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Educators and researchers often use research-based assessments to measure the efficacy of their courses. Limited resources exist, however, for interpreting assessment results. We will present analyses and representations created with data from more than 500 introductory physics courses that provide a context for interpreting assessment results. The data set comes from the online Learning About STEM Student Outcomes (LASSO) platform and the scientific literature. The representations include scatterplots of pretest and posttest scores and distributions of effect sizes, Cohen’s d with Hedges’ correction. These representations show how courses compare to the larger database before and after instruction. The results show that common rules of thumb for effect sizes are not useful for interpreting effect sizes on research-based assessments. Excel and R files are available at https://tinyurl.com/stemequityresources for readers to create their own visualizations overlaying their course data on the larger data set.

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technical paper

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.

Information technology: challenges and bottlenecks

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.

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

In physics discipline, women are globally underrepresented at the graduate level as well as at the academic and top leadership positions in higher education institutes. It is argued that multiple stakeholders, including academic departments, management at higher education institutes, government, and scientific societies need to work in tandem on developing effective programs to recruit, retain, and advance women in physics in all under-represented areas. My presentation describes one such national programmatic effort - “Vigyan Vidushi” (“a learned woman scientist”) recently launched in India by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It is a three-week summer school for the postgraduate physics degree pursuing women with a goal to enhance their preparedness towards graduate education and bring awareness of possible hindrances in their career paths. The presentation will explore specific features of the Vigyan Vidushi Summer School in a case study model to understand its widescale utility and impact.

Vigyan Vidushi- A programmatic effort towards addressing under-representation

Advisors and graduate students are sometimes stuck and not moving their research forward. We use Deliberate Innovation(DI) techniques to understand the specific situations centered around research that graduate students and their advisors find themselves in that may be problematic. A critical element of this is determining whether advisors and advisees show indifference in particular situations. We understand indifference by noticing what people are and are not drawn to in the research setting, and will be focusing on ways in which we have seen it show up. Finding this indifference allows us to know where to focus our attention, with the ultimate goal of finding situations in which we can help graduate students and advisors get unstuck and move their research forward.

Using Deliberate Innovation to Understand Indifference in Graduate Advisor/Advisee Relationships

Abstract. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Higgs boson discovery reached audience levels unprecedented for a particle physics event. The LHC can create almost a billion proton-proton collisions per second. A non-zero Higgs Field was determined to alter the properties of these particles. Understanding how this field works is one of the central particle physics research areas and justified LHC construction. From a science education research perspective, how the particulate nature of matter is introduced in the classroom is an important. The purpose of this paper explores an alternate context for which subatomic particles may be introduced to K-12 students—space weather. NASA solar probes have studied space weather and the behavior of solar energetic particles since the 1960s. The perilous impact of space weather on global commerce has motivated greater research into its particulate nature and behavior.

Instructional Context for Astrophysics: Space Weather

The Next Generation Physics Science and Everyday Thinking (NGP) curriculum materials [1] were developed to give students learning experiences that integrate all three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) [2]. Analysis of a subset of the materials with EQUIP rubric [3] confirmed this alignment and integration. However, analysis of the test bank questions that accompany the materials (using the 3D-LAP [4]) revealed that most items being used for assessment did not integrate the three dimensions. We are therefore developing assessment tasks that follow the pattern of NGP activities in integrating all three dimensions. In this presentation, we will describe the path that led us to this point, the process we are using to develop these assessment tasks, and preliminary results.

[1] https://nextgenpet.activatelearning.com
[2] NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By
States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
[3] https://www.nextgenscience.org/resources/equip-rubric-science
[4] Laverty, J. T., et. al., (2016). PloS ONE,11(9): e0162333.


Developing NGSS-aligned assessment tasks for the Next Gen PET curriculum

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) assesses students’ perceptions of physics through self-reported agreement with attitudinal statements. Previous work shows that CLASS results may be subject to response-shift bias, in which knowledge gained during an intervention causes learners’ perceptions of their pre-instructional state to become more novice-like. We explored possible sources of this response-shift bias in the CLASS by asking students to (1) complete the survey twice at the beginning of the semester (providing their pre-instruction responses and expected end-of-semester responses) and twice at the end of the semester (providing their post-instruction responses and retrospective beginning-of-semester responses), and (2) comment on their concurrent responses. By comparing beginning-of-semester and end-of-semester comments with survey shifts from a broad sample of students, we illuminate an underexplored dimension of student thinking. Preliminary results show that our students expect their perceptions of the applicability of physics will grow directly from acquiring physics knowledge.

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