United States

Those seeking to change the policies, practices, and cultures of universities to support effective educational practices often find it a challenge. To navigate this work, change efforts are increasingly being focused at the department-level, including two models for departmentally-based change: the Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project and Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) Initiative. In the DAT Project, externally-facilitated working groups, comprised of students, faculty, and staff, pursue collectively-determined projects aimed at improving the undergraduate experience in their department. In the TQF Initiative, externally-facilitated working groups of faculty (modeled on the DAT Project) focus on transforming teaching evaluation practices in their department. To better understand these related models of institutional change, we conducted interviews with individuals from the DAT Project and TQF Initiative, including facilitators and grant PIs. We present results that give insight into outcomes of these models, impacts of differences between the models, and avenues for growth in the models.

AAPT SM20

Improving education through departmental change: a comparison of approaches

change models

teaching evaluation

institutional change

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.


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 SM20

poster

Group work provides valuable opportunities for students to actively participate in classroom conversations. Instructors often emphasize generating and sharing ideas in group work, but how these ideas are shared in small-group discussions can be complicated by social dynamics within that group. In this project, we applied techniques from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze the interpersonal meanings in students’ discourse in a college physics lab section. By examining how students socially positioned themselves in the episode, we found that students steered the group’s conversation not only by explicitly offering ideas, but also by positioning as not-knowing, raising questions, and appealing to authority. This episode provides another example to a growing body of research describing the consequential role of social dynamics in how physics students contribute to small-group discussions.

Examining the Social Dynamics of Small-Group Discussions

Descriptions of the nature of science contrast the view of physics as objective, unaffected by human influence. In order to better understand students’ thinking about the nature of physics, we collected responses to the question, “Do you think physics is objective or subjective?” In this presentation, we compare and contrast the ideas from “Science for All Americans” to students’ ideas about the presence of subjectivity in physics. Students, prior to engaging in conversation about subjectivity, tend to describe physics without reference to human influence. After discussing this question with peers, students acknowledge the individual limitations of human perception and focus in research. We argue that an awareness about the influence of structural and individual subjectivity in classrooms can create a robust scientific community and disrupt the current culture that serves to marginalize groups of people.

Biases, Limitations, and Focus: Student Perspectives on Subjectivity in Physics

At research universities, foundational STEM courses are offered to hundreds or even thousands of students every year. Unfortunately, success in these courses is neither universal nor equitably distributed. Development of such courses and research into their efficacy should be a shared endeavor, yet it often takes place only locally - one discipline and one campus at a time. The Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses project aims to change this. Motivated by a focus on equity, inclusion, and excellence as central goals of the reform process, SEISMIC brings together more than a hundred individuals from ten institutions in a collaborative structure inspired by ‘big science’ research projects. This talk will describe the emergence and early progress of this R&D project, including parallel data analysis, coordinated experimentation, continuous exchange of speakers, and extended annual meetings.

Rethinking Foundational STEM Courses: Pulling Weeds or Growing Deep Roots?

Integrating Computation into Science Across Michigan (ICSAM) is an NSF funded project that focuses on supporting teachers who wish to incorporate computational activities into their physics classroom in an equitable way. Teachers from across Michigan come to MSU for one week during the summer to participate in a hands-on computational workshop. The emphasis of the workshop is to build up teachers' efficacy and ability with computation while also focusing on encouraging the teachers to consider the impact on equity that computation can have in the physics classroom. Teachers design a computational activity that they intend to use in their class while also having access to the array of computational activities designed by the other teachers. The teachers then participate in bi-monthly workdays that the ICSAM team tailor to the challenges and needs of the teachers. In this presentation, we report on the workshop design and impacts of the ICSAM project.

Integrating Computation in Science Across Michigan

Quantum physics is weird and un-intuitive. We usually imagine the classical world around us when think about physics. But in reality it is much more interesting and surprising. I will talk about my personal journey as a physics educator to take modern physics out of the lab and into the public hands. I will show how we can use hands-on demonstrations of superconductor levitation to tell the story of quantum physics. I will argue that this should be our mission as educators.

