United States

PERC SM 22

Identifying Symbolic Forms Associated with Inequalities in Physics

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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This study aims to understand how physics faculty seeking guidance in making departmental changes related to recruitment and retention frame the challenges in their program. We focus our analysis on one set of applications submitted to the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) in its first year of operation. DALI is the community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative.It brings together a cohort of physics faculty to apprentice into strategies for sustainable institutional change and facilitation practices associated with leading change teams. Through analysis of DALI applications, we find that many applicants attribute their enrollment challenges to sources outside of their immediate control, while those that do propose solutions to these challenges primarily focus on curriculum change. By understanding how DALI applicants frame their enrollment challenges, developers of departmental change resources can better mold their recommendations and community engagement activities to what is needed, whether that be meeting faculty and departments where they are at or pushing departments to explore new strategies and frameworks for evaluating their challenges.

Exploring faculty's explanations of enrollment issues: where does responsibility and control reside?

Research-validated clicker questions comprise an easy-to-implement instructional tool that can scaffold student learning while formatively assessing students' knowledge. We present findings from the development, validation and implementation, in consecutive years, of a Clicker Question Sequence (CQS) on measurement uncertainty as it applies to two-state quantum systems. This study was conducted in an advanced undergraduate quantum mechanics course, in both a virtual and in-person learning environment. Student learning was first assessed after receiving traditional lecture-based instruction on relevant concepts, and their performance on it was compared with that on a similar assessment given after engaging with the CQS. We analyze and discuss similar and differing trends observed in the two modes of instruction.

Development, validation and virtual and in-person implementation of clicker question sequence on quantum measurement uncertainty

In Basic Education in Mexico, it is intended to develop critical thinking through the study of Natural Sciences. Particularly, at the elementary level, students have their first approach to the study of optics and are expected to understand physical phenomena of the environment, among which is light and its interactions. However, this represents a challenge, because, during initial teacher training, the contents related to physics are not included in the curricular map. The objective of this research was to analyze the Mexican educational program to recognize what are the expected learnings regarding the branch of optics and its implications in teaching. The study was carried out with three types of population: urban, rural and indigenous context; through a documentary analysis and interviews with teachers at the primary level.
In the results, in the study program it was identified that the main resource to arouse children's interest in optics are situations of daily life, for example, the operation of some instruments such as the periscope, binoculars and magnifying glass; or, the formation of images in mirrors and lenses. Regarding teachers, the need to use teaching methods to develop skills, knowledge and attitudes for the study of this science was recognized. Also, make use of experimental activity to promote the development of scientific thinking in childhood.

Approach to the study of optics with primary school students

There have been numerous calls for physics instructors to utilize active learning in their courses. Many research-based instructional strategies also suggest the use of group work. However, instructors frequently revert back to didactic instructional styles and make modifications to research-based instructional strategies to suit their students' needs and context. To support physics instructors in fostering effective and inclusive group work, we developed a literature-based guide composed of 29 recommendations for practice, including citations to the literature, descriptions of what, why, and how instructors can implement the recommendations, and example implementations. The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss the development and features of, and present findings from pilot interviews with instructors about the alignment of the guide's recommendations with their own instructional practices. Overall, we found that participating instructors implement some of the recommended practices and cite department-level constraints for not implementing other recommendations.

Supporting effective and inclusive group work in introductory physics courses: a guide for instructors

The pathways and engagement of physicists in informal physics education are varied, which makes their professional development needs not well understood. As part of ongoing efforts to build and support community in the informal physics space, we conducted interviews with physics practitioners and researchers with a range of different experiences. Through thematic analysis, we use personas methodology to articulate the needs and pain points of professional physicists. We present our set of four personas: the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest in physics, the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue a STEM career, and the physicist who wants to improve the relationship between scientists and the public. This work will allow the informal physics community to create tailored resources for the variety of professional development needs of informal physics facilitators.

