United States

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.

AAPT SM 20

Investigating partnerships and funding for the Physics Education Research community

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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. 

technical paper

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.

Studying distractors with ReMNIRT: Reduced Multidimensional Normalized Item Response Theory

Shared Resources in Student Understanding of Spherical Unit Vectors: Theory​

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has called for a reshaping of science curricula to mirror the 3 Dimensions that define expert knowledge organization: Scientific Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts. Conceived for the K-12 educational context, the philosophy of centering instruction around not just content knowledge but also the skills for engaging in science is equally amenable to college instruction. In order to characterize the extent of alignment between instruction and the NGSS, we have developed the 3 Dimensional Learning Observation Protocol (3D-LOP). In this talk, I will present results from our gateway science transformation project characterized by the 3DLOP. I will also discuss the impact of transforming assessment items to align with a 3D framework on efforts to likewise transform the instructional environment.

3DL4US Project: Characterizing NGSS 3-Dimensionality in College Instruction

Postsecondary STEM education and STEM education researchers rarely center the experiences and needs of students with disabilities. Thus, it is not surprising that postsecondary STEM education is not designed to support students with disabilities, and students with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM. Inclusive teaching practices support learner variation, possibly reducing though not eliminating the need for individual accommodations. We used a modified version of the Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory (ITSI) to investigate physics instructors’ views about and use of inclusive teaching practices by recruiting practicing STEM professionals from American Physical Society Division and Section meetings and listservs. In this talk, we present preliminary findings about strategies that instructors frequently identified as important/not-important and strategies they self-identified as using/not using. Additionally, we explore variations across “who” respondents described they would use the instructional practices for and argue that instructors should avoid implementing strategies only for an instructor-defined “students who need it”.

Surveying Physics Instructors’ Attitudes and Beliefs about Inclusive Teaching Practices

In this study, we evaluate the impact of rehearsing teaching skills in a classroom simulator on GTAs’ instructional practices in combined tutorial and laboratory sections of an algebra-based introductory physics sequence over three semesters. GTAs participated in different numbers of simulator rehearsal sessions across the three semesters: no simulator training, one session, and four sessions. We conducted 109 classroom observations for 23 GTAs, using a modified version of Laboratory Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (LOPUS). To classify and characterize GTAs’ instructional practices, we conducted a hierarchical cluster analysis and found three instructional styles: “the group-work facilitators”, “the whole-class facilitators”, and “the waiters.” These instructional styles vary in multiple GTA codes, including amount of wait time and posing questions in small groups and whole class. We discuss the characteristics of the instructional styles and distributions of GTAs’ use of the styles in each semester.

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