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For decades, astronomy has been studied by undergraduates at colleges, with most of the astronomy courses being taken by general education students. Further, a total number of students that are enrolled in an introductory astronomy, either a cumulate or topical course, is approximately 200,000 students per academic year. During the Spring 2019 semester at the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI), across two astronomy courses, the Solar System (ASTR 1010) and the Stellar System (ASTR 1020) (Fig. 4), there are 12 course sections and 154 students enrolled. Critical barriers are difficult concepts of science education encountered by students identified by Hawkins (1978), “such as size and scale, air and water and beyond, heat, and elementary mechanics”. These are among the core concepts in introductory astronomy courses. Critical barriers would be likely more difficult to overcome if the student had a learning disability. Most of undergraduate students do not have a self-reported disability, and approximately 10% of undergraduate students report having a disability. One disability that would be very difficult to overcome in an introductory astronomy course is partial or full visual impairment. Astronomy education research is underway to be able to integrate introductory astronomy learning objectives into tangible materials to give blind and visually impaired people. However, limited activities have been initiated here at the Community College of Rhode Island. This project seeks to develop a curriculum kit for visually impaired students based on the content of the ASTR 1010 course to apply tactile, temperature, and sound techniques to determine if it is feasible for use in the introductory solar system course to accomplish the learning objectives of the course, outlined by the college. Our work shows that astronomy course objectives can prove to be difficult for visually impaired individuals to master. However, with extra time and instructor input, creative ways can be generated to ensure that the course learning objectives are met, as shown here, is possible.

AAPT SM 21

Activities for Visually Impaired Learners in Introductory Solar System Astronomy

visually-impaired

activities

astronomy

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poster

Physics by Inquiry (McDermott et al, 1996) is a hands-on, inquiry-based curriculum. Students work through the experiments and exercises in small groups, with their understanding assessed at pivotal points in the curriculum. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we taught Physics by Inquiry courses remotely, encountering the challenges of synchronous teaching and learning. This poster will illustrate our strategies and the ways we met the challenges.

Teaching Physics by Inquiry Remotely

Computational Modeling is seen as one of the three pillars of modern physics by many. Surprisingly, it is not mandatory in many German school curricula and thus, few physics teachers use it in class on a regular basis. To increase awareness of computational modeling in the local physics teacher community and to investigate the effects of the use of computational modeling in combination with real experiments on students, a science lab was created, that combines computational modeling with an experiment and real-world data to tackle students’ preconceptions in Newtonian dynamics using the software Newton-II. Students from 11th grade take part in the science lab after having discussed Newton’s laws in school. The poster highlights the way in which computational modeling is combined with real world data in four different experiments and the effect of the lab on, among others, students’ conceptual understanding and preconceptions.

Improving Students’ Conceptions Combining Computational Modeling and Real-world Data

The formation of standing wave is accompanied by the generation of wave node and wave abdomen. Different from the transverse standing wave, the longitudinal standing wave also has the thinning part and the dense part. Previous demonstrators of longitudinal standing waves were able to demonstrate these phenomena at a slightly higher frequency (~30Hz), which made it impossible to see how the phenomena changed in density. Except with the help of a strobe or high-speed photography, it would have been a mistake to assume that the wave nodes were and wave abdomens always in the thinning part and the dense part respectively. In this paper, a new demonstrator of the longitudinal standing wave is presented, which can clearly see the periodic density change at the nodes of longitudinal standing wave, the opposite density state at the adjacent node, and the maximum amplitude at wave abdomen with a relatively low frequency (~4Hz).

Demonstrator of low frequency longitudinal standing wave

To support physics instructors in improving or modifying physics activities for their courses, we investigate sixty-six research-based activities from eleven different research-based curricula by applying k-means cluster analysis. The best results were found when the program generates three design clusters. We mark these clusters as Thinking like a Scientist, Learning Concepts, and Scientific Reasoning. These three clusters indicate different design goals. In the Thinking like a Scientist cluster, activities emphasize the design of experiments by students, error analysis, reasonableness checking, and making assumptions or simplifications. The Learning Concepts cluster focuses on the prediction of results and experimental observations. The scientific reasoning cluster emphasizes answering physics or math questions that do not use collected data and finding evidence by students to support their claims.

