United States

PERC SM 22

Mid-Study Update from an Online Design-Your-Own Labortory Experiment Curriculum

PERC 2022 is focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we are centering queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we want to apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we want to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER.

Explicit attention will be given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

We have had such a fun time organizing this year’s PERC. You might be aware that we were committed to transparency and documenting our processes and decision making which we outlined here. This year has also been challenging to be a queer or otherwise marginalized person in the US. And we continue to seek and provide support for those individuals.

As such, we recommend that folks visiting Grand Rapids who have the means consider giving to some local organizations who are working to advocate for those impacted by historic and ongoing marginalization and violence.


PERC 2022 focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we centered queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we wanted to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER. Explicit attention was given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

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The physics teachers require, in addition to knowledge of the discipline, to develop skills that allow them to plan and implement teaching strategies that help students acquire knowledge of the different branches of physics and their usefulness in different contexts. Thus, teacher training plays a fundamental role and can be approached from two perspectives: initial training (profile) and in-service training (teacher training). In Latin America, particularly in Chile and Mexico, the training of physics teachers focuses on their professional profile, so it is necessary to deepen teacher training, so that an ideal profile is achieved to teach physics classes. In general, the teaching training of teachers can again be divided into two: 1) courses on the didactics of physics; and 2) Courses on the educational model of the school. In this work, a study is made about the training of the physics teacher, creating indicators to know the ideal profile of the teacher and proposing training tools that allow the teacher to approach the ideal profile, making a comparison of the results of the study between teachers of Chile and Mexico.

Professional profiles and teacher training of Physics teachers in Latin America

Conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics labs deploy PER-informed pedagogical strategies in physics labs with the aim of helping to improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Unlike traditional labs (which tend to be highly-structured and focus on verification of scientific relationships via precision measurements) and skills-based labs (which tend to eschew the aim of helping students learn physics concepts in favor of teaching experimental skills), some studies have suggested that conceptual inquiry-based labs may have a positive impact on student conceptual understanding, as measured by concept inventories. This paper reports on a randomized controlled study that compares student conceptual gains in electricity and magnetism between a conceptual inquiry-based lab and a skills-based lab. Following a difference-in-differences analytical strategy and hierarchical linear modeling, the result from this study is that the conceptual inquiry-based lab provides no additional benefit to students' conceptual learning gains compared with the skills-based lab. Studies such as these may help physics departments make decisions about the goals and scope of transformations to their introductory lab courses.

Measuring the impact of conceptual inquiry-based labs

How do we engage students with the skills of doing physics? Many reforms have been devised over the years, and one that ties many of these threads together is the framework of Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL). This framework provides a tools for aligning teaching around the 3 Dimensions of how scientists organize their disciplinary understanding. Implementing 3DL focuses on strengthening 'what' we teach, as opposed to active learning techniques that focus on 'how' we teach. Nevertheless, they create learning environments that are meaningfully active and allow students to put their knowledge to use. In this talk, I will present results from exam assessment items and in-class instructional segments, collected over 4 years from introductory courses. Our results indicate that using 3DL-aligned instruction to focus on what is taught is not only productive for student learning, but also offers opportunities for making classrooms active. We also find that Scientific Practices – the dimension encompassing the activities that scientists engage in – stand out amongst the 3 Dimensions: focusing on them leads to the most success in achieving 3 Dimensionality. This makes Scientific Practices the key to creating meaningfully active learning environments where students can put their knowledge to use and learn physics in scientifically authentic ways.

Creating Learning Environments Where Students Can Put their Knowledge to Use

Instructors new to active learning classrooms frequently ask how they should best structure groups in the classroom to ensure optimum learning. Groups within classrooms are complex social systems with many variables, so unfortunately there is no easy answer. Existing group-formation algorithms do not specify how groups should be structured; they only provide a way for instructors to specify their own algorithm based on factors like GPA or Gender. There are many dimensions of student thinking, motivation, and experience that may be relevant, but here we focus on one measurement that is relatively easy to measure: prior preparation. There have been some studies investigating the role of preparation in cooperative grouping, but each study seems to come to a different conclusion. Here we provide some evidence as to why that might be the case by investigating outcomes based on different measures of preparation and investigating the effects of cooperative grouping for different groups of students. We find that groups that are heterogeneous with respect to physics preparation tend to perform better. Additionally, we find that this effect is particularly pronounced for women and underrepresented students, but not for white men. This would seem to suggest that a reason for disagreements in the literature could be sensitive to how preparation is measured as well as the demographics of the study population.

Investigating the role of student preparation on cooperative grouping in an active learning classroom

In this study, we adapted a prior identity framework to investigate how students' perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment (including sense of belonging, peer interaction and perceived recognition) in an introductory physics course predicts their course grades and physics motivational beliefs (including self-efficacy, interest and identity) at the end of this course. We found signatures of inequitable and non-inclusive learning environment in that female students' mean scores for sense of belonging, peer interaction and perceived recognition were all lower than male students' in the course. In addition, we found that female students had lower average course grades than male students. Using structural equation modeling, we found that students' perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment predicts their self-efficacy, interest, identity and grades at the end of the course. In particular, students' perceived recognition, e.g., by instructors and teaching assistants, played a major role in predicting students' physics identity, and students' sense of belonging in physics played an important role in explaining the change in students' physics self-efficacy. Our findings can be helpful for creating an inclusive and equitable learning environment in which all students can excel.

