United States

We examined variations in Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) pre-class scores according to self-reports of students&#39; 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.

AAPT SM20

What are students learning in AP physics?

ap physics

student preparation

physics education research

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.


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.

technical paper

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.

Scaffolds to Support Student Learning: Judging Astronomical Explanations

Computer programming is an essential skill for physics majors seeking employment in a highly technological world. The advent of “big data” in business, engineering, and traditional STEM fields requires graduates proficient in data acquisition, storage, manipulation, and analysis. Physics departments are responding to this trend by integrating computational instruction into their undergraduate programs, but questions remain regarding the effectiveness of this training. In the Department of Physics and Astronomy at James Madison University, we have developed a set of learning objectives related to computational skills and integrated these objectives throughout our curriculum, primarily in laboratory courses. Our team has also developed an assessment tool, consisting of multiple choice and free response questions, that can quantitatively measure students’ computational skills within the context of physics. This presentation will discuss both the successes and challenges we encountered as we seek to enhance computational instruction and evaluate student learning improvement in our department.

Enhancing Computational Instruction for Physics Majors: Developing Tools for Assessment

All industrialized countries are facing the same problem of declining student interest in pursuing STEM careers. In physics education, the typical response is to examine issues of appropriate and effective pedagogy, as well as gender and cultural inclusion (both in and out of the classroom). While it is appropriate that the physics community examine what it can do to make physics education more accessible to a greater diversity of students, there are some boundary conditions concerning student interest and motivation that need to be considered in parallel. In this presentation I will examine some issues related to student interest in science, and how the broad student interest in space science can be leveraged to recruit and especially retain students in STEM majors. NASA has established a National Space Science Education center that is partnering with AAPT to capitalize on the leverage that student interest in space science provides. I will present the current status of the effort, plus outline how the AAPT team is launching a project to create a network of space science educators in 2-yr colleges, in collaboration with NASA’s Space Grant program.

Space Science, Physics Education, and the NASA-AAPT Collaboration

General relativity is one of the most modern, powerful, and beautiful theories in all of physics. Yet, it's also complex and rarely taught in high school physics. This session will share some cheap, simple, hands-on activities for introducing high school students to general relativity. Building on what students already know about Newtonian gravity, the activities including modelling curved spacetime with stretchy fabric and tape and introducing the equivalence principle by dropping a bottle of water into freefall.

Teaching General Relativity via Hands-on Activities

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. Positive Psychology can be used to improve positive learning environment and promote active learning in physics. It can be useful to inspire physics students to have fun with science activities.

Implementing Positive Psychology in Teaching Physics

Other than traditional lecture demonstrations, there are also many everyday life events, such as car crashes and lightning strikes that also aptly demonstrate concepts in Physics but cannot be easily recreated in class. Today, many of these events are captured on video and are easily available on the internet. To facilitate teachers to find what they need, we classify online videos useful for Physics teaching into six broad categories. Not only are these carefully selected videos useful for illustrating the relevance of Physics to daily life, they also allow students to practice making sense of their observations and identifying the underlying Physics principles at work. Sense-making is key to the learning of Science. We will discuss four key strategies for designing class activities to help students exercise sense-making of the underlying Physics in the videos.

Uncovering Physics Examples from Internet Videos for Physics Lessons

Parallel Pedagogy simultaneously introduces and develops the four mechanics concepts of Momentum, Energy, Dynamics, and Kinematics. We report on how our free, online comprehensive resources supported a first-time mechanics instructor to smoothly adopt this pedagogy. These resources include 100 public videos and a free online textbook/workbook, both of which are interactive through student access via PlayPosit and Perusall, respectively. The flipped format and online interactive resources are also ideally suited for conversion to virtual instruction with Zoom class meetings facilitating peer instruction and relationship-building. Student acceptance of this new model is built by transparently motivating practices with physics education literature and openly sharing the student adaptation experience. We’ll show some positive learning outcomes. Consistent with this learning model, before our presentation please prepare (but come anyway if you can’t): 1) See the video of our model for learning physics: https://api.playposit.com/go/share/225308/32670/0/0/Different-Way-to-Learn-Physics 2) Look over the most recent class: https://canvas.calpoly.edu/courses/22072

Smooth Transition to Concept-Focused Mechanics, Covering Concepts in Parallel

Students know that a simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) has a ‘resonance curve’, and some students even know how to label the axes of a plot showing that resonance curve. The frequency (and amplitude) of a sinusoidal drive force are the main independent variables, and the steady-state amplitude of the SHO’s response is the main dependent variable. But a simple modification to a mechanical SHO can change it from ‘direct drive’ to ‘parametric drive’, and this subtle change has dramatic consequences. First of all, parametric resonance occurs when the drive frequency is not at the SHO’s natural frequency, but nearly _double_ that frequency. Next, there no longer emerges any steady-state amplitude of response, and the right dependent variable to measure is the rate of _exponential growth_ (or decay) of the system’s oscillations. There is also a _threshold amplitude_ for the drive required to give any growth in the response. This presentation features a torsional SHO with a non-contact parametric drive, and shows theoretical predictions and experimental data for its performance. Finally, we connect this parametric drive of a mechanical SHO to some glamorous applications of parametric excitation in modern physics.

What are students learning in AP physics?

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