Diverse strategies for design physics activity by investigating research-based activities

Chromaticity measurement is an interdisciplinary subject and is very complex. Color of object s could be measured accurately by using computer-software with the transmission spectra of grating spectrometer on the basis of the international standard, CIE-XYZ system. The colors can display directly on the computer screen. The experimental result s and theoretical analysis are presented in agreement also in this paper.

Chromaticity Simulation Using Software Program

We have recently restructured our first semester University Physics Laboratory to emphasize comparison of experimental and modeling results throughout almost all the experiments. The students, who also use simulation to a certain degree in the lecture portion of the course with the Matter and Interactions curriculum, write vPython code at glowscript.org to describe the fundamental physics of the interactions studied in the experiments. Students are provided a starter code for each experiment that performs the heavy lifting of creating a scene that resembles the experiment and setting up graphs of important parameters. The students focus on coding the fundamental force relationships as well the equations that integrate force to obtain momentum and velocity to obtain position. They write reports that focus on comparisons between experimental results, modeling outcomes, and theoretical predictions. In this poster we will present examples of several experiments and models that are used in this laboratory.

Integrating Simulation and Experiment in the WKU University Physics Laboratory

Students at Eastern Michigan University who have chosen a physics major or minor are now required to take a course introducing them to scientific computation. Nonetheless, they benefit from intentional and continued practice of newly developed computational skills. Such practice can readily occur in courses such as intermediate mechanics, where the content is more visual and less abstract. I will describe computational exercises used during Winter 2021 to provide students further experience with spreadsheets and GlowScript code. I will also discuss their implementation during virtual course meetings brought on by the global pandemic.

Computational Tasks for Intermediate Mechanics

Our research lab developed the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activities to support students’ scientific evaluations and judgements when considering alternative explanations of phenomena. For the present study, we tested two astronomy-related MELs--the Moon Formation preconstructed MEL and the Origins of the Universe build-a-MEL--in high school and preservice teacher classrooms. Students engaged in both these activities, completing embedded measures of their evaluations, judgements, and knowledge, pre- and post-instruction. We asked: How do relations between students’ evaluations, judgements, and knowledge compare between the preconstructed MEL and the build-a-MEL? Using a partial least squares structural equation model (SEM), we found that the preconstructed MEL had a stronger relationship between students’ evaluations and post-instruction plausibility judgments, but overall SEM statistical indices showed that the build-a-MEL was more robust in promoting students’ learning. Therefore, for the present study, the build-a-MEL was a better activity for facilitating more scientific evaluations, judgements, and astronomical knowledge.

Comparing Two Scaffolds for Evaluating Scientific Explanations

Following the restructuring of many science classes and labs, teaching the introductory mechanics labs in hybrid mode (with a half of the students attending one lab session and other half attending next session) during Fall’20 and Spring’21 has provided valuable experience in integrating the computation into these courses. The poster will present the use of the Tracker Video Analysis and Modeling Tool for the exciting laboratory experiments in mechanics. The students had the opportunity to set-up and film some of the experiments themselves at home/dorm, and analyze the video yielding results of same or higher quality compared to those experiments done in lab (note that filming was optional as carefully set-up videos for analysis were provided).

Using Video Analysis to Perform Remote Experiments in Mechanics Laboratories

Our research characterizes college students’ understanding of eclipses and related phenomena. We initially gathered data from online and paper versions of a conceptual survey immediately prior to the August 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse. College students were asked basic questions about eclipses, such as the frequency of occurrence and the positions of celestial bodies, along with questions on prior instruction and demographics. Based on analysis of these initial results, we modified the survey Presider: Chandralekha Singh 78 2021 AAPT Summer Meeting Monday for clarity and to include questions on student response confidence. We administered the survey again during the 2020-2021 academic year, and found that students performed significantly worse on the conceptual survey, especially on questions about the basic mechanism of eclipses. Since many of these students experienced the 2017 eclipse, this suggests that basic conceptual understanding of eclipses following media attention and/or classroom instruction is not retained.

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Activities for Visually Impaired Learners in Introductory Solar System Astronomy

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