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Imagine your students working together on an activity that engages them with authentic data, is aligned with topics you already teach, and builds their confidence in doing science, while becoming more data fluent. Rubin Observatory has developed free, online investigations that use intuitive data visualizations and interactive analysis tools. Investigations are designed to take into account classroom time and technology constraints, and address the reasoning levels and common learning challenges of students. While they can be used asynchronously, a face to face setting is optimal for active-learning and discussion. These investigations are appropriate for students in advanced middle school through “Astro 101” college courses. They are accessible to students of all backgrounds and abilities. All investigations incorporate the three-dimensional learning design of the NGSS and come with extensive teacher support materials, including formative and summative assessments.

AAPT SM 22

Rubin Observatory’s Approach to Improving Data Fluency

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


AAPT SM 20

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

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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. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



In this talk, I will present a methodical (step by step) spatial curriculum focused on teaching students about the complex astronomy concept of seasons. The curriculum teaches students about seasons using spatial activities to improve their spatial thinking, reasoning, and conceptual understanding of the topic. This spatial curriculum requires minimum material and is easy to implement for middle or high school students. The curriculum was implemented in 6th grade at a STEM school. The 7-lesson plan curriculum includes spatial components like 2D and 3D drawings, videos, and simulations combined with group discussions. Students use digital diaries (Google Slides) as means for journaling and learning about various concepts related to the seasons. The implementation showed that spatial activity improved students’ spatial thinking and reasoning. Students also demonstrated an overall increase in conceptual understandings about seasons and showed more interest in learning new astronomy topics using a similar spatial curriculum.

A Spatial Curriculum for Teaching Seasons

ACORN Physics (“Attending to Conceptual Resources in Physics”) Tutorials are a part of a broader effort to understand and cultivate the wonderful ideas that students use as they learn physics. These tutorials are designed to help instructors pay attention to and build from students’ common, fruitful ideas (“ conceptual resources”) that represent seeds of science. We have done research to identify conceptual resources that students use as they learn about kinematics, linear momentum, forces, circuits, mechanical waves, and heat and temperature -- so that we can bring you tutorials that elicit and build from student resources and provide you with pragmatic support to implement these tutorials. You can access all of our materials, including the tutorials, videos of students using them, questions to help you prepare to use them, conceptual questions that you can build in to your curriculum, and overviews of our research, free from our website at https://www.physport.org/curricula/ACORN

ACORN Physics Tutorials for building on seeds of science

Communicating physics is an essential learning outcome for undergraduate physics courses because it facilitates the synthesis of students’ ideas, is a useful professional skill, and is the basis of sharing knowledge with a broader community. Physics lab courses are an ideal setting to learn these communication skills. Writing is an important subset of communicating physics, which has been explored in the “Framework of Goals for Writing in Physics Lab Classes” from Hoehn and Lewandowski. The overall goal of this project is to use this framework to understand how students acquire writing skills in physics, to structure labs to support learning those skills, and to measure the effectiveness of scaffolding writing skills into the lab sequence. At our institution, we are restructuring the lab sequence to scaffold writing skills. We collected and analyzed student writing samples and open response feedback surveys and will present preliminary results.

Scaffolding Writing in Physics Labs

Instructional explanations (hereafter explanations) are ubiquitous in all classroom formats in introductory physics. While there is a large body of work exploring the range of strategies that are employed in explanations and their effect on learning, not much is known about the relationship between student preferences for certain explanation strategies and the strategies that are known to be effective. We claim this is important to understand, as student preferences will influence perceptions of instructor efficacy and learning regardless of student learning outcomes. To explore this relationship, we asked first-year engineering students in a large enrollment introductory physics course to compare pairs of explanations generated by highly regarded instructors (including undergraduate learning assistants, graduate teaching assistants, and faculty) and describe the criteria they used to determine which explanation was better. We conclude with commentary about the need to balance student preference with explanation qualities known to positively impact student learning outcomes.

