United States

At large universities, where introductory physics labs are often run by graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), it may be necessary to provide professional development for TAs in order to successfully implement inquiry-based lab learning, establish TA practices that support inclusive education in the lab, or effectively introduce other important lab practices. As part of a transformation of our introductory physics labs toward an inquiry-based model, we developed and implemented a research-based training program that includes relevant activities and role-playing while attempting to account for TA `buy-in&#39;. Our analysis demonstrates a positive shift in TA views about student learning and an encouraging improvement in instructional behaviors for TAs who participated in our lab TA professional development program. We have also worked to build systems to both sustain and disseminate our lab TA professional development program and will briefly share some of these efforts.

PERC SM 20

Making lab TA professional development work (and some evidence that it does)

lab tas

labs

professional development

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.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

At large universities, where introductory physics labs are often run by graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), it may be necessary to provide professional development for TAs in order to successfully implement inquiry-based lab learning, establish TA practices that support inclusive education in the lab, or effectively introduce other important lab practices. As part of a transformation of our introductory physics labs toward an inquiry-based model, we developed and implemented a research-based training program that includes relevant activities and role-playing while attempting to account for TA `buy-in'. Our analysis demonstrates a positive shift in TA views about student learning and an encouraging improvement in instructional behaviors for TAs who participated in our lab TA professional development program. We have also worked to build systems to both sustain and disseminate our lab TA professional development program and will briefly share some of these efforts.

technical paper

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.

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?

A critical component of the Projects Theory of Change are the faculty who become local champions and take it upon themselves to get the facts out about the teaching profession. To be successful, these faculty must customize the project resources with local teacher salaries and retirement information. Workshops and detailed instructions on the project website have been provided; however, we have found that the expertise and time required to collect this data and to customize the resources is posing an unacceptable energy barrier. In addition, we have found that national salary data is unreliable to the point that we are uncomfortable making claims about the profession using this data. To solve both of these problems, we have embarked on a data collection effort and developed a metric for comparing tangible teacher benefits to the local economy.

Data mining: Helping faculty develop an accurate picture of the teaching profession in their region

Educational Change from an Administrator's Perspective

Being a teacher in an instructional laboratory where students design their own experiments is not an easy task. Being a first year graduate TA who never taught before makes this challenge even harder. How do you guide the students to design a productive experiment? How do you teach them to communicate their findings? How do you create a learning community in your classroom? We will report on our work in an urban university where we implemented the Investigative Learning Environment (ISLE) approach in a large-enrollment introductory physics sequence (algebra and calculus based). A part of the approach involves students designing their own experiments in labs guided by specific questions and self-assessment rubrics. We describe professional development efforts, data collection (observation protocols) and their effects on the instruction and student learning and attitudes.

Professional Development and Struggles of Beginning Instructors Teaching Design Labs

The Access Network is an organization that supports vibrant interactions among students and faculty who advocate for equity work in the physical sciences. This paper uses McGee and Bentley's framework of "equity ethic" (EE) to understand how Access student leaders adopt and refine a commitment to equity and social justice work within the physical sciences. In McGee and Bentley's study of STEM students of color, they define EE as students' sense of altruism and collectivism within and outside of their communities. Through interviews with student leaders, we model components of students' EEs and how their EEs are influenced by their participation in Access. Student accounts illustrate that they are invested in improving equity within their disciplinary communities and see progress toward these goals as an important measure of success. Our findings highlight how students are already infusing an EE into their professional physics activities.

Students' exploring and refining their equity ethic within the Access Network

At Purdue University, all physics, chemistry and engineering majors (N>2400 annually) take at least one semester of their calculus-based introductory physics sequence using the innovative texts, Modern Mechanics and Electric and Magnetic Interactions by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood. In this presentation, I will share the rationale and the unexpected steps taken in adopting these innovative texts. Having now had over a decade's experience teaching both these courses, I will share my thoughts on the challenges and successes of this change.

How Purdue transitioned to Matter & Interactions

The recent AAPT recommendations on the laboratory curriculum and on computational physics, as well as the Phys 21 report from the APS and AAPT Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs, encourage physics programs to prepare students for a range of opportunities after graduation through a curriculum that develops and reinforces of a set of transferrable skills and knowledge. The laboratory is an ideal venue for developing many of the skills discussed in these documents, including design, technical, analytical, and communication skills. This talk will address innovative ways to implement these recommendations throughout the upper level laboratory curriculum, examples of revised curricula from Lewis University and other institutions, methods of evaluating skill development in the lab, and opportunities for developing new assessments.

Skill Development in Physics Labs Beyond the First Year

The talk highlights photovoice, a participatory method that gives power to creators of images to capture experiences that are central to their life. Black and Latinx students verbal considerations of success in the context of their urban charter school is included, as is a sample of students visual data about what success is outside of their schooling context. The study reveals the school's no-excuses orientation to teaching and learning fosters an oppressive definition of success in the context of classrooms. However, photovoice reveals students are able to resist the limited view as four emergent findings reveal how students (re)imagine success. Lastly, implications about what educators and school communities may learn, if students were seen as active co-constructors in the design and implementation of their own education is discussed.

(Re)imagining success through photovoice: Highlighting a research and teaching strategy that could be useful in physics/STEM education

Teaching assistants (TAs) across the United States play an important role in the education of students, as they often teach laboratories, recitations, and discussion sections. Due to increased recognition of the importance of student-centered instruction and active learning, TAs are often required to implement instructional strategies they are unfamiliar with. Thus, professional development programs designed to help TAs implement student-centered instruction effectively are very important, and one central component of any successful program is integrating formative assessment throughout. In this talk, I will describe such a program with a focus on how formative assessment is used, not so much to evaluate the TAs, but to provide feedback and support to help them grow into effective educators.

Using formative assessment to improve the teaching effectiveness of teaching assistants

Developed by Larry Michaelson, a management professor at the University of Oklahoma, Team-based learning (TBL) details a pedagogical approach designed to improve learning outcomes, increase student engagement, and create a sense of community. Unlike group-work used in other fields this approach explicitly has several key elements: teams of 5-7 students stay together for the entire semester, teams participate in a Readiness Assurance Process and in-class team activities, individual team members evaluate their members' contributions, and course grade weighting includes team components. After attending a workshop led by the Council on Teaching and Learning in 2017, four professors at Siena College in upstate NY began incorporating this pedagogy into their physics courses at all levels. In this talk, I will describe team-based learning in upper-level physics classrooms at Siena College. To evaluate this innovation, we are conducting a series of qualitative case studies of student experience of team-based learning in our upper-division physics courses. The implementation of team-based learning in physics courses and a preliminary report of the qualitative analysis will be described.

Modernizing Upper-Division Mechanics: Preparing Students for a Complex World

Undergraduate teaching evaluation systems often poorly measure teaching effectiveness and lack processes for formative development of teaching quality. In response to these concerns, the Teaching Quality Framework Initiative (TQF), a Center for STEM Learning project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is creating a process for transformation of teaching evaluation toward a more scholarly and evidence-based approach. The TQF, as part of the Bay View Alliance and multi-institution TEval collaboration, focuses on teaching evaluation in order to improve instruction and enhance student outcomes, among other long-term institutional objectives. Departmental-level and stakeholder meetings are combined with outreach to administrative officials and cross-departmental sharing of resources to create campus-wide change. We present tools and processes associated with departmental-level and campus-level change, explore how departments move through this process, share example tools developed by teams, and engage in conversations around mechanisms to create sustainable campus-wide change and disseminate tools/processes beyond our campus.

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Making lab TA professional development work (and some evidence that it does)

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