United States

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.

AAPT SM 20

Hands on with Quantum Physics

science demo

science education

quantum physics

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. 

technical paper

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.

Attracting STEM-Talented Undergraduates to Secondary Education with Early Teaching Experiences

The slowly charging capacitor is the standard example used to illustrate that the displacement current is needed in Ampere’s Law if we want to correctly determine the magnetic field between the capacitor plates. However, it is not widely recognized that in any quasi-static situation the magnetic field can also be determined using the Biot-Savart Law with just real currents. In this presentation, we will see how including the effects of the surface currents on the plates helps explain the resulting magnetic field both between the plates and outside the plates. It is very likely that the results will surprise most viewers. Discussing these issues in an upper division physics course would provide students with additional physical insight into this interesting system.

Untold secrets of the slowly charging capacitor

Using matched PhysPort data, we assess the utility of plotting gains as a function of pre-test scores on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). Doing so has the advantage of providing nuance regarding differences in populations, whether it be to shed light on the efficacy of instructional methods or equity among different student populations. We empirically compare raw and normalized gains and find for a population of 9,354 students that neither the raw nor the normalized gain is uniform for students of all pre-FCI scores. We suggest alternative methods for quantifying gain, the relative gain, and the relative raw gain, on standardized assessments that overcome this diculty. We compare the relative gain measures to effect size and nd that each contributes to our understanding of gains. The relative gain measures are straightforward to interpret and visualize. We suggest effect size and other gain measures, particularly the relative gain measures, be used in a complementary way to better assess the differences between populations.

Gains as a function of pre-test scores

Physics students enter into a broad range of careers. It can be challenging to know not just what kinds of positions physics majors can apply for but how physics students can find jobs that they are well suited for. This lighthearted talk will briefly provide data round undergraduate student employment but focus on how students can find and how advisers can help undergraduates apply for positions.

Careers for Undergraduate Physics Majors

Following the example in "Developing scientific decision making by structuring and supporting student agency" by N.G. Holmes, et al, students designed the research question in a three-week sequence and a written lab report was replaced with an online synchronous oral lab report, followed by time for questions from student colleagues. I will report on enhanced student engagement in class and in office hours and will share anecdotal comments. Students participated in a "belonging intervention". I will share practical lessons learned.

Giving students agency increased engagement at just the right time

Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (Next Gen PET) – a research-based, guided-inquiry, physical science curriculum has been implemented at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) in a required science course for elementary education majors since Fall 2016. We teach the studio version of Next Gen PET in 4 sections of the course each Fall and Spring Semester. Since Summer 2016, we have offered an on-line version of the course for 6 weeks to help meet demand for the course. In Spring 2020, the course transitioned from on-campus, in-person instruction to on-line instruction in March due to the outbreak of COVID-19. This presentation will share how we have transitioned to on-line instruction with Next Gen PET and include insights we have gained with comparisons made of going on-line by choice versus being forced due to COVID-19.

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