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Electricity is the main form of energy transfer and use in the 21st century, and its understanding is of central importance. We describe how 8th grade students learn the physics of electric circuits through building computational particle models of conductors. The gradual construction of the computational particle model of the conductor, embodies the conceptualization of repulsion between free electrons, the push of the electric field, and the hindrance of the stationary ions. Comparing Pre/Post questionnaire data with a control group, shows that building the model is a sound basis for macro-level understanding of electric dynamics. Qualitative analyses highlight how creative activities such as drawing the conductors boundary and spreading electrons in it, complement observing the working model and discussing its mechanism in the classroom. Drawing on constructivist and grounded theories of learning, we discuss how constructing models and making conceptual micro-macro connections results in meaningful learning of this difficult topic.

PERC SM 20

Constructing micro-level models to promote understanding of electric circuits in middle school

mental models

electric circuits

computational modeling

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AAPT SM 21

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?

Latinas in physics experience multiple marginalization due to the intersection of their ethnicity and gender, thus it is important for the physics community to focus support and help them achieve their success in physics. To begin supporting Latinas in achieving success it is crucial that the community has an understanding of the diversity of goals that contribute to their overall success in physics. With this qualitative study we used interviews to explore the goals expressed by 20 undergraduate and graduate students who identify as Latinas across the United States. Guided by Motivational Systems Theory, we present the goals participants had in common (e.g. resource provisions and social responsibilities) as well as the different goals they emphasized (e.g. emphasis on affective goals versus integrative social relationship goals). These goal contents provide a more nuanced level of detail to goal orientations held by Latinas in physics and serve as examples of the relevant goals that the physics community should support.

Explicating the goal contents of Latinx female physics students

Holistic Teaching Evaluations and Knowledge in Use

Ideally, instructors and their institutions would have a shared set of metrics by which they determine teaching effectiveness. We asked 72 physics instructors to describe how they and their institutions assess teaching effectiveness. Results suggest that institutions typically base most or all of their assessment of teaching effectiveness on student evaluations of teaching. Instructors, on the other hand, base most or all of their assessment of teaching effectiveness on student exam performance and nonsystematic formative assessments. Few institutions and instructors use assessment practices suggested by the research literature. In general, instructors are much more positive about the methods they use to evaluate their teaching than the methods their institutions use to evaluate their teaching. Both instructors and institutions could benefit from broadening the assessment sources they use to evaluate teaching effectiveness through increased use of standardized measures based on student learning and greater reliance on systematic formative assessment.

Assessment of teaching effectiveness: Lack of alignment between instructors, institutions, and research recommendations

As VR becomes more common, there remain unanswered questions regarding how best to use this technology in the classroom. On the topic of electrostatics, for example, a large, controlled, randomized study performed by Smith et al. (2017), found that VR-based instruction had an overall negligible impact on student learning compared to videos or images. However, they did find a strong trend for students who reported frequent video game play to learn better from VR than other media. One possible interpretation of this result is that videogame play provides a kind of "training" that enables a student to learn more comfortably in the virtual environment. In the present work we test if a VR training activity unrelated to electrostatics can help prepare students to learn electrostatics from subsequent VR instruction. We find that preliminary VR training leads to a small but statistically significant improvement in student performance on our electrostatics assessment.

Using Virtual Reality in Electrostatics Instruction: The Impact of Training

The University of Washington (UW) Physics Education Group is creating virtual reality (VR) lab environments that simulate "novel" physical phenomena that do not exist in the real world but follow laws that can be modeled using techniques accessible to first-year physics laboratory students. Presenting these novel phenomena in VR provides an opportunity for authentic model-generating activities in introductory labs while retaining key components of in-person labs such as hands-on interaction, measurement uncertainty, and opportunities to build teamwork skills. This talk describes in detail the development of and students' experience modeling one such novel phenomenon, identifying the scientific reasoning skills students bring to bear in the absence of any expected experimental outcome and highlighting opportunities for this technique to build those skills.

