United States

We report on the impact of incorporating computational activities into a one semester general astronomy course. Computation has been shown to be an effective active learning tool in physics for developing understanding of concepts, connecting concepts with formulae, and associating science with prediction. Fifteen spreadsheet-based computational exercises were designed and field tested to complement the existing active learning astronomy curriculum. Examples of these computational exercises are presented along with assessment of the success of these computational activities. The reasons for introducing computational activities will be discussed, along with benefits supporting the inclusion, and difficulties faced when implementing the change. Student learning pre to post was measured with the TOAST and LPCI. Additionally, student survey data was collected to investigate student attitudes toward computational exercises and overall perceptions of the course. Assessment revealed TOAST correctness gains of 20\%, LPCI correctness gains of 29\%, and overall positive attitudes towards the computational activities.

PERC SM 21

Incorporating computational activities in a general education astronomy course

physics education research astronomy education research

curriculum development

computation

active learning

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poster

**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)

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

In recent years, multiple reforms have been suggested in the instructional physics lab to leverage students' agency in a range of experimental practices. Granting students’ agency over experimental design is a particularly persistent challenge, due to powerful structural features such as verifying that the apparatus is "operator proof" and that the students can obtain the expected measurements in a limited amount of time. As a result, labs often include pre-prepared lab "kits" and detailed step-by-step instructions, thus effectively undermining students’ engagement in experimental design. 

We examined teachers’ awareness of design considerations in the context of an activity problematizing the role of multimeters when measuring the relationship between the current through a battery and its terminal voltage. The activity took place in a national network of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for high-school physics teachers (11 nationwide year-long regional PLCs; N ? 300 physics teachers, a broad spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds, representing about a quarter of the national workforce, operating in the high-stakes context of a national matriculation exam). The dataset was composed of 100 individual responses to a questionnaire administered at the beginning of the activity. Later stages consisted of small group and plenum discussions, as well as reflections at the end of the activity. 

The findings indicate that at the beginning of the activity, most of the teachers were not able to articulate many key design considerations, such as how choices related to the location of the multimeters and the measurement scale impacted the precision and range of measurements and the control of variables. 

The teachers were highly engaged in the follow-up components of the activity and enthusiastic about its contribution to raising awareness of considerations in experimental design.

Teachers' awareness of aspects of experimental design: the case of multimeters

To develop students’ critical reflection it’s necessary to implement in traditional course structure some activities promoting metacognitive control for self-regulated learning. Referring to some recent works on physics education research (Warren, 2018 and 2020) which showed the great potential of using Bayesian updating activities in introductory algebra and calculus based physics courses, we tried to use the same strategies for the curricular study of wave phenomena in two different classes of an Italian high school for scientific studies. In fact, we believe that as soon as it is possible to engage students in the use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning, better we could promote an authentic practice of physics, even in its early stage of study. To evaluate the effectiveness of those methods we compared pre and post test student scores on the Epistemological Beliefs Assessment for Physical Science (EBAPS), obtaining a meaningful gains in particular in the axis of "Nature of knowing and learning" and in the one of "Evolving knowledge" that is what we expected in developing epistemological beliefs as a consequence of metacognitive self consciousness.

Monitoring the wave phenomena learning process through Bayesian updating activities

There are many difficulties for students when it comes to learning the fundamental relationships in Newtonian mechanics, which is supported by manifold research. Even after class the understanding of Newton’s laws of motion is often inadequate, which is problematic because classical mechanics is the foundation of many other areas in physics and the natural sciences in general. These problems stem from the fact that students’ preconceptions in the field of mechanics are especially diverse and persistent because they are strengthened in everyday life over the course of many years. These preconceptions and the fact that idealized situations are often most prominent in class can lead to a felt incompatibility of everyday life and physics lessons. The computer can be a tool to reduce that gap by discussing complex and authentic motions in class without the need to use difficult math, which can lead to reduction in certain unwanted preconceptions. Two different ways of using the computer in mechanics class, computational modeling and video motion analysis, are presented on the poster. The two methods are compared in a pre-post design study with N = 267 students from 11th grade from German high schools in regard to the overall conceptual understanding of Newton’s first two laws. The results suggest that both methods can be successful in teaching the basic concepts of Newtonian dynamics and no differences can be seen in the overall scores for conceptual understanding. Furthermore, it seems that computational modeling performs better in items regarding Newton’s first law, due to a comparatively greater reduction of a specific preconception, which is further explained on the poster.

Conceptual understanding of Newtonian dynamics in a comparative study of computational modeling and video motion analysis

Professional development is an effective way to diffuse evidence-based instructional practices. At the same time, assessing the impacts of professional development opportunities in physics education is still an emerging field. In this paper, we examine the efficacy of an assessment instrument designed to evaluate a university-wide professional development program at NDSU, the Theory of Planned Behavior Survey (TPBS). The development of the TPBS is based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, a theoretical framework originated in psychology, which uses participants attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control beliefs about a particular behavior (e.g., implementation of active learning) to predict intentions and explain that behavior. The TPB has been used in other fields to understand and predict behaviors, but it has not been utilized in STEM Ed research. Previous work has identified a link between changes in the constructs measured by the instrument that occurred after professional development at NDSU and the increase in the participants’ use of active learning techniques in the classroom. In this paper, we focus on examining evidence for the validity of the instrument and discuss methodologies for data collection, namely the retrospective pre-test approach, which avoids biases associated with self-reported data collected via traditional pre-post survey administrations. We use Arjoon, Xu, and Lewis’s framework for validity and provide evidence for the reliability, internal structure, and temporal stability of our instrument. We will also compare results from our instrument to those obtained using the Approaches to Teaching Inventory.

