of a Rubric to Analyze Student Teaching Assistants’ PCK-Q

This will be a humbling talk. We take you on our journey of fails in digital and analouge data collection, encoding and scoring as well as procedures and ideas of fixing them. We answer questions like: “ How can I reach sufficient encoding redundancy? ”, “ How to estimate the coding error probability? ”, “ What are the pitfalls in (digital) data scoring? ”, “ What metadata might become useful for my analysis? ” Or as Springuel, Wittmann &amp; Thompson (2019, p.2) would say: “[D]ata encoding is often neglected or taken for granted, even though this step forms an important bridge between the data collection and analysis. ”

Fails for Concept Inventory (digital) Data Encoding

Our course "The Science of Acoustics" is an introductory course on waves, oscillations, and sound. My colleagues and I&nbsp;have been teaching the lab portion in a consistent way over the past decade with only minor tweaks to equipment and instructions, but our switch to remote learning forced me to rethink some activities. This talk is about making choices concerning how to modify&nbsp;lab activities so students can achieve the relevant learning objectives. I may not have made "correct" choices in every case, but I will discuss thinking on labs that range from ones&nbsp;kept basically identical except for the use of virtual equipment (e.g., a pendulum lab)&nbsp;to others where the questions we asked were completely flipped around (e.g., a lab on standing waves). I will also reflect on how this experience will affect my delivery when things go "back to normal."

Making choices for virtual labs in "The Science of Acoustics"

The use of custom, inexpensive home experiment kits during the pandemic revealed several strategies that will be applied to traditional teaching of introductory physics labs at Oglethorpe University.&nbsp; These include: using the&nbsp;PHYPHOX app and smartphone sensors;&nbsp;cost-effectively increasing&nbsp;the number of onsite lab stations using kit parts so more students are directly involved in running the experiments;&nbsp;having each student collect their own data and write up results with them while still collaborating with team members;&nbsp;limiting the number of formal lab reports required after students demonstrate documentation skills in order to focus on spreadsheet development&nbsp;and conceptual knowledge;&nbsp;and having home kits available even when onsite so students can use them remotely for custom projects based on standard experiments.&nbsp; In particular, having all students collect and analyze their own data virtually eliminates the 'freeloader' syndrome where some students do far less work than others on experiments and documentation.

Lessons from Home Experiment Kits for Traditional Introductory Physics Labs

We want to ask students to see patterns in time-series graphs of voltage. Traditionally, we put bulky, expensive oscilloscopes on the benches or made everyone share, or didn't even have one for our classroom. Now, we're teaching circuits with Tinkercad, or we're having students do self-directed projects with Arduinos, both with on-screen graphs of voltage over time. This is helping me teach reading time-series graphs to pre-high-school&nbsp;students;&nbsp;and logical approaches to patterns, and measuring time, to college&nbsp;students. We'll look at videos of oscilliscopes, simulated oscilloscopes, and similar tools.

Look Under Your Chair, Because You're All Getting Oscilloscopes!

The EQuIPD grant is a Department of Education Funded teacher professional development program centered on use of core content models, modeling instructionall practices and use of technology for collaborative inquiry experiences for students. As districts pivoted to new learning environments owing to COVID, teachers were placed in either hybrid, FTF or virtual classrooms.&nbsp; The grant has worked to support teachers in new forms of collaborative inquiry in several ways including sending kits home to students, teacher demonstrations/students analyzing data sets, virutal experiments and using cell phone apps (Arduino Science Journal, phyphox and Physics Toolkit. This talk will highlight the support for teachers to implement these new modes of inquiry and showcase some example lessons where students used cell phone apps to collect and analyze data in collaborative teams through an inquiry proccess to develop a core concept model in physical science. This model is appropriate for students at any level.

Working Together Alone: Colloborative Inquiry using Cell Phone Apps

Our algebra-based introductory physics class for life science students is entirely remote this year. The course is typically taught as a highly interactive multi-section studio class. It was a challenging transition but, by making extensive use of Zoom breakout rooms, we think we have done this fairly successfully. The transition has been a tremendous amount of work. The things we plan to retain when we eventually go back to in-person teaching include: (1) using interactive Google doc worksheets, rather than a printed workbook ; (2) spending less time presenting slides and more time with students working together; (3) regular low-stakes quizzes instead of a few high-stakes tests; and (4) streamlining the course, with fewer topics and not as many moving parts. This talk will go over details of these features, which seem to have worked well and which we hope will make for a better student experience in future semesters.

Keepers: From remote studio physics back to in-person

The STEMcoding project launched in 2017 with a series of "physics of video games" activities designed for high school physics and physical science. Many of these activities are described on the STEMcoding YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/c/STEMcoding) and we have trained dozens of teachers through various workshops. In 2020 these resources became a lifeline for many of these teachers who needed to find solutions for distance and hybrid learning. And over summer 2020 we redesigned nearly all of our activities with this in mind. This talk provides and overview of how 2020 has shaped the STEMcoding project.

The STEMcoding Approach to Distance Learning

The pandemic timeline has turn out to be much longer than initially predicted, and the need for a remote teaching will be the norm for many more months (if not years) to come. &nbsp;The immediate switch to the remote teaching that happened due to COVID-19, not surprisingly, had the greatest detrimental effect on laboratory components of physics courses and challenged academic integrity during testing. Smaller courses during summer time allowed us to test different approaches and more adequately prepare for large-enrollment classes for the upcoming Fall semester. Decisions when to choose between the labs with real data or simulations-generated data will be discussed. I will touch upon the challenges and successes of running the live lab sessions on teleconferencing platforms such as Zoom. Some elements, like pre-recorded introductions to the labs, methods of lab reports collections and grading online will be useful well past the pandemic.

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Initial Implementation of an Upper-Division Thermal Physics Assessment

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