How inclusiveness of learning environment predicts students’ physics grades and motivational beliefs in introductory physics courses

As physics educators integrate computational activities, they must attend to the overarching processes that students follow when interacting with computer code. We describe one such process, Coding Expediently, as an epistemic game that students might play with a goal of minimizing the amount of time or keystrokes required to carry out a set of programming steps. Playing this game reduces the time and cognitive load students devote to step-by-step interaction with computer code, leaving more time and cognitive load for bigger-picture sense-making. We describe observations of two students playing this game during think-aloud interviews in which they completed an introductory Python tutorial. These students represent two differing technical backgrounds: rich experience with mathematics and no programming experience, and moderate experience with mathematics and rich programming experience outside of Python. We describe observations of these students playing this epistemic game selectively (even when they are aware of its benefits) and how they play this game in significantly different ways.

Coding Expediently: A Computationally Situated Epistemic Game

We present a citizen science campaign, Dark Energy Explorers, aiming to improve the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX will collect at least one million galaxies that are 9 - 11 billion light-years away, yielding one of the largest maps of the universe. We created Dark Energy Explorers on Zooniverse, the world's largest citizen science platform to help us classify these astronomical objects. With Dark Energy Explorers we train participants, of any background, to be able to distinguish different galaxies by swiping left or right on their smartphone. Initial analysis has shown that citizen science is an efficient and effective tool for classification most accurately done by the human eye. Since launching in late February 2021, we have reached 3.5 million classifications by 8,000 volunteers in 80 countries! Dark Energy Explorers has proven to be a uniquely powerful tool for science advancement and increasing accessibility to science worldwide.

Dark Energy Explorers - Using Citizen Science to enhance the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX)

The competencies required of physics-oriented STEM professionals are rapidly evolving to include computational practices (the use of computers to study physical systems). Developing these practices in students requires sustained learning experiences, and high school students benefit from encountering this domain at an appropriate level. However, many high school physics teachers have had limited (if any) exposure to computation, let alone practice with integrating it in a high school-appropriate manner. Our interdisciplinary team of university STEM educators designed and facilitated two semesters of an online professional development sequence for high school teachers. This sequence included asynchronous modules and monthly remote meetings centered around teachers reflecting on their experiences as learners and adaptations to these modules for delivery in their classrooms. At the end of spring 2022, we conducted semi-structured interviews to explore the teachers' experiences and plans for implementation. When analyzing the transcripts from the remote meetings and interviews, we attended to how the teachers operated within two frames. Their learner frame focuses on what the teacher is learning about computation, what piques their own curiosity and interest, and what they feel they can accomplish. Their mediator frame focuses on what they believe their students could reasonably accomplish with computation, what their students are curious about, and how they can use computation to develop their ideal classroom environment. Our analysis highlights teachers' enthusiasm about how computation can contribute to the playful, creative environment that they value in their classrooms. They also saw curiosity as a necessity for productive computational integration and that computation could engage students' curiosity in new ways. We offer implications for future iterations of professional development to emphasize computation's potential to inspire curiosity in all students.

Creating a computational playground in high school physics

The Next Generation Science Standards outlines the "crosscutting concepts" as the common tools and lenses adopted across the disciplines of STEM. Little work has been conducted on crosscutting concepts to date. To address this gap, a qualitative research study was undertaken to assess the effects of discipline-specific instruction on students' conceptualization of energy and matter within introductory science and engineering coursework. The first law of thermodynamics served as the primary topic given its crucial role as a guiding principle for energy and matter. Three first law problems were developed that each incorporated field-specific systems, language, and notation. The dynamic transfer framework served as the methodological and theoretical basis for the study. Interview questions monitored the epistemological frames adopted by students to solve the problem and the target tools students read out to "know with." Physics, chemistry, and engineering students were recruited from majors' courses that each served to introduce the first law of thermodynamics. Participants were tasked with solving one in-discipline and one out-of-discipline interview problem. Physics and engineering students were generally shown to apply a physical mapping epistemological frame by reading out the first law as an equation, while chemistry students more commonly read out an inferred energetic process to reason about changes in internal energy. However, physics and engineering students differed in the application of the physical mapping frame. Physics students uniquely demonstrated the ability to modify equations based upon read out systems and language, while engineering students tended to map problem features directly onto the provided equations through a perceived arithmetical approach. These findings shed light on how different disciplines within STEM conceptualize first law problems and energy and matter concepts to bridge across disciplinary boundaries.

Exploring science and engineering students’ guiding epistemologies when addressing first law problems across disciplinary contexts

Discipline-based education researchers produce knowledge that is aimed at helping instructors improve student learning and educational outcomes. Yet, the information produced may not even reach the educators it is intended to influence. Prior work has found that instructors often face barriers to implementing practices in peer-reviewed literature. Some of these barriers are related to accessing the knowledge in the first place such as difficulty finding and understanding research and a lack of time to do so. To lower these barriers, we created an online blog, [blinded], that summarizes recent discipline-based education research in short posts that use plain language. Having covered nearly 100 papers to date, we conducted a survey to see if we were addressing the need we had originally set out to address. We posted a 23-item survey on our website and received 24 usable responses. The results suggested that readers do generally agree that we are meeting our original goals. Readers reported that our articles were easier to understand and used more plain language than a typical discipline-based education research (DBER) journal article. At the same time, readers thought that all the important information was still included. Finally, readers said that this approach helped them keep up with DBER studies and read papers they otherwise wouldn't have. However, most readers did not indicate they changed their teaching and research practice as a result of reading our blog. Our results suggest that alternative methods of sharing research (e.g., non-peer reviewed publications or conference talks) can be an effective method of connecting research with practitioners, and future work should consider how we as a community might build on these efforts to ensure education research can make meaningful changes in the classroom.

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Mid-Study Update from an Online Design-Your-Own Labortory Experiment Curriculum

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