Examining the efficacy of a professional development assessment tool

As part of the development of the Fluids Conceptional Evaluation, we planned to conduct qualitative phenomenographic interviews in person with 140 students from 14 different types of institutions from around the country. The purpose of these interviews was to 1) Establish of the clarity of each proposed FCE item; 2) Establish the appropriateness of graphics if any used with each proposed item, and 3) Determine the different reasons students give for selecting particular responses to each item. When we received funding from the NSF for this project in Fall 2020, we were asked to address how we would adjust our methodology to conduct our research in the day of Covid 19. We quickly realized we had to switch our in-person interviews to Zoom virtual interviews. To date, we have conducted a number of virtual interviews with students from three institutions. In this poster, we will describe how we were able to make this adjustment and the unexpected benefits and drawbacks of conducting interviews virtually.

Not Quite Face to Face: Conducting Qualitative Phenomengraphic Interviews Virtually

Prior research has found room for improvement in both the accessibility of postsecondary STEM instruction as well as in the tools to support the necessary professional development to drive and measure shifts in instructional practice. As a starting point, we are developing a tool to support postsecondary STEM instructors in implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL)-aligned strategies; we intend for the same tool to be useful for discipline-based education research about UDL in postsecondary STEM. Because prior research has revealed tensions in how the disability and postsecondary STEM education communities operationalize aspects of the UDL framework, we discussed the initial version of the UDL-IPOP with participants from these fields. We found that there were differences in language and interpretation across the disciplines that affected the way participants evaluated the protocol. There were also conflicting perspectives about how to apply the guidelines in each discipline.

Disciplinary tensions in applying Universal Design for Learning to postsecondary STEM

High school physics classrooms across the United States are making efforts to integrate computation into their approach to teaching physics. There is wide agreement on the importance of teaching computational thinking (CT) practices in these types of settings, but little research has focused on the dispositions that students can develop that support the development of CT practices. This presentation examines the case of one high school physics class where students do computation-integrated physics in a group work format. Drawing from a newly theorized framework on CT dispositions and the well-established theory of mindset, we investigate how students take up dispositions and mindset during class, and we examine connections between these theories and how they manifest in our data. We intend to help researchers and practitioners identify students’ dispositions so that they can provide opportunities for their students to better develop dispositions and more productively engage with computationally integrated physics.

Dispositions and mindset in computation-integrated physics

STEPP is a new scaffolded interactive resource that runs in a web browser designed to integrate computational thinking into support of the learning of introductory physics. With a flexible, problem-solving focus utilizing the computer science framework of Finite State Machines (i.e., state diagrams), STEPP is a novel approach to programming in a physics classroom that does not depend on knowledge of a programming language. Through an intuitive graphical interface built in the game-engine Unity, students are empowered to create their own models and simulations to dynamically visualize the problems they encounter in their study of 1D kinematics, 2D kinematics, and Newton’s laws of motion. Multiple mathematical representations of motion further support physics learning. The computational thinking skills taught through interaction with STEPP center around physics problem-solving (decomposition and algorithmic thinking), modeling, and abstraction. Although initially designed for on-level high school physics, STEPP is equally applicable for use in Advanced Placement and university introductory mechanics courses.

Design of a scaffolded interactive for integration of computational thinking into introductory physics

The Alma project was developed at San Francisco State with the purpose of promoting inclusion and affirming students’ identities by encouraging self-reflection through journaling. After the Alma Project was successfully piloted in 2018 in Supplemental Instruction (SI) classes, it further expanded into all SI classes as well as introductory physics and astronomy labs. In Spring 2020, reflective journaling was used as an asset-based tool to center student voices in physics classrooms and to recognize students’ experiences transitioning to online learning during the COVID-19 global pandemic. In addition, a question was added to lab experience surveys to understand students' experiences with remote learning during COVID-19. Essays (N = 257) and surveys (N = 1031) were analyzed using an iterative thematic coding approach. Based on these surveys and essays, we identify themes of positive and negative impact of online teaching and learning as well as strategies students described for self-care.

Reflective Journaling in the Era of COVID

Through reflective journaling, the Alma project at San Francisco State University (an HSI) seeks to affirm STEM students’ identities, support connections with their life experiences, and recognize their cultural wealth. Our department offers a number of introductory physics and astronomy lecture and lab sequences including: a three-semester calculus-based physics sequence targeted toward engineering, computer science and physical science majors; a two-semester algebra-based physics sequence targeted toward students in the biosciences; a one-semester conceptual physics course; and one-semester conceptual astronomy course. In response to the prompt “why am I here,” designed to draw out their values and purpose, students journaled for 5 - 10 minutes and then spent time in class sharing their responses. Using an iterative thematic coding approach, we analyzed more than 400 essays and identified 11 cultural capitals expressed by students. Here we compare and contrast the frequencies of cultural capitals exhibited by respondents in different course types.

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Teachers' awareness of aspects of experimental design: the case of multimeters

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