United States

Many events can drive change but one hopes that a tragic event is not a primary motivator. Varied ideas about change regarding the graduate program circulated the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah prior to 2017. But along with those ideas came resistance to change among the faculty, little sense of urgency, and an inability to settle or agree on the best course of action. However, when tragedy struck in the fall of 2017, change occurred at a much more rapid pace. In this talk we discuss the different aspects of the change process that transpired: spearheading events, decisions, departmental reaction, long-term impacts, challenges, guiding messages, and sense of community. One key finding we present is that, while policy change was widely implemented and accepted, there is still some resistance to cultural change within the department.

AAPT SM 21

Graduate Reform in Physics and Astronomy: Tragedy, Policy, and Culture

graduate education reform

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technical paper

Stop Saying “Zero Gravity”?

The term “zero gravity” first appeared in NASA’s technical bulletins in 1968. Since then “zero g” has become extremely common in popular usage. We also often hear talk of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) being weightless or experiencing zero gravity. I present here preliminary results of a survey conducted on social media of college students in the U.S who have taken a physics course in high school or college. Participants were asked about their familiarity with “zero g” or “zero gravity” and also if they thought that astronauts float because of zero gravity. The results show that a very high percentage of students surveyed are aware of the term. Significant numbers among them think that astronauts float due to the absence of gravity, a belief that does not appear to be based on a conceptual understanding of free fall/circular motion and scientific reasoning.


Stop Saying “Zero Gravity”?

Decision based learning (DBL) is a heavily scaffolded constructionist methodology. It guides students through complex cognitive tasks using a decision tree developed from expert approaches to problem solving. DBL was used to teach conceptional Newtonian mechanics in an online, on-demand, general education science course. This talk will introduce the methodology, explain why it was chosen to provide instructional framework for conceptional Newtonian mechanics, and provide results on the effectiveness of a pilot trial of the technique.

Decision Based Learning in Conceptual Newtonian Mechanics

Inquiry-based physics labs often include a focus on collecting and analyzing scientific data. During the process of making sense of the data, students often engage in data cleaning, even if not explicitly instructed to. Data cleaning is the process of identifying and mitigating instances in the data that are misaligned with expectations or hypotheses of the experiment, often due to equipment or software bugs. Our research analyzes think-aloud interviews from thirteen students and observational data in a first-semester, undergraduate IPLS lab. Qualitative coding focused on students’ decision-making processes while engaging in data cleaning in a think-aloud interview setting and in observation data of students working in lab. Results show that students typically follow a process of noticing an anomaly, reasoning about its cause, and then either keeping or discarding the anomaly. However, nuances in this pattern differed in the lab environment as teaching and learning assistants had a significant impact on students’ methods of data cleaning. Although determining the source of outliers in data is complicated, unpacking students’ decision-making process is important for lab instructors to better support students in learning how to work with and interpret data.

Investigating Student Decision-Making when Engaging in Data Cleaning

We present the improvements made to the teaching methodology for a required advanced electronics lab course for physics and astronomy majors at UNC-CH. The course had the reputation of being most challenging for our majors, leading to depleted student morale, and even losing physics majors. The primary concern was that students were focusing too much time and attention on the equipment and mechanics of the labs at the cost of understanding the underlying electronics principles. Our course changes include (1) updating the traditional lab format to worksheets to be completed in small groups, (2) including more circuit simulations and coding to foster conceptual understanding, and (3) dedicating time in each lab for mini-lectures to reinforce or introduce ideas that were missed in the lecture portion of the course. We present results from these changes to teaching practices and the benefits that we have achieved.

Improving Teaching Methodology for an Electronics Lab Course

Scientific reasoning has been emphasized as a core ability of 21st century education. For decades the only assessment instrument available for large-scale application was Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning, but the instrument has demonstrated validity weaknesses and ceiling limitations. As a result, there is urgent need for the development of a valid and updated scientific reasoning assessment instrument that is based on a coherent model and targets the wide-ranging skills required for 21st century learners. This talk reports on the development of a comprehensive modeling framework for scientific reasoning along with a new assessment instrument. The validity and reliability of the instrument, which have been established based on large-scale assessment outcomes, will also be discussed.

Development of a Modeling Framework for Assessment of Scientific Reasoning

Modern physicists and modern choreographers each investigated Energy, Space and Time throughout the 20th century. While modern physics considered length contraction, time dilation, and ideas like the Higgs boson, modern dance artists experimented with spatial organization, duration in performance, and the relationship between the performer and the audience. We, a particle physicist and a dancer/choreographer, have developed a curriculum (included in our 2019 book published by Yale University Press, "Physics and Dance") that uses these advances in each discipline to illuminate the other. We present several case studies from our curriculum and show how learning the similarities and contrasts between developments in modern physics and those in modern dance help students wrestle more deeply with the ideas in each discipline.

Relativity to Muons with Physics and Dance

Holographic duality represents a revolutionary new way to tackle strongly coupled systems like QCD at low energies, where quarks and gluons clump into “hadrons”, like protons and neutrons. The duality posits that low-energy QCD is equivalent to a weakly coupled system in a curved high-dimensional spacetime, where we can use standard perturbative techniques to make predictions for quantities like meson masses and couplings. While the original formulation of the duality relies on string theory, many techniques derived from it can be boiled down into problems readily accessible to undergraduates. In this talk, we show that finding the hadron spectrum using holographic duality amounts to solving a one-dimensional Schroedinger equation, where the structure of the 5D curved space is encoded in the Schroedinger potential.

Using the Language of Quantum Mechanics to Explain Holographic Duality

In this talk, I address the question whether it is possible to convey the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and its amazing applications to someone with only a high school background of physics and mathematics. In the fall of 2018, I offered a course on Quantum Mechanics to incoming freshman students at the Texas A&M University. These students, just out of high school, took this course before they took the usual Mechanics and Electricity/Magnetism courses. I shall present the details of this course which covered, on one hand, the foundations of quantum mechanics including wave-particle duality, complementarity, aspects of Einstein Bohr debate, and Bell theorem, but also some mind boggling applications, such as in quantum communication and quantum computing. In 2020 I published a book (Quantum Mechanics for Beginners – with applications to Quantum Communications and Quantum Computing, Oxford University Press 2020) based on my lecture notes for this course.

Teaching quantum mechanics and quantum information to high school students

The first detection of gravitational waves (GW) by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) has sparked new interest from physics and astronomy students in the often explosive processes and exotic objects that can be observed. This presentation will introduce the science of what GWs are and how LIGO detects them. We will also discuss several detections of gravitational waves, including describing the sources that created the GW. Most importantly, we will discuss how you can make connections between the science of GW and the concepts you are teaching in your high school and college classrooms. A summary list of resources will be provided, many of which will also be appropriate for public outreach purposes.

* This talk is presented on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Can You Surf a Gravitational Wave?: Explaining LIGO Science

Although the technology that enables the modern Information Age looks very complicated, it has several basic physics ideas at its core that are simple enough to explain at the high school level. One can use the same simple physics arguments to explain the fundamental limits of current information technologies and the bottlenecks we are already experiencing when we try to send, receive, or process information. Perhaps most importantly, after learning these basic physics principles, the students should be able to think about ways to overcome the challenges and propose their own solutions.

Graduate Reform in Physics and Astronomy: Tragedy, Policy, and Culture

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Stop Saying “Zero Gravity”?

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