United States

In the five years since LIGO’s historic first detection of gravitational waves these detections have become almost routine with LIGO and Virgo regularly receiving new candidates. The field of gravitational wave astronomy provides an exciting and engaging opportunity to introduce students to astrophysics. In this talk I will give the background knowledge you need to discuss LIGO, gravitational waves, and these historic discoveries with your students.

AAPT SM 20

What to Say When Students Ask About Astrophysics: Gravitational Waves

gravitational waves

astrophysics

education

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.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

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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. 

Many students in high schools have misconceptions about frontier science experiments. They may think that there is nothing new for them to discover or that they do not have the background necessary to understand what is happening in these experiments. Yet students can use classical physics to analyze neutrino experimental data and draw conclusions. This talk will describe my students' analysis of neutrino data through conservation of momentum. The audience can participate as students for a very brief time to get the feel of being the investigator. I will also share the reaction of my students to using this activity.

Neutrino Experiments Inspire Students

To address the challenge of involving physics majors into the department early in their career, we created a peer group mentoring program. Incoming undergraduate first-year students are assigned to a group of other incoming students and two undergraduate peer mentors. This mentoring circle meets multiple times per quarter to discuss common student concerns and success strategies. Initial outcomes include higher GPA for program participants, a difference that is not explained by demographic factors or incoming preparation.

Resonance. Peer group mentoring for first-year, undergraduate physics majors

Generating mathematical models of phenomena is central to the practice of physics. Since there is typically no physics in the introductory sequence for which a model doesn't already exist, most laboratory experiences are structured as hypothesis-testing experiments in which students are given a model to verify. As a part of the introductory lab transformation project at the University of Washington (UW) - informed by the Investigative Science Learning Environment learning system - the Physics Education Group has created an authentic model-generating learning opportunity. Using a virtual reality environment, students explore physical phenomena that do not exist in the real world (or Wikipedia). Students generate mathematical models describing these phenomena from scratch, applying reasoning skills similar to those used by research scientists. This talk will describe the development of the "artificial" phenomena, their implementation in UW introductory electromagnetism labs, and the labs' impact on students' learning and development of scientific reasoning.

Modeling novel physics using virtual reality in introductory physics laboratories

In our Advanced Laboratory course students develop practical data analysis skills working through two simple experiments early in the semester that we then revisit throughout the course. For most of the semester, students rotate through different experiments. Having these two common experiments enables all students to practice specific data analysis and error analysis techniques on their own measured data at appropriate times during the semester. For example, students calculate the wavelength of a laser from the glancing incidence diffraction pattern from a machinist’s ruler. They gradually refine the estimates of the wavelength and the corresponding uncertainty. In this talk, I will describe the two experiments and how we use them to teach data analysis and error analysis throughout the semester.

Developing Data Analysis Skills with Simple, Common Experiments

Statistical analysis is one of the technical skills we are targeting in a newly developed project-based lab course. Students are asked to measure the smallest possible force using a strain gauge and to provide convincing evidence that the force has been detected. This goal extends over several class periods as students make revisions to improve their measurements and complete pre-lab readings and activities on statistical analysis methods. At the culmination of the module, students design and conduct an experiment that requires the measurement of a small force. They must use the statistical methods they have learned to support their findings.

Small force project for teaching statistical analysis in the lab

What helps students transfer ideas between labs, lectures, non-school projects? Why are students in my electronics lab so angry that there is no clear border between “conductor” and “insulator”? I’m experimenting with creating connections between ideas by making play-dough circuits, teaching metrology, and analyzing assumptions about borders. Borders as binary and absolute took hold ~500 years ago, alongside the scientific revolution. So did the rise of the nation-state, narrowing of gender roles, criminalization of same-gender sex, invention of race and white supremacy, creation of policing and prisons, and of course colonialism. Science, along with many other disciplines, suddenly became more centrally controlled and rigid in its borders. What can each of these borders teach us about the others? What could non-binary borders look like, and how do they affect lab learning and teaching? Please join us if you are interested in informal science, laboratory assessment, gender fluidity, colonialism, or of course non-binary robots.

Even My Robots Are Non-Binary: Questioning Borders of Ideas and Land

We examined variations in Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) pre-class scores according to self-reports of students' high school physics courses. Most students in our unusual sample population had taken an AP physics course, allowing us to calculate the correlation between FMCE scores and AP exam scores. We also carried out regression analyses to determine how FMCE scores and course final exam scores depend on taking an AP course and AP exam scores when math SAT score is included as a proxy of students’ general level of college preparation. The results of our analysis suggest that taking AP physics and even scoring well on the AP physics exam may be a rather weak measure of conceptual understanding of physics or the mastery of physics one would expect students to achieve from an introductory university physics course.

What are students learning in AP physics?

In 2012, Central Washington University became a PhysTEC supported site. The success of our project relied on us strengthening our partnerships with other STEM departments as well as our existing science teacher education program. Along with the PhysTEC project, the physics department was in the middle of a pedagogical revitalization using the results of the SPIN-UP report (1). Curriculum revisions such as integrated lecture-lab courses, mentored inquiry projects for all majors, and a learning assistant program lifted the physics department to a position of pedagogical leadership on campus. The department worked with pedagogical experts in mathematics and other science departments to translate some of these innovations to their content and pedagogy courses. This broader collaboration attracted the attention of two deans and the provost, leading the College of the Sciences and the College of Education and Professional Studies to overhaul STEM teacher education by revising and implementing the UTeach model.

Using the SPIN-UP Report and UTeach to Revitalize Teacher Education

Teaching physics using a multimodal semiotic approach provides students with various opportunities to construct, represent, and communicate their developing understandings of physics concepts. Physics education research has shown that using multiple representations for problem-solving can enhance student learning. This talk extends the idea of multiple representations by arguing that engaging students in various semiotic modes such as speech, written text, gestures, images, and body positioning and movement not only enhances student physics understandings but also offers students different avenues of development and expression of their identities as physics learners that embrace their diverse sociocultural, racial, and ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Expanding our notion of what counts as valid physics representation provides a more equitable space for physics teaching and learning.

Towards Multimodal Physics Teaching that Embraces Body Movement

Critique and evaluation of scientific explanations has been underemphasized in K-12 science classrooms (NRC, 2012), and as a result, college students may still need assistance in learning how to make such evaluations about astronomy concepts. The Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagram is an instructional scaffold that promotes students to critically evaluate alternative explanations and increase their ability to understand complex scientific concepts. Relatedly, the build-a-MEL (baMEL) allows student agency in selecting from provided choices to make and use a new MEL diagram. We have created two astronomy-related activities: a MEL about the Moon's formation and a baMEL on the origins of the Universe. Research on student learning about the Moon’s formation and about the Universe’s origins, as well as on students’ ability to be critically evaluative, is ongoing. These activities are NSF-sponsored and freely available to instructors. The activities are appropriate for undergraduate non-science majors, future teachers, and high school students.

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What to Say When Students Ask About Astrophysics: Gravitational Waves

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Neutrino Experiments Inspire Students

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