Personas for supporting physicists engagement in informal education

We examine how upper-division physics students find derivatives from an equipotential graph in an individual interview setting.  We focus specifically on identifying the different kinds of behavior that students engage in when finding a derivative from an equipotential graph, and also on the representational elements that students use or introduce during their work.  We find that the students were able to find the derivative successfully using a ratio-of-small-changes approach.  Students engaged in behavior like sketching straight lines or arrows on the given graph as a way to choose points for calculating a ratio and to keep one variable constant for the derivative.  We also saw students make sense of the equipotential graph and reinterpret the derivative they found using those representations using two other graphical representations: cross-sections and three-dimensional plastic surfaces.  We find these results encouraging because the students had studied equipotential graphs and derivatives as ratios-of-small-changes as part of their junior-level electrostatics, suggesting that such a course is effective at helping students develop representational fluency for working with multivariable derivatives.

Finding Derivatives from an Equipotential Graph

Research characterizing common student ideas about particular physics topics has significantly impacted university-level physics teaching by providing knowledge that supports instructors to target their instruction and by informing curriculum development. In this work, we utilize a Natural Language Processing algorithm (Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA) to identify distinct student ideas in a set of written responses to a conceptual physics question, with the goal of significantly expediting the process of characterizing student ideas. We preliminarily test the LDA approach by applying the algorithm to a collection of introductory physics student responses to a conceptual question about circuits, specifically attending to whether it is useful for characterizing instructionally-relevant student ideas. We find that for a large enough collection of student responses (N ≈ 500), LDA can be useful for characterizing the ideas students used to answer conceptual physics questions. We discuss some considerations that researchers may take into account as they interpret the results of the LDA algorithm for characterizing student's physics ideas.

Developing a natural language processing approach for analyzing student ideas in introductory calculus-based physics

Students' sense of belonging contributes to success at universities. Studies hint that students' sense of belonging in their introductory STEM courses may be tied to the course structures. In this study, we compared students' sense of belonging and letter grade between four semesters of an introductory calculus-based electricity and magnetism course. The course structures varied throughout the four semesters with hybrid versus in-person instruction and midterm exams versus quizzes for assessment, but all implementations used research-based instruction. Here, we compare students' sense of belonging and letter grades within these different course structures. Students expressed a stronger sense of belonging and earned higher letter grades with the lower-stakes quiz structure than in prior semesters with midterm exams. However, students' sense of belonging did not change when attending hybrid compared to in-person.

Investigating the effects of course structure on students' sense of belonging and course performance

Many of the activities and cognitive processes that physicists use while solving problems are "invisible" to students, which can hinder their acquisition of important expert-like skills.  Whereas the detailed calculations performed by researchers are often published in journals and textbooks, other activities such as those undertaken while planning how to approach a problem are rarely discussed in published research.  Hence, these activities are especially hidden from students.  To better understand how physicists solve problems in their professional research, we leveraged the framework of cognitive task analysis to conduct semi-structured interviews with theoretical physicists (N=11).  Here we elucidate the role of planning and preliminary analysis in theorists' work.  Theorists described using a variety of activities in order to decide if their project was doable while also generating possible solution paths.  These actions included doing cursory calculations, reflecting on previous knowledge, gaining intuition and understanding by studying prior work, and reproducing previous results.  We found that theorists typically did not pursue projects unless they had a clear idea of what the outcome of their project would be, or at least knew that they would be able to make progress on the problem.  Thus, this preliminary design and analysis phase was highly important for theorists despite being largely hidden from students.  We conclude by suggesting potential ways to incorporate our findings into the classroom to give students more numerous opportunities to engage in these expert-like practices.

Making expert cognitive processes visible: planning and preliminary analysis in theoretical physics research

Although social identity, as it relates to physics identity, is not a new area of research, disability identity is woefully understudied in physics. Disability is political, and ableism is real, ordinary, and pervasive in physics. Disabled people find themselves as the subject of sociopolitical violence both in and out of the classroom, simply for existing in their body. In a climate charged with politicality and identity discourse in the classroom,
it is surprising that a framework for understanding disability and the transactional relationship disabled persons have with their environment in a political way has yet to be used in physics education. In this paper, I introduce Political Disability Identity (Putnam,2005) as a framework for studying disability identity in Physics Education Research. I outline the domains of Political Disability Identity, and the underlying themes which should guide research using this framework. Finally, I call for its use both in the physics classroom, and in Physics Education Research.

Next from PERC SM 22

Exploring faculty's explanations of enrollment issues: where does responsibility and control reside?

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