Student preferences about instructional explanation strategies in introductory physics classes

Covariational reasoning--considering how changes in one quantity affect another, related quantity--is a foundation of quantitative modeling in physics, and a learning objective of introductory physics instruction at the college level. Our prior work suggests that covariational reasoning in physics contexts differs from that in purely mathematical contexts, and is effortful even for well-prepared students. We also find that students' covariational reasoning does not improve substantially as a result of introductory physics instruction. To address these issues, we have begun work to identify subskills that underlie productive covariational reasoning in physics contexts. We present our preliminary work on the identification of "essential skills" related to covariational reasoning, and the development of a set of targeted online tasks to improve those skills.

Improving Introductory Physics Students' quantitative Reasoning through Targeted Practice

In this presentation, we will discuss the trajectories of undergraduate physics transfer students into a bachelor’s granting university. Students in the study attend a large, public bachelor’s granting university in which a significant fraction of undergraduate physics majors are transfer students. In one-on-one interviews, students discussed their academic and personal experiences before, during, and after their transition from community college(s) to a bachelor’s granting university. During the interviews, we adapted the life grid methodology to track student’s career and skill development over time. In this talk, we will discuss how their career and skill development evolves through their higher education path. We then consider how these paths complicate common narratives about the time students spend in a community college and bachelor’s granting university.

Trajectories of Transfer Students Toward a Bachelor's Granting University

Traditionally, measurement of quantitative changes in students’ motivational characteristics over an academic semester have been measured using pre- and post-test surveys. However, with the complexity of such constructs, a pre-post design may limit deeply understanding the impacts that curricular and co-curricular activities have on students. In this research, we have designed and implemented a mixed methods approach to investigate one such complex construct, students’ self-efficacy -- or the confidence in one’s own ability to perform a task. We employ the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) with in-the-moment survey measurements to quantify a shift in their self-efficacy followed by a qualitative daily reflection to further investigate the threats and/or supports that may have influenced that change. In this talk, I will present our research design and discuss our efforts toward validating our methodology. Generally, we are hopeful that this research design has possible versatility within STEM education research more broadly.

Using a Mixed Methods Approach to Study Complex Motivational Constructs

Force symbols in University Modeling Instruction explicitly represent forces as detailed descriptions of interactions to facilitate (i) coordinating force with the system schema and (ii) learning force. For example, represents the gravitational force by Earth on ball, where “g” represents gravitational (i.e. the type of interaction), “E” represents Earth, represents “by” and “on”, and “B” represents ball. Although students are taught to say as “gravitational force”, audio data from student-led whole-class discussions shows that more than 40% percent of the time was referred to as “force gravity” instead. Analogous results were obtained for contact force symbols as well. Because language plays such a crucial role in learning physics, several years ago, as an experiment, the notation was changed from to to make it more closely match how it is to be read. Student use of “force gravity” and “force contact” dropped to less than 5% with this notation switch. Energy.

Changing Notation That Represents Force Changes How Students Say It

This mixed methods research case study addresses the design of introductory physics lab courses at a university from the perspective of the physics teaching faculty and students. The data from this research is being used for the development of a theoretical framework to strengthen the global need for integrated STEM education. The AAPT Physics Education recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum (2014) identified six focus areas: constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, developing technical and practical laboratory skills, analyzing, and visualizing data, and communicating physics. Participants responded to a four-point Likert scale on each of the AAPT six focus areas with open-ended questions to further articulate their experiences with physics lab courses. Students were administered a pre-and post-survey as well as five Likert scale questions on their STEM self-efficacy. The results, as well as the development of the integrated STEM theoretical framework, will be discussed.

Effectiveness of introductory physics laboratory courses in supporting learning goals

We draw on data from interviews with physics instructors and research mentors, interviews with physics students, and surveys of the physics community to model how physics gatekeepers respond to the access and inclusion needs of disabled undergraduate and graduate students. While we continue to develop this model, we will discuss a priori and emergent model features. We compare the differential pathways to access through two common mechanisms: institutional accommodations and inclusive practices. Then, we discuss an emergent mechanism from our data: gatekeepers provide access to “students who need it”. We argue that gatekeepers who provide access to “students who need it” likely have good intentions, such as demonstrating care and treating disability as a facet of diversity. However, we describe several challenges with this mechanism, such as the role of power in which students share their access needs and which students are evaluated by gatekeepers as “needing” alternative access.

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