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Physics education research on student understanding of kinematics has largely focused on misconceptions and difficulties. Our project reports student resources for understanding kinematics -- ideas that we consider to be the “beginnings” of sophisticated understandings. Our preliminary analysis highlighted four common resources that students are using to solve kinematics problems. In this talk, we will elaborate on the resources used most often by students and give examples from our preliminary research.

AAPT SM 20

Identifying student resources for understanding kinematics

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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.


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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This study examines the predictive power of different parameters on FMCE (Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation) pretest score. The sample consists of students attending a large eastern land-grant university in the US enrolled in the introductory calculus-based mechanics class (N=2457). A variety of parameters were used to predict FMCE pretest score including gender, underrepresented minority status, first-generation status, high school GPA, college GPA, ACT/SAT score, college math entry level, AP classes taken, transfer credits, class standing, prerequisite course grade, and college credits completed. Correlation analysis and linear regression were used to understand relations between the variables. Several parameters were statistically significant explaining the variation of FMCE pretest score including AP classes taken, class standing, and calculus-readiness.

What does the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation pretest measure?

Thermal physics encompasses thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content and is a core upper-division course requirement for most physics degrees. Thus, in order to improve student outcomes in these courses, it is important for both educators and researchers to have a validated method of evaluating student understanding of upper-division thermal physics content. For an assessment like this to be useful, it is crucial that the assessment tool can be both easily implemented and easily scored. In this presentation, we discuss a multiple response upper-division thermal physics assessment that was distributed in an online format in the Spring of 2020. The development of multiple choice and coupled, multiple response assessment items and initial implementation of these items, including validation, will be discussed.

Initial Implementation of an Upper-Division Thermal Physics Assessment

Flat-earthism is one kind of science denial, and it asserts that scientists conspire with governments to keep secret the "fact" that the Earth is flat. Many scientists' attempts to disprove a flat Earth unfortunately cite evidence that is not easily accessible to a non-scientist. I have made a navigable 3D computational model of a popular U.S. flat-earthers' model of a flat Earth, which makes it possible to identify a number of naked-eye observations that strongly disagree with the predictions of the flat-earthers' own model. This is potentially useful because flat-earthers privilege naked-eye observations as the only valid kind of evidence. I will demonstrate the computational model, which is available at tinyurl.com/FEmodel.

A Flat Earth?

Periscope is a set of lessons that connects big questions of physics teaching and learning to authentic video episodes from best-practices physics classrooms. Periscope lessons are useful if you supervise learning assistants or teaching assistants, lead faculty development, seek to improve teaching in your department, or want to improve your own teaching. Periscope’s primary aim is to help STEM instructors see authentic teaching events the way an expert educator does – to develop their “professional vision” (C. Goodwin, American Anthropologist 96(3), 1994). This development of professional vision is particularly critical for educators in transformed STEM courses, who are expected to respond to students’ ideas and interactions as they unfold moment to moment. By watching and discussing authentic teaching events, instructors enrich their experience with noticing and interpreting student behavior; practice applying lessons learned about teaching to actual teaching situations; train to listen to and watch students in their own classrooms by having them practice on video episodes of students in other classrooms; observe, discuss, and reflect on teaching situations similar to their own; develop pedagogical content knowledge; get a view of other institutions’ transformed courses; and expand their vision of their own instructional improvement. Periscope is free to educators at physport.org/periscope.

Periscope: Looking into learning in best-practices physics classrooms

Wave optics is a difficult teaching topic that was up to now usually investigated on university students. In Croatia, this topic is compulsory for a significant fraction of high school students, aged 18-19 years. In 2018. we started a four-year research project that includes investigation of high school students' difficulties with wave optics, construction of a new diagnostic instrument (Conceptual Test on Wave Optics), and development and testing of an experimental teaching sequence on wave optics. The final goal of the project is to investigate the effect of the new teaching approach, which includes several students' investigative experiments, on students' conceptual understanding of wave optics and on their scientific reasoning. Some preliminary results of the project will be presented, including findings from the 27 semi-structured interviews and from the process of the CTWO development. The most frequent students' conceptual difficulties regarding interference, diffraction and polarization of light will be discussed.

