United States

We present the results of a survey of 220 faculty members at selective liberal arts colleges who teach introductory STEM courses. The survey was designed to learn how these faculty support student quantitative skills development in their introductory courses and what high-school quantitative skills are the most challenging for their incoming introductory students. In particular, we wanted to identify the skills that students struggled with across different disciplines in order to explore the possibility of developing shared online modules to support student quantitative skills review and practice in many different introductory STEM courses. Five priority topic areas emerged -- graphs and tables, descriptive statistics, exponents/logarithms, intercepts/slopes of lines, and confidence intervals/standard error -- although there were significant disciplinary differences.

PERC SM 20

Supporting student quantitative skills across introductory STEM courses: faculty approaches and perceived needs

faculty approaches for student support

online modules

quantitative skills

AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques. Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



AAPT SM 22

AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques. Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

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?

Physics education researchers sometimes conduct research on physics faculty change; we also write about faculty when we do research on implementing reforms in physics classrooms, or when we talk about how faculty affect students understanding. This study classifies mentions of physics faculty in PERC and PhysRev-PER journals in order to study implicit frameworks used by the PER community when viewing and writing about faculty. Furthermore, mentions are categorized to give a sense of what aspects of instructors are most often commented upon. While no overall tendency towards positive or negative mentions was found, in the category of faculty beliefs, mentions were significantly negative, while in the category of faculty goals, mentions were significantly positive. We report this as a starting point for PER researchers to analyze the way we view and talk about other faculty.

Physics education research's implicit views of physics faculty

"In a society characterized by STEM sciences the knowledge about Nature of Science (NOS) is deemed an important part of students education.
Although there are a couple of studies about students beliefs about NOS available in some states in Germany, due to the differing school curricula in each state generalizations are to be avoided. Therefore, we have conducted a study which explores the development of lower high school students conceptions of NOS during one school year in the state of Hesse (N=101). For this study parts of an existing questionnaire of NOS were combined with aspects of the control-of-variables-strategy and five of the six original scales could be confirmed. On the poster we will present the methods and instruments as well as an overview of our results."

Do Hessian High Schools Foster Understanding of Nature of Science? (PERC)

Problematizing is a physics practice involving the articulation of a gap in understanding into a clear question or problem. Inquiry-based labs may be conducive to problematizing behaviors, as students often collect data that do not agree with simplified models or their intuitive predictions. In this study, we analyzed video of students performing a lab in which they find the acceleration of an object in flight to be different from what the presented models predict. We aimed to identify the various activities that groups engaged in upon recognizing this inconsistency. Common problematizing behaviors included explicit discussions of physics concepts, proposing a new experiment or calculation, and checking experimental calculations. We found that each group's sequence and duration of behaviors was quite unique, highlighting a diversity of approaches taken to address this inconsistency.

Problematizing in inquiry-based labs: how students respond to unexpected results (PERC)

Interactive video-enhanced tutorials (IVETs) involve web-based activities which lead students through a solution using expert-like problem-solving approaches, such as those needed for solving problems using Newtons Second Law. The IVETs, which are based in part on the tutorials created at the University of Pittsburgh, are designed using multimedia principles of learning and research on human learning and memory. The tutorials are adaptive and provide different levels of scaffolding depending on students needs. They are also affect-adaptive, such that they respond to students affective states, including confusion, frustration, boredom, or anxiety, while completing the IVET. This paper presents the general design characteristics of the IVETs with concrete examples and results for one specific IVET.

Promoting Problem-Solving Abilities through Web-based Interactive Video-Enhanced Tutorials

Families are an important context for learning astronomy, one that researchers on astronomy teaching and learning have largely overlooked. At public observatories, families have an opportunity to learn both the substance and practices of astronomy together. However, the typical structure of public observations (one visitor looking through a telescope while an expert explains what they see) creates tension with families engaging in the disciplinary practice of building disciplined perception through collaborative sensemaking. In this paper, we report on a preliminary study in which a family pilot tested new activities to encourage collaborative sensemaking. Key factors that supported the familys collaborative learning include (1) using activities that shift authority and control to each member of the family, (2) Having a variety of activities that can be deployed at strategic times rather than a fixed schedule, and (3) Being responsive to the family dynamics, including the emotional needs of each family member.

