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The Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Project aims to help physics programs respond to challenges they already face with a collection of knowledge, experience, and proven good practice. In addition to a written guide, the EP3 Project will run a Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI), a two-day in-person workshop and year-long virtual community to support department members in leading improvements to their program that align with EP3. Five departments will select two faculty members each to participate in a DALI. These participants will learn to effectively lead a local departmental team, strengthen the capacity of that team to create and sustain change, and help the team to implement and assess their plans—all with the goal of developing a culture of continuous self-reflection, assessment, and improvement in the department. We will discuss the goals, structure, and planned implementation of DALIs in this presentation.

AAPT SM 20

Supporting Program Improvement with a Departmental Action Leadership Institute

departmental improvement

ep3 project

departmental change

Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

PERC SM 20

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

technical paper

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. 

While computers have long played an important part in Physics laboratory instruction, the scope of their use is often limited to relatively simple data processing tasks like fitting experimental data to well-established analytical models. While these applications are obviously important, they are not representative of the full range of ways that computers are used in modern physics research laboratories. In this talk, I will discuss how the Physics department at Willamette University has created engaging laboratory experiences that tightly integrate experiment, theory, and computational modeling and incorporate modern computational tasks like data visualization, simulation of experimental systems, and computer-aided design and fabrication of experimental apparatus. These activities have reduced the time that faculty spend training undergraduates to work in their labs allowing students to make more significant research contributions, while also helping them acquire crucial computation skills that they will need as they join the 21st century workforce.

Modern Computer Applications in the Advanced Laboratory

Teacher self-efficacy is as important as teacher content knowledge: do the teachers see themselves as able to know and teach the material well? In the Maine Physical Sciences Partnership, we worked with teachers to improve the teaching and learning of middle and high school physical science. As part of this work, we had teachers take and analyze a survey on energy that their students would be answering. One group was recorded as they discussed the survey, question by question. Telling their story involves describing the survey and providing examples of their low and high self-efficacy statements. They answered every question correctly, constructing their responses slowly but carefully. But, they began the activity by expressing profound uncertainty in their content knowledge. By the time the activity ended, the level of confidence they expressed in their knowledge and their ability to teach it had increased considerably.

Changes in Teacher Self-Efficacy In Knowing and Teaching Energy

The STEP UP Project is focused on challenging societal beliefs surrounding the roles of women in physics and helping interested young women achieve their goals to become physicists. The movement includes many high school physics teachers across the country. Of many teachers recruited to implement the STEP UP lessons, three returned student essays associated with the Women in Physics lesson. Students wrote essays before and after a class discussion, and we compared the students’ pre-assignment response with those of the post-assignment and noted changes, if any, in the students’ thoughts on the discouragement of women from studying physics. We compared students’ shift in beliefs before and after the lesson and constructed diagrams showing changes between the pre- and post-assignment.

STEP UP: Examining the Effects of Two Interventions on the Physics Identities of Students Interested in Medical Careers

This study will inform the Physics Education Research community about patterns of research topics, partnerships between researchers, and funding sources for the PER community over the last ten years. The study involves a textual analysis of all PERC proceedings between 2010 to 2019 to identify funding sources and determine patterns. PERC proceedings were selected given the central role of the Physics Education Research Conference to the PER community. PERC proceedings represent the community across scope of project from small to large, across stage of project from beginning to finished, and from new researchers to those established in the field. Findings are contrasted with those from the Learning Sciences community to provide context for understanding the significance of patterns. The goal of this work is to provide insight into the community’s history and ten-year trajectory so that the community can consider how to move the field forward in new directions.

Investigating partnerships and funding for the Physics Education Research community

Gathering and sharing personal stories is a science communication approach that communities have used to showcase the range of individuals who participate in their respective community. In this talk I will share my experiences as an undergraduate writing a column focused on one university’s Physics community for the student newspaper. I originally treated this as a journalistic activity in which I interviewed a member of the community about a specific topic and presented my account of the conversation supplemented by outside resources. Now, as a graduate student, I am critically reflecting on the process of writing the columns. As I do this, I am finding lessons that can inform future projects that aim to share stories from community members. I will discuss the process of writing these columns and my current thoughts resulting from critical reflections, connecting this with work that others have done around representation in research communities.

Critical Reflections on Sharing Stories from a Physics Community

Gender can be a touchy subject in any classroom, and perhaps it seems even more so in physics, where many women and LGBTQIA+ people have traditionally felt unwelcome. This talk will start with information about the status quo for these groups. Then it will provide advice and resources to help physics teachers as we work towards making everyone feel welcome in our classrooms, at our schools, and in our workplaces.

Talking about genders in the classroom

In this paper, we present three types of activity that we have observed during students’ self-directed use of a physics software called Algodoo. In contrast to many common digital learning environments used in physics education, Algodoo allows students to explore a variety of physics phenomena within the same digital learning environment. We describe the characteristics of the three activity types and discuss how the types can be seen as productive for the teaching and learning of physics. For the interested physics teacher and physics education researcher, we present how, in allowing students to creatively engage within physics environments such as Algodoo, physics educators can help students springboard into a range of relevant physics topics while supporting the students’ agency and divergent thinking.

Three productive ways physics students utilize a digital learning environment

One aspect of data analysis that seems overlooked in introductory lab instruction is that of measurement uncertainties. Students have difficulty grasping the concept that measurements are not infinitely precise. In this talk, I will outline an activity and follow-up methods to instill the idea of measurement uncertainty in an introductory college-level lab setting.

Measurement Uncertainties in an Introductory College-Level Physics Class

Improved critical thinking is a widespread objective of education, yet it is difficult to design specific learning objectives that target the process of thinking itself. We propose a model for developing critical thinking skills in the lab that prioritizes student agency and decision-making, developing skills and background knowledge as a foundation for expert-like thinking in the context of these decisions. Students are trusted to make meaningful progress based on their own perceptions, designing tasks where the process is more important than the result, and are graded using rubrics that allow students to take risks without fearing penalties. In this talk, we describe how our lab materials are designed to promote critical thinking, how skills are developed to support it, and our observations of the outcomes of this type of instruction.

Critical Thinking in Labs: Giving Students Room to Think

Distractors (i.e. incorrect responses) on research-designed multiple choice instruments are often designed to reflect specific prevalent belief structures among students. Traditional Item Response Theory (IRT) models only consider the correctness of students’ responses, not the specific incorrect responses given, and therefore cannot reveal the specific misconceptions held by a population of students. We introduce a new model, ReMNIRT, which extends upon prior work in polytomous IRT by introducing a weight matrix which concisely quantifies what each possible response tells us about the latent skills of students. We apply this model to a data set of pre- and post-instruction administrations of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to approximately 17500 students at seven undergraduate institutions. The insight that this analysis gives on the specific ways in which students misunderstand mechanics will help instructors to use the FCI and other research-designed assessments more effectively as formative assessments to inform their teaching.

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