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PERC SM 20

Instructional Pragmatism: Using a Variety of Evidence-based Approaches Flexibly to Improve Student Learning

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AAPT SM 21

poster

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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