From “having a day” to doing astronomy: Supporting families learning together

We investigate student comfort with the material in an upper-division spins-first quantum mechanics course. Pre-lecture surveys probing students' comfort were administered weekly, in which students assigned themselves a "discomfort level" on a scale of 0--10 and provided a written explanation for their choice. The weekly class-wide average discomfort level was effectively constant over the semester, suggesting that the class found no single unit especially jarring nor especially easy. Student written responses were coded according to their reported source of discomfort---math, math-physics connection, physics, and notation. The relative prevalence of these categories varied significantly over the semester, indicating that students find that different units present different challenges, and also that some of these challenges fade in importance as the semester progresses. Semi-structured interviews with students in a similar quantum mechanics course at a different institution provided additional context and insight into these results.

Characterizing and monitoring student discomfort in upper-division quantum mechanics

The physics education and computer science researchers at Ithaca College collaborated to develop a mobile application to provide students with a dynamic experience studying electric fields, a notoriously difficult topic. This study is the first in a longitudinal study comparing the impacts of the mobile application and paired worksheet activity to other learning tools including a laptop simulation and a worksheet-only activity. Participants include health science majors enrolled in an algebra-based physics class. The normalized gain in performance on a diagnostic administered prior to and after interacting with one of the three activities was used to measure the impact of each activity on student understanding. Student attitude was measured using a questionnaire in the post-activity diagnostic. The results show students prefer laptop activities as physics learning aids and students in the two sections, mobile application and laptop simulation, produced higher average gains in learning than those in the worksheet-only section.

Analyzing the impacts of a new mobile application on student understanding of and attitudes toward electric fields

What motivates a student to learn and how they perceive their classroom structures have a significant effect on learning. In an introductory physics course, we find that in particular students tend to focus on superficial markers of success and not on mastering central concepts. For a foundational course, this is of particular concern. In this study, we present narratives from students highlighting their differing orientations towards achievement and learning, which we roughly categorize as mastery or performance. Our preliminary analysis is the first step towards a framework for student motivation and achievement strategies in introductory physics, and complements work in belonging.

Analysis of student perceptions of classroom structure, belongingness, and motivation in an introductory physics course

The use of the Physics GRE in graduate admissions has gained considerable attention in recent years. While studies have shown the problematic nature of the exam quantitatively, it is time that student experiences were also included in the discussion. We interviewed 69 current graduate physics and astronomy students about their process of deciding where to apply to graduate school. Physics GRE requirements played a substantial role in this decision, with 48 students mentioning the test as part of their process to narrow programs down to a personalized short-list. Potential barriers (e.g., financial and travel) that affected some students, but not others, create an unequal playing field for grad school applicants. These results suggest that graduate programs requiring the Physics GRE are doing more than asking prospective graduate students to simply take a physics test, and may be inadvertently disadvantaging the very students that they are trying to recruit.

Physics GRE Requirements Create Uneven Playing Field for Graduate Applicants

A number of well-established research scales are available to assess students interest in German physics lessons. One common scale differentiates between the interest that students show in physical contents and their interest in physics lessons (Hoffman et al., 1998). In addition, a scale widely used in educational psychology distinguishes between the emotional significance of an activity and the perceived significance of its content (Krapp, 2010). So far, these two constructs have largely been used unrelated. Against this background we have decided to integrate both constructs in a questionnaire for our current study to assess high school students interest in physics (N = 1529). Our collected data suggests that the previous combined constructs need to be revised as two of four scales seem to coincide in one. The poster will report in more detail on our data and the proposed newly structured interest scales.

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Supporting student quantitative skills across introductory STEM courses: faculty approaches and perceived needs

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Physics education research's implicit views of physics faculty

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