Design and student experience of novel physics systems delivered in virtual reality labs

Compared to other formal learning environments in undergraduate physics programs, multiweek group projects in lab courses give rise to unique interactions between students, their peers, their instructors, and apparatus. What does teaching look like in these contexts? How do instructors change their teaching practices as students transition from proposing project topics to carrying out experiments and reporting on results? To answer these and related questions, we conducted a multiple case study of group project implementations in upper-division labs at five universities. In this presentation, we draw on data from interviews and surveys with instructors and students to identify a variety of teaching practices. We further describe the intended purposes and perceived impacts of these practices. Preliminary data analysis suggests that group projects may be a shared endeavor in which students and instructors have asymmetric apprenticeship-style roles and responsibilities.

Taxonomy of teaching practices during group projects in lab courses

The Research Physics program, launched in 2016, offers Israeli high school physics majors extra credit for performing a research project guided by teacher-mentors. The 240 hour Research Physics Mentors' training program is designed as a fast-track framework taking novice teacher-mentors through a professional development process within a community of experts and peers. The practical component involves mentoring a student-pair for 18 months, from topic selection until the final exam. The program is based on a "structuring and problematizing" scaffolding process (Reiser, 2004), enabling the development and application of knowledge, skills, beliefs and attitudes. During 2017-2019 a qualitative study, sketched profiles of four trainee teachers' professional development, describing how they maintained a viable mentoring process with their unique student team and research topic. The analysis of multiple evidence resources tracked issues of mentoring responsibility and scientific and mentoring knowledge, relating them to assignments and interactions with program leaders, students and peers.

Training Teachers as Physics Research Mentors: Four Personal Development Stories

Much of physics involves the construction and interpretation of equations. Sherin designed the symbolic forms analysis to describe students construction of equations in physics. A symbolic form includes two components: the symbol template to represent the externalized structures of the equation and the conceptual schema to represent the acontextual mathematical justification of the symbol template. We incorporate symbolic forms into a conceptual blending framework to describe the ways in which construct and understand equations. Our model treats the conceptual schema as the underlying generic space of conceptual blending that frames the combination of the contextual information and the symbolic structure. We present this model in the context of student construction of non-Cartesian differential length vectors. We illustrate the affordances of the model by drawing further connections between the frameworks and expanding this approach to other contexts within our research.

Modeling the construction and interpretation of equations: Incorporating symbolic forms into a conceptual blend

Our department has undertaken a multi-year effort to make computational methods central to our physics curriculum. Our students should graduate with the attitude that computational approaches are a normal part of physics, used every day, and for a multitude of tasks. To accomplish this, our current objective is to make 25% of all work done by students in our upper division courses computational. This talk will begin with an overview of the history and change process of this initiative. What lead us to this decision, and how we have chosen to implement it as a department. It will then present an instrument developed in-house to measure students' attitudes and self-efficacy with respect to computation. This discussion will include both the process by which the instrument was developed, and what we have learned from the first few semesters of data. IUPUI is an urban public institution graduating 10-15 majors each year.

Introducing computational physics across the curriculum

Student issues with both understanding electrical potential and difficulties with interpreting diagrams have been well explored. A prior study showed equipotential diagram modifications of line thickness and color significantly increased student gaze times at the diagrams without increasing students' correctness. Students' awareness and understanding of electric charge sign and its role in electric potential is a major issue. An investigation of modifying traditional equipotential diagrams based on theories of visual affordances to improve students' recognition of electric change sign when ranking electric potential was undertaken. In this study different modifications of color and line style were made to equipotential lines to increase visual salience of charge sign. Students were randomly assigned to traditional or modified diagrams and asked to compare electric potentials for indicated points on given diagrams. Pre- and posttest comparisons and the results of student interviews are presented to clarify the specific issues students have reading equipotential diagrams.

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Explicating the goal contents of Latinx female physics students

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