Investigating high school students' understanding of wave optics

The Applying Scientific Knowledge (ASK) program recruits science and math majors in their second year, who take a shared research methods class and then conduct research with faculty mentors for two or more semesters. Assessment throughout the program studies students' experiences of research, their STEM community development, and their skill development and academic progress. The question guiding this portion of the analysis was: How do students define or describe the concept of research, and how does that change as they advance through the ASK program? Students were interviewed near the end of the methods class (prior to joining labs), then after one or more semesters of research experience. We will present a preliminary analysis of interview themes from the first two cohorts, focusing on the physics majors and their similarities or differences from other students. We find that students have a mix of career-oriented and personal motivations for pursuing research.

Diving into a void: Student views of research

Get the Facts Out (GFO) is a complex and ambitious social change initiative. It involves a huge number of people at national scale, across different levels of the system. As external evaluator, it is my (rather difficult) job to evaluate the success of the project, and help it to improve. I will describe my use of “developmental evaluation,” where results are intended to provide timely feedback to a rapidly evolving complex project. The evaluation has also been guided by the project’s theory of change, and thus addresses questions such as “how well prepared are champions to undertake the work,” and “are campaigns faithful to the principles of GFO”? I will discuss the decentralized, embedded evaluation measures we are using (including a Fidelity of Implementation rubric, activity tracking forms, chat-bots, and surveys). This talk will be of interest to people with an interest in program design and/or project evaluation and assessment.

My biggest project evaluation challenge: Get the Facts Out

Self-efficacy, or confidence in one's ability to perform some task, is often used as a predictor of academic persistence, particularly in science fields with low retention and in the difficult process of transferring from a two-year college (TYC) to a four-year college (FYC). Self-efficacy has traditionally been measured quantitatively through surveys explicitly asking for confidence rankings. We describe the process of developing a codebook to qualitatively code statements of self-efficacy made in open-ended settings like interviews. To develop this codebook, we used interview and written data from two populations: (1) FYC students pursuing a science degree; and (2) TYC students planning to transfer to a university. The discussion prompts were designed to elicit discussion of these students’ self-efficacy to complete their degrees in natural science majors, to navigate academic requirements, and, when applicable, to transfer to a FYC. We will discuss the mechanics of using this codebook and intended applications.

Coding Students' Statements of Science Degree and Transfer Self-Efficacy

Disability is an important dimension of human diversity. Previous research indicated that physics instructors receive little training about supporting people with disabilities, physics curricular materials are not designed to support students with disabilities, and STEM professionals hold more negative views about people with disabilities than their peers in other academic disciplines. The purpose of this study was to investigate the knowledge possessed by practicing physicists about people with disabilities and different types of impairments. We collected data at 10 American Physical Society meetings via a home-grown survey, the Disability and Physics Career Survey. Specifically, 208 participants were given a list of disability diagnoses (e.g., attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, blindness, amputated limb) and were tasked with selecting the category of impairment (e.g., cognitive, visual, mobility) that the diagnoses belonged in. If practicing physicists are not knowledgeable about diagnoses and/or categories of impairment, they will be less likely appropriately mentor students with disabilities.

Practicing Physicists’ Knowledge about Disability

Most research focusing on student ideas about electric circuits frames these ideas in terms of misconceptions, difficulties, and misunderstandings. Our project reports student resources for understanding electric circuits, ideas that we consider to be the “beginnings” of foundational understanding. In this talk, we will present four conceptual resources for understanding electric circuits based on our analysis of students’ written responses to conceptual circuits questions. Our aim is to add to instructors’ existing knowledge of students’ ideas, supporting them in identifying and building on student resources for understanding electric circuits.

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Identifying student resources for understanding kinematics

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