United States

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.

AAPT SM 22

A Capacitive Liquid Level Sensor for Application Based Labs

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.



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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.

The Effect of Value-Focused Discussions on Scientists' Ethical Decision Making

IPaSS is a partnership program between the University of Illinois and secondary school physics teachers across the state. The program is designed to be responsive to teachers’ instructional needs by equipping them with research-based, vetted, university-level instructional materials. In this presentation, we share the results of interviewing 14 physics teachers who joined the program over the past two years with varying levels of experience. The teachers have been involved in a design-based professional development program both in-person and online. The analysis of the video data revealed three main findings: 1) the design-based structure of the PDs provided conceptual, social, and emotional support, 2) access to university resources supported immediate implementation into their classroom practices, and 3) the program and colleagues’ perpetual support throughout the year distinguished IPaSS from their experience in other professional development programs.

Teachers’ Perceptions of a Design Based Research Practice Partnership Program

Understanding how physicists solve problems can guide the development of methods that help students learn and improve at solving complex problems. Leveraging the framework of cognitive task analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews with theoretical physicists (N=11) to gain insight into the cognitive processes and skills that they use in their authentic research. Among numerous activities that theorists described as integral to their work, here we elucidate how theorists utilized analogies. We found that theorists used analogies to generate new project ideas as well as overcome conceptual challenges. Theorists deliberately sought out or constructed systems to use as a source of knowledge, indicating this is a skill students can practice. When mapping knowledge from one system to another, theorists sought to use systems that shared a high degree of mathematical similarity; however, these systems did not always share similar surface features. We conclude by offering potential applications to instruction.

Making expert processes visible: how and why theorists use analogy

This study investigated student difficulties reading electric field diagrams and the effect a visual change to these diagrams had on students’ ability to interpret these diagrams. Electric field diagrams are often drawn with a uniform line thickness and color. We modified the electric field diagrams to use variations in line thickness, line continuity, and arrow shape to indicate the strength and direction of the electric field. These changes, which are consistent with theories of visual attention and grounded cognition, exploit students’ innate ability to perceive line variations and arrow styles to communicate the electric field strength and direction. Students were randomly assigned to compare electric field strength and direction for points on traditional or modified diagrams. Results show correctness gains of 12.3% for magnitude and gains of 7% for direction using the modified diagrams. Overall correctness gains of 10% were observed for the modified over the traditional diagrams.

Investigating introductory student difficulties reading electric field diagrams

“How to start/set up the problem?” “What to do next?” The list can go on and is painfully familiar to virtually all students and not only. If left unanswered, these questions can easily turn students away from Physics, making problem solving a torture rather than fun and disengaging students rather than stimulating them to learn more. The author shares some approaches, methods, and materials that might help in resolving this situation based on 30+ years of learning and teaching Physics at different levels. They have been tested with hundreds of students and proven to help many of them. The material briefly described in this presentation is available for students and teachers. It was published in full last year in a two-part book with the same title.

Tools and Logic of Problem Solving in Physics

We investigate the different cultures of introductory university physics pedagogy of the United States and China through case studies at Kansas State University and Chongqing Jiaotong University. We look at the effects of different educational system backgrounds, social and cultural backgrounds, university systems and student characteristics on teaching status and pedagogy. In the US, the introductory physics curriculum pays more attention to quantitative reasoning and ethical significance of science, while that of China emphasizes the results and the materialistic worldview more. These differences are supported by greater resources in teaching time, lecture demonstration development, and supporting students’ learning. However, these increased resources in the US also lead to more diversity of teaching methods and increased efforts to assess students. We close with suggestions for improving the general education of physics in the universities of the two countries.

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A Capacitive Liquid Level Sensor for Application Based Labs

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