Hands on with Quantum Physics

It turns out that answering the above question is not an easy thing to do. In the GFO project* we are defining a ‘mid-career teacher’ as a high school teacher in a public school district in the U.S. who has about 15 years experience and has a Masters degree or a Masters plus some number of graduate credits. Finding enough data on the salaries earned by such a teacher is a painstaking process of accessing salary tables district by district and looking up these values. The GFO project has been trying to collect useful data on this topic from a wide range of district types and geographic locations. This talk will present the methods used in this time consuming quest, some of our current results and how these salary values compare with cost of living values and median incomes for those same districts. This comparison more accurately reflects these districts’ affordability for the teachers that work there.

“So, what does a typical mid-career teacher actually make anyway?”

As science educators, we strive to teach content that is high-quality, rigorous, engaging, relevant and equitable for all students. Teaching content that includes examples from current scientific research - in astrophysics, for example - can help hit the engaging and relevant goals. At the Sanford Underground Research Facility, we are going deep underground to study the universe through astrophysics. One experiment is searching for elusive dark matter, another experiment is measuring the nuclear reactions which happen as a star evolves, and other experiments are studying the properties of neutrinos. We engage K-12 students in all of these areas, developing curricula, activities and presentations for students that connect the astrophysics research to standards, science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts such as scale, proportion and quantity. We will bring some examples for participants to try for themselves.

Engaging students through Astrophysics: A Multimessenger Approach

Blended learning with flipped classrooms – where online pre-class instruction precedes highly interactive classes - outperforms traditional pedagogy. It also challenges the organizational and cognitive load capabilities of instructors. Placing the required resources: videos, interleaved questions, in-class activities (short instructor presentations, group problems, and other activities), homework, and quizzes in a single online platform allows creating and organizing assignments to fit various weekly class schedules. I will describe an Introductory calculus-based Mechanics course using the Modeling Approach to Problem Solving pedagogy (1&2), emphasizing the online in-class activities. We use the edX platform to handle and deploy the resources, supplemented by an organizational software package that displays sufficient metadata to create and assess a balanced learning experience, and to improve outcomes year to year based on the collected metadata. We are grateful to MIT for help generating resources and making the organizational software package. Please consider adapting this course for your students.

Modeling Approach to Problem Solving: freely available blended course

We take a social network analysis approach to investigate how members of an online teacher community interact with each other through a nine-week classical mechanics summer course. The class, associated with the Master program in physics with teaching emphasis at Texas A&M University-Commerce, requires students to participate in weekly problem solving and biweekly reading reflection discussion boards. We measured the weekly activity level for the community and number of interactions between students, and compared these to the average values determined for the entire semester. We found that the participation of students in problem solving discussions fluctuates from week to week; revealing the activity of the community of practice, influence of student backgrounds, and possible structural features of the course. Comparatively, the reading reflection participation did not show a noticeable variation. In order to gain more insight into our findings we characterized the types of interactions by categorizing student communication.

Applying Social Network Analysis to an Online Community of Practice for Teachers

We investigated how participation in a semester-long after-school teaching experience attracts undergraduate STEM majors to consider a career in teaching. The students were asked several questions about their attitudes towards teaching in high-need districts before and after the experience through surveys and interviews. Preliminary analysis suggests that experience with teaching in this program does lead STEM majors to consider teaching as a career. However, our sample was not ideal, since students typically need to declare their second major in secondary education in their sophomore year in order to fit all of the course requirements in four years. The strong interest in teaching as a career among graduating seniors was striking and leads us to conclude that earlier intervention with a teaching experience could spark interest in teaching in time to add the secondary education major, thus ensuring that the students are well prepared upon entering the classroom.

Improving education through departmental change: a comparison of approaches

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