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Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an instructional strategy involving feedback from students on pre-lecture activities in order to design in-class activities to build on the continuing feedback from students. We investigated the effectiveness of a JiTT approach, which included in-class concept tests using clickers in an upper-division quantum mechanics course. We analyzed student performance on pre-lecture reading quizzes, in-class clicker questions answered individually, and clicker questions answered after group discussion, and compared those performances with open-ended retention quizzes administered after all instructional activities on the same concepts. In general, compared to the reading quizzes, student performance improved when individual clicker questions were posed after lectures that focused on student difficulties found via electronic feedback. The performance on the clicker questions after group discussion following individual clicker question responses also showed improvement. We discuss some possible reasons for improved performance at various stages. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

AAPT SM 21

Just-in-Time Teaching and Peer Instruction in a Quantum Mechanics Course

peer instruction

clickers

just-in-time teaching

quantum

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

PERC SM 21

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

poster

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. 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. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

If you are registered please note that you need to be logged in with your AAPT email / credentials in order to get access.

Professional societies call on their members to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. To meet this goal, introductory college courses need to repay the educational debts society owes due to racism and sexism. We investigated the size of and changes in society’s educational debts in conceptual knowledge in introductory chemistry, biology, and physics courses for majors using a critical quantitative framework. The varying gender and racial representation across these disciplines provided context for interpreting the relationship between society’s educational debts and representation across disciplines. We analyzed data from 22,520 students in 328 courses at 34 institutions collected with the LASSO platform using Bayesian hierarchical linear models. The models identified similar trends in educational debts due to racism and sexism in all three disciplines. We will discuss implications for research, instruction, and diversity in physics.

Society’s Educational Debts from Racism and Sexism in Science Disciplines

DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.

How STEM faculty enter Discipline Based Education Research

Societal stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in physics can impact motivational beliefs, e.g., of women and racial and ethnic minority students in physics courses. This study investigates how the learning environment predicts male and female students’ motivational beliefs including physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity at the end of year long (spanning two-semester) algebra-based introductory physics courses. These were courses at a large university in the US taken primarily by biological science majors many of whom are interested in health professions. Although women are not underrepresented in these physics courses, societal stereotypes and biases internalized by female students over their lifetime can still impact their motivational beliefs about physics. Our findings show gender gap in motivational beliefs favoring men. These findings can be useful to provide support and create an equitable and inclusive learning environment to help all students excel in these courses.

How the learning environment predicts students’ motivational beliefs in physics

Intelligence mindset has been studied extensively in education research, but domain-specific intelligence mindset research is relatively new in the physics context. Additionally, recent mindset research has uncovered separable factors within the intelligence mindset construct. In this study, we test a model involving four factors (My Ability, My Growth, Others' Ability, and Others' Growth) to pre and post survey data from Physics 1 classes. In particular, we explore how these mindset factors change over time as well as their ability to predict course grade. We find that students are less likely to endorse a growth mindset for themselves and others at the end of their first calculus-based introductory physics course than at the beginning. We also find that decrease in mindset measures are more drastic for female students than male students. Finally, we find that the best predictor of course grades is the My Ability component of the mindset construct, which has implications both for creating equitable and inclusive learning environment and determining how educators implement mindset interventions.

Who do students believe a growth mindset applies to?

This study reports the predictive power of different parameters towards FMCE (Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation) post-test scores controlling for FMCE pretest scores. The sample consists of students (N=1060) from a large eastern land-grant university enrolled in Physics 1 (calculus-based mechanics class). These students are primarily pursuing engineering degrees. Multiple linear regression was used with FMCE post-test score as the dependent variable and a broad collection of independent variables including high school GPA, ACT/SAT score, college math entry level, AP classes taken, transfer credits, college credits, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and personality. The degree to which these variables are still important if FMCE pretest scores are controlled for is examined.

What factors predict FMCE post-test scores controlling for pretest scores?

Modified Module Analysis (MMA) has proven to be a productive method for studying physics conceptual inventories. MMA can be used to analyze large datasets by forming networks of item responses then using community detection algorithms to identify responses that are consistently selected together. MMA has been applied to many physics instruments, such as the Force Concept Inventory, identifying underlying misconceptions measured by the instrument and providing insight into the structure of those misconceptions. In this study, MMA was applied to over 8000 pretest and post-test responses to the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS). The CLASS was separated into “expert-like” and “unexpert-like” responses, corresponding to the responses that were chosen by experts in physics. The communities present in the networks naturally separated into expert-like and unexpert-like communities. These communities were analyzed to determine coherent structure in the instrument and in students’ attitudes about science.

Network Analysis of the CLASS

Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this poster, we use an example from an introductory physics course to show how whiteness is reproduced in physics classroom spaces, and we name some of the mechanisms that facilitate that reproduction.

Seeing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study

We have developed a workshop, which meets weekly in an online synchronous format, to support physics majors during the pandemic and to help them develop essential transferrable skills. Class typically begins with a check in to see how students are coping with the challenges of college during the pandemic. The rest of the time is spent on activities and discussions designed to help students develop communication and problem-solving skills, such as communicating science to the public and tackling open-ended problems, that are not commonly addressed elsewhere in the curriculum. There is flexibility built into the class such that we can adapt the schedule to meet the needs of the students or to go into more depth on certain topics. This poster will discuss the workshop format and activities as well as student feedback on the workshop and the potential for incorporating such a course into the physics curriculum.

Developing Essential Physics Skills through a Workshop-style Course

TYCs have unique opportunities to support their students, like through close student-teacher relationships due to small class sizes, and we studied one such class in a cohort program at a TYC for natural science majors intending to transfer. This course was a STEM research methods course that we observed by taking field notes, administering written journal reflections to the students throughout the course, and by interviewing some of the students at the end of the course. In this poster, we will discuss the course overall and the student experiences, as well as the ways our observational methods supported us building helpful research relationships.

Observing and Characterizing a Two-Year College Research Methods Course

Descriptions of the Nature of Science are in contrast with the widespread notion that “physics” is objective, unaffected by human influence. To better understand students’ thinking about the nature of physics, we taught a lesson from the Underrepresentation Curriculum and collected written responses before and after in-class discussion about the nature of physics. In this manuscript, we share student responses about the presence of subjectivity in physics and relate them to commonly accepted ideas about the Nature of Science. Prior to discussing subjectivity, students tend to describe physics without reference to human influence. Afterwards, many students identify that while physical properties may be objective, human interpretation, biases, and values influence physics as well. Some students also consider our understanding of physics as incomplete. These discussions are a first step towards increasing awareness of structural and individual subjectivity. We believe this will ultimately support a more equitable, robust scientific community.

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Just-in-Time Teaching and Peer Instruction in a Quantum Mechanics Course

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