United States

Teaching is rewarding but lot of hard work for new teachers. It makes it more difficult for immigrant teachers who speak English as a second language. I will address different teaching practices in Sri Lanka in comparison to the US. Physics is a natural&amp;nbsp;science where there are many real-world examples that one can bring into the classroom when teaching a certain Physics concept. However, this can be challenging if you are a person who didn’t grow up in the US. In my personal story, I will address the challenges I have faced and also my successes, how I was able to incorporate my traditional background and language into teaching and relationship building which is often difficult for some non-American teachers. I will also address actions I have taken to improve my teaching and to adapt to US styles of teaching and learning.&amp;nbsp;

AAPT WM 21

My Journey as a Physics Educator in US

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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

Teaching is rewarding but lot of hard work for new teachers. It makes it more difficult for immigrant teachers who speak English as a second language. I will address different teaching practices in Sri Lanka in comparison to the US. Physics is a natural&nbsp;science where there are many real-world examples that one can bring into the classroom when teaching a certain Physics concept. However, this can be challenging if you are a person who didn’t grow up in the US. In my personal story, I will address the challenges I have faced and also my successes, how I was able to incorporate my traditional background and language into teaching and relationship building which is often difficult for some non-American teachers. I will also address actions I have taken to improve my teaching and to adapt to US styles of teaching and learning.&nbsp;

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AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
- meet and greet other physics educators
- form networks nationally and locally
- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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Inquiry-Based Learning is a trend in science classrooms. However, bringing Inquiry-Based Learning to Colombian classrooms has been a slow process. Most of the professional development programs for teachers in Colombia are large, short-duration workshops with very ambitious goals and with a focus on tools (such as Moodle, sensors in smartphones, etc.). Only a few workshops are about methodologies, and most of these are focused on theory with reduced context.&nbsp; Over the past few years, we have designed and delivered teacher workshops in several Latin-American countries, as well as the United States, to support teachers to integrate Inquiry-Based Learning. This presentation will summarize insights from these experiences and discuss the design of a new teacher professional development program to support teachers in Antioquia, Colombia in the adoption and implementation of Inquiry-Based Learning methodologies in K12 science classrooms. The activities designed include the use of free PhET simulations and low-cost experiments. &nbsp;

Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning in Antioquia Colombia through Teacher Training

Asian/Asian American physics students lack ample representation in physics identity studies and in the broader STEM sociological literature. This may be due to their perceived “overrepresentation,” the “model minority” myth, or their treatment as monolithic. These misconceptions obscure the diversity amongst Asian students. How do these students understand and form their physics identity? Through in-person interviews, we have gathered data on the experiences of self-identifying Asian/Asian American undergraduate physics majors. For our analysis, we draw from previous physics identity research and use the Critical Physics Identity framework developed in a recent paper on Black physicists’ identities. 1 We present results from the Ideational Resource code and emergent codes generated from the data, such as Transnational Context and Asianization.

The Intersection of Physics Identity and Asian Identity

Standards based reform has been one prominent feature of the current educational landscape in the US since 1980s. High-stakes testing (HST) is key to the administration of standards as it holds schools accountable to meet the standards, changes the behavior of teacher and students in desirable ways, and monitors student achievement required by standards. High-school physics education (HSPE) in China is driven by the HST of college entrance examination, also known as Gaokao. I will compare HSPE between the US and China in reference to sample questions from Gaokao in China and their counterparts in the US. I will illustrate how HSPE in the two systems prepare students for the tests. Finally, I will analyze the longitudinal impacts of the two systems on students’ physics learning in college. I intend to give an insight into what is taught and how it is taught about physics in an HST-oriented context.

Examine high-school physics education driven by high stakes testing

Undergraduate research is a high-impact practice, shown to engage STEM students and increase retention, especially in underrepresented populations. Providing educational access to a diverse student population, community colleges are a vital part of the STEM pipeline, so it is critical to develop research skills as early as possible in their academic career. Colorado Space Grant Consortium has allowed our students and faculty access to excellent research opportunities at an affordable price, including payloads on high altitude balloons and sounding rockets. However, the cost of doing research on suborbital rockets, even through COSGC, can be prohibitive. In order to facilitate a student designed and built payload flown on a sounding rocket, Red Rocks Community College and Arapahoe Community College partner, combining resources both financial and advisory. The project is extra-curricular, allowing a wide range of student backgrounds and interests to participate and acquire a wide array of engineering and scientific skills.

