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The Physics and Astronomy Department at San Francisco State University has recently implemented a pedagogical training course for incoming graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Using student surveys, we investigate various contributors to students’ sense of belonging and compare to testimonies from GTAs (in the form of surveys and interviews) about how they attempt to foster a sense of belonging for their students in lab. We find similar emergent themes in both student and GTA data. After implementing the training course, we found that GTAs were able to cite both a wider range and higher number of pedagogical techniques to create an inclusive classroom. We also found that the testimonies of GTAs who took the pedagogy course were more closely aligned with that of their students’ about how to promote a sense of belonging in lab.

AAPT SM 20

GTA Training: Promoting Inclusive Environments and Students’ Sense of Belonging

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AAPT SM 21

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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. 

In this second of two paired talks exploring the longitudinal outcomes of Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) on student learning, we examine whether differences in student work on a diffusion task given in the senior biology capstone course can be correlated with prior enrollment in IPLS, and how those differences reflect competencies developed in the IPLS curriculum. More specifically, we assess whether IPLS students are more likely to reason quantitatively about diffusive phenomena and to successfully coordinate between multiple representations of diffusive processes. We also use survey data to describe the attitudes toward physics of IPLS and non-IPLS students in the senior capstone, and position these findings within the broader context of our longitudinal study of the impact of IPLS on student work in later biology and chemistry environments.

The impact of IPLS in a senior capstone biology course

TopHat is a platform known for in-class quizzing, with students using their phones to respond to questions. However, in our two-semester introductory algebra-based physics sequence, we are leveraging the TopHat platform to do significantly more than that. In addition to the in-class clicker feature, we are using TopHat for (1) pre-class preparation, with quizzes that include videos, content, and feedback from the students to the instructor; (2) online homework; (3) quizzes that are automatically graded; (4) an interactive e-book, with a significant number of embedded simulations. In this talk, I will provide some details about these four different uses, and show examples of each. The vast majority of the material we use was created by us, with a goal of making high-quality content available to the students for a reasonable cost.

Teaching a blended course with TopHat

Motion graphs are an important part of learning kinematics, yet many beginning students struggle with graph interpretation. In this study, introductory physics students and graduate students viewed 42 different graphs of position, velocity or acceleration versus time on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded using a stationary eye tracker. Participants were asked to match a region of the graph with a text description of an object’s motion. We will summarize key findings about visual attention for selected questions and link these eye-gaze patterns to both question performance and audio-recorded explanations of reasoning.

Visual Attention while Interpreting Motion Graphs

Engaging in discussions about the underrepresentation of women have been found to increase women's interest in physical science-related careers and improve their physics identities. Understanding deeply these conversations and how they develop may offer insight into the ways in which teachers can support women in physics classrooms. To this end, we recorded two different sections of an experienced high school physics teacher while implementing a lesson about the underrepresentation of women in physics developed as part of the STEP UP project. In this talk, we will present a comparative analysis of students’ argumentation during these two classes.

Analyzing Classroom Discussions on the Underrepresentation of Women in Physics

Cultural border crossing can stir up feelings of anxiety, pretense, and internal conflict, especially if one feels alien to the culture they are navigating. While individuals can learn to navigate border crossings between cultures, limit their expectations of belonging, and find ways to make meaningful and recognized contributions, the feeling of being "other" is hard to overcome and can be isolating. This has been my experience: feeling recognized but not belonging. For example, I have been identified as the "educator" in physics communities but as the "physicist" in education communities. I have been identified as coming from "somewhere else" in western contexts and as the "American" in eastern contexts. I have been treated as irrationally "religious" in science communities and as overly "analytical" in religious communities. While these experiences are wearisome, they provide substantial opportunities to free oneself from the rigid bounds of any culture. As a community, we need to be cognizant of the cultural boundaries that we create, often unintentionally, so that we can strive to be inclusive in ways that are meaningful to those who are most different from ourselves.

Doing Physics and Being Other

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are essential in the teaching of introductory physics at many universities, and have been so for over a century. However, no formal efforts to prepare GTAs for their teaching responsibilities existed before roughly 1970, and only the last three decades have seen systematic research on the best methods of GTA training. In this talk, I provide a brief summary of the most salient results from research in GTA preparation, and synthesize the most important recommendations from the literature into the six (plus one) principles for best practices in GTA development.

Research Results and Best Practices for GTA Preparation

In an effort to begin the task of suffusing computational approaches throughout or physics and astronomy curriculum, we recently decided to adapt a required, sophomore-level, intermediate mechanics course to include an introduction to scientific programming and numerical methods. Given that this course is typically used to develop the mathematical tools students require in their third and fourth years, such as solving differential equations, working with advanced vector manipulations, and processing matrices, it seems that adding programming approaches fits perfectly with the course goals. Of course, there are drawbacks as well, since adding material requires removing other material that has long been part of the course. In this talk, I will present my experience, both the positive and negative aspects, and I will argue that the overall result has been beneficial. I will also discuss my very recent conversion of the course from using Java to using Python with Jupyter notebooks.

Integrating Computation into an Intermediate Mechanics Course

In this talk, we present results from our analysis of the long-term impacts of participating in the New Faculty Workshop-Faculty Online Learning Community (NFW-FOLC). The NFW-FOLC supports new physics and astronomy faculty as they implement research-based instructional strategies (RBISs) in their classrooms. A NFW-FOLC cohort meets regularly via videoconference over the course of one year. We have interviewed participants two years after the completion of their FOLC cohort to investigate the longitudinal impacts of FOLC participation on their current teaching practices. The main goals for NFW-FOLC participants are for them to develop as reflective practitioners and for them to successfully implement RBISs over the long term. We also hypothesize that participants may become change agents at their local institutions. We will speak to all three of these impacts in this presentation, discussing the potential of a FOLC experience to influence participants’ teaching well after the FOLC stops meeting regularly.

Long-term impact of faculty online learning community (FOLC) participation

After having implemented two lessons developed as part of the STEP UP project, five teachers were interviewed about their experiences using the materials in their classes. These teachers have unique backgrounds and teach in schools with different social and economic contexts. We triangulated the quantitative outcomes of their students with their interview reflections to determine how local context is associated with student outcomes, particularly students’ perceptions of the lessons and the post-high school physics intentions.

How Teacher Attitudes Toward Physics Impact Student Outcomes

Technocracy, a problematic world view that values technical abilities and solutions over social ones, pervades engineering. In our pedagogy seminar for Learning Assistants (LA) in an engineering design course, we engaged LAs in role-plays, semi-improvised performances guided by a prompt, around troubles faced by a student team. We draw on audio-video records of a role-play and following discussion from our pedagogy seminar in which LAs, playing as students or an LA, had to contend with both social and technical issues. Using tools from discourse analysis, we analyze how technocracy is both reproduced and challenged during the role-play and following class discussion. The discussion allowed the LAs to reflect on their assumptions and decisions during the role-play. We will present implications for the design and facilitation of role-plays as well as for research studying STEM cultures. *Work supported by NSF Grant 1733649.

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GTA Training: Promoting Inclusive Environments and Students’ Sense of Belonging

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