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Un-grading is a method used in education that focuses on formative feedback. For example, many Un-graded courses have students set learning goals at the beginning and check in with the professor throughout. At the end of the course students are assigned a grade based on their learning goals. At our institution there are ongoing efforts to implement Un-grading in STEM courses, including introductory physics. Here, I present preliminary findings from qualitative research on these efforts. Students and instructors from three different courses utilizing this method were interviewed and the transcripts analyzed to identify benefits and drawbacks of Un-grading. The results of this study suggest Un-grading has a variety of benefits over traditional grading scales. For example, students felt Un-grading allowed them to learn in a style and pace that worked for them. The study also suggests ways to improve its effectiveness.

AAPT SM 22

Education Research on Un-grading

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.



technical paper

Disability is a unique and multifaceted identity. It is made political simply by existing in the body and the mind of a disabled person. In a climate charged with politicality and identity discourse in the classroom, a framework for understanding disability and the transactional relationship disabled persons have with their environment in a political way is needed in physics education research. In this talk, I will introduce a framework scarcely used in education, Political Disability Identity (PDI). This framework is useful for understanding disability identity development in the physics classroom. I will discuss its utility in education research, particularly physics education research.

Political Disability Identity: A Framework for Physics Education Research

CourseSource Physics provides physics educators a place to publish their successful teaching practices and to engage in a community of fellow educators. Do you have a single lesson, unit, or whole class that's working well with student learning evidence to show it? This is the journal for you! I'll talk about our philosophy, our structure, and how you can get involved.

CourseSource Physics: A new practitioner journal for physics educators

Adapting Next Gen PET, an NSF-funded Engaged Student Learning project, sought to address two persistent problems in undergraduate education: the challenge of effective teaching resulting in useful learning in large lecture formats and the challenge of developing scientific understanding of physics principles by pre-service elementary teacher candidates. The goal was to provide a framework to both improve physics learning for future teachers and empower faculty to implement education research in their physics courses by providing a well-tested and refined version of the curriculum that fits the most widely used general education science class model (lecture and lab). We also sought to add the one science practice not emphasized in the PET curriculum, planning and carrying out investigations. These new curriculum resources and their impact on instructor evaluation and student learning will be presented.

Next Gen PET in a lecture-lab format!

Ring magnets interacting along a dowel rod provide a simple system for exploring oscillating systems beyond those with a linear restoring force. Using measurements from slow motion video, coupled with computational models of the system, we have developed experiments which can be used both in introductory and upper-level labs. Introductory labs include modelling non-linear forces in static equilibrium and modeling and measuring the period of the damped oscillator. Students then extend these ideas in upper-level labs, including damped-driven oscillators, resonant frequencies, and modeling multi-body systems of three and four ring magnets.

Modeling Ring Magnets: Non-linear, Damped Oscillators

Connections to engineering applications are becoming increasingly valued in introductory level physics curricula. For both high school and college students taking introductory physics, it is important that they understand both the concepts, and their applications. We present a capacitive liquid level sensor that demonstrates a use of capacitors beyond the usually cited storing of energy. Seeing how design parameters impact its performance in an experiment can demonstrate how devices are designed and optimized, and how students can apply the physics they are learning. Our sensor uses a large parallel plate capacitor and a relaxation oscillator to convert liquid level information to frequency. The frequency at which a lamp in the circuit blinks gives information about how much dielectric is between the plates, and thus the liquid level. This demonstrates how a capacitor could be used in an engineering context to make useful measurements.

A Capacitive Liquid Level Sensor for Application Based Labs

The practice of eliciting, valuing, and building on student ideas is central to several research-based teaching strategies, including responsive teaching and resource-oriented instruction. Attending to student thinking and using student ideas as instructional assets can be a challenge for novice instructors, and so we investigate the ideas from which these practices are built in order to better support novice instructors’ growth as teachers. Here, we apply a conceptual resources framework to identify Learning Assistants’ (LAs’) resources for student-centered instruction. We identify productive ideas about teaching that are voiced by multiple LAs and reoccur in the LA pedagogy courses at two universities. This talk will present examples of LAs’ resources for teaching that may be elicited, promoted and built upon to support LAs in enacting student-centered practices, ultimately improving physics instruction for the students they teach.

Identifying Learning Assistants’ Resources for Student-Centered Teaching

As educators, we value students’ ability to work in groups and often ask them to do so in class. Students desire “good” group dynamics, yet various factors can lead to disappointing outcomes, including inequitable distribution of labor or the exclusion of minoritized students. Teaching staff, particularly novice Teaching Assistants (TAs), may not notice group dynamic issues, nor have they been trained to prevent or resolve them. In this talk, I will propose a view of conflict as a natural part of working in groups, and therefore something we can equip our students and teaching teams to navigate and repair. This talk will provide examples of recent classroom interventions with students and instructional staff under this social-emotional paradigm in a large-enrollment introductory laboratory setting. Results from early iterations of these interventions will be presented along with our next steps in this work.

A Paradigm of Repair for Group Work in Introductory Labs

Scientists are encouraged to engage in some form of ethical training. A common criticism of these training modules is that they are not effective. We formed a fellowship of fifteen scientists to investigate different modes of engagement with value-laden topics to see how scientists would engage in more ethically-driven discussions. These scientists met for a series of group sessions over the course of an academic year. We examined these discussions through the lens of epistemic frames, and characterize these frames through a number of characteristics including behaviors, verbal cues, and epistemic forms. We use these characteristics to identify the frames present in the fellowship, and what factors influenced changes in frames. Categorizing discussions with epistemic frames offers an opportunity for identifying what is driving more ethically-minded discussions, and this knowledge could then be used to better design ethical training modules.

Identifying Epistemic Frames in Faculty Discourse Centered around Ethics

The use of groupwork in physics tutorial and lab sections presents opportunities for students to learn from each other as they make sense of physics and develop critical thinking skills. However, the same opportunities might leave students vulnerable to their ideas being negatively judged by their peers, creating a negative learning experience. GTAs who lead such courses might use strategies to help students resolve their group dynamic challenges to mitigate negative social interactions. In this study, we analyze interviews with fourteen students who were enrolled in Physics I/II mini-studio sections (combined tutorial and lab) to investigate group dynamic challenges they experienced and their GTA’s actions to resolve those challenges. Then, we explore a potential relationship between students’ perceptions of their GTA as an instructor or mentor with their evaluation of the GTA’s success with helping to resolve their group dynamic challenges. Finally, we discuss implications for GTA professional development.

Student Perspectives of Mini-Studio GTAs’ Roles in Resolving Group Challenges

Current ethics training shows little improvement in ethical decision making. Recent studies have shown that values play a much bigger role in science than what is normally accepted. We believe that by having discussions about the values found in decisions in science, we can improve scientists’ ethical decision making. We are measuring better ethical decision making by seeing how scientists’ awareness of ethical values and level of moral reasoning changed. We formed a fellowship of fifteen science faculty where they discussed the values embedded in various scientific norms to bring awareness to the values inherent in research practices. In order to see how the fellowship impacted the scientists' ethical reasoning, we conducted pre/post interviews where we asked “what would you do” in different ethical vignettes. We determined that scientists’ identified more values and we are still looking at their ethical reasoning.

Education Research on Un-grading

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