Undergraduate Suborbital Research: Increasing Student Engagement Through Community College Partnerships

We all know what student behaviors lead to success in the long run: work steadily, review homework solutions and in-class problems, organize equations and concepts, work practice problems.&nbsp; The challenge is that some of our students enter with particularly weak backgrounds in science and mathematics. &nbsp;If&nbsp;these strategies don't work quickly enough to allow students to succeed in their introductory course, they drop out and switch majors.&nbsp; The solution: give students an alternate path, a “grade guarantee.”&nbsp; Students who complete all these successful behaviors are guaranteed a grade of C on each test, and therefore have a clear path to success in the course, and exit the course well prepared for the next course. &nbsp;This talk will describe how this grade guarantee can be put into effect without creating an undue burden on students or faculty.

Providing a Path to Success in Introductory Physics

Building an inclusive culture takes time and training.&nbsp; This is a curriculum using the strageties proposed&nbsp;in Sue et al's 2019 paper "Disarming Racial Microaggressions" (American Psychologist 74, 1, 128-142).&nbsp; The goal of the training is to practice responses to microagressions that are likely to occur in physics and future job settings.&nbsp;&nbsp; The goal is to give students options when they encounter a microaggression occurring in the future.&nbsp; In this presentation, we explain the pre-class set up, trigger warnings, in class discussions, and post-class practice and reflections.&nbsp; It is particularly important to remove the expectation that students of color are somehow responsible for educating the rest of the class, this is an unfair burden that will take away from their study of physics.

Training Physics Students to Diffuse Racial Microaggressions

For over 30 years, research-based materials developed by the physics education research community have helped transform introductory physics instruction.&nbsp;&nbsp;Many of these materials focus on the development of student conceptual understanding and place considerable emphasis on qualitative inferential reasoning.&nbsp;&nbsp;An emerging body of research, however, suggests that poor student performance on certain physics tasks – even after research-based instruction – may stem more from the nature of student reasoning itself than from specific conceptual difficulties.&nbsp;&nbsp;As part of a larger, multi-institutional effort to examine and support student reasoning in physics, we have been developing methodologies to probe student reasoning and designing and testing interventions to better support productive reasoning.&nbsp;&nbsp;New research tasks, informed by dual-process theories of reasoning, and associated results will be discussed.

Examining and Supporting Student Reasoning using Novel Methodologies*

Quantitative reasoning in introductory physics is characterized by using simple mathematics in creative and novel ways. Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL) is characterized by the blending of conceptual and procedural mathematics to generate and apply models relating physics quantities to each other. As part of developing a PQL assessment instrument, the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL), we characterized expert reasoning in three domains – proportional reasoning, covariational reasoning and reasoning with sign and signed quantities. Accurately characterizing student reasoning can help guide instructional interventions designed to help students develop more expert-like reasoning.&nbsp; In this talk, I will share ongoing quantitative analyses of student PIQL responses, and related qualitative studies. I will report on reasoning clusters revealed through module analysis, and hierarchical structure using item tree analysis. I will also share results that isolate emergent student resources associated with the three domains of expert PQL in introductory physics.&nbsp;

Finding Potential Pathways between Expert and Student Physics Quantitative Reasoning

Pearl (2000) described a formal methodology for characterizing and investigating cause-effect relationships, which included a formal diagrammatic representation for causal systems.&nbsp; This talk describes initial efforts to use these causal diagrams for modeling qualitative reasoning in introductory physics.&nbsp; Using causal diagrams to characterize students’ difficulties in physics, we have found a common causal structure that describes one class of qualitative reasoning error seen across several problem contexts.&nbsp; Causal diagrams also provide a new lens for understanding how students’ incorrect reasoning may contain productive resources for learning physics.&nbsp; These initial findings suggest that causal diagrams may be a useful lens for understanding existing findings in PER and guiding future investigations.

Using Causal Diagrams to Model Student Difficulties and Productive Thinking

Dual process theories model reasoning and decision making as comprised of both implicit and explicit processes. In these models, decisions can are made via explicit and deliberate thinking with potentially dominant influences from implicit and automatic “thinking”, such as strong tendencies for people to reply quickly, use the most available information, and make unwitting assumptions and observations aligned with beliefs and experience. While these implicit influences of human thinking may optimize every-day living and survival, they can also make normative scientific reasoning and understanding more difficult. I show some physics education-relevant examples based on students inferences from tables of data as well as examples from physics conceptual questions. To better conceptualize this process, I introduce a useful analogy to navigating a terrain. The question then becomes, how do we negotiate or change these natural and inevitable “cognitive contours” to help students more effectively learn science and reason scientifically?

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