United States

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.

AAPT SM 20

How Teacher Attitudes Toward Physics Impact Student Outcomes

teacher beliefs

step up

high school

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. 

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.

How technocracy becomes visible in engineering learning assistants’ role-plays

Our group has created open source online learning modules covering around 95% of common topics in a college level calculus-based mechanics course. These learning modules are hosted on an open-source platform, Obojobo, which can be deployed on a cloud server and integrated with any learning management system supporting LTI standards. The motivation to create this new set of open education resources (OER) is threefold: 1. They blend instruction, practice and assessment together in a mastery-based modular design to improve student learning; 2. The modular design provides higher flexibility and better organizational structure to facilitate, adopt, and reuse OER; 3. Our group is developing methods to analyze student learning data that enable the modules to be continuously improved based on data analysis. In the future, these modules could hopefully replace lectures and textbooks to promote the adoption of active learning practices in the classroom.

An Online Physics Course to Empower the Adoption of Open Education Resources

It is common among many college students to wait until the last minute to complete homework assignments, which leads to insufficient time for study. Can assigning extra credit for early completion of homework assignments alter students’ behavior? We study students’ work habits when completing mastery-based online learning modules for homework by analyzing clickstream data collected from the online learning platform over multiple semesters. In some semesters, students may earn extra credit by completing some of the assigned modules well before the due date in the form of “treasure trove” quizzes. These quizzes receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from students. We examine in what ways the "treasure troves" change student behavior by clustering learning events into sessions using a machine learning algorithm. We examine how duration, number, or event density of clusters differs when “treasure troves” are introduced. We also study their impact on exam scores.

Can extra credit effectively reduce cramming behavior for online homework?

Learning assistant (LA) programs support instructors transforming their courses to use evidence-based instructional strategies. We investigated the types of schools that have LA programs to better understand how the distribution of those programs supports excellent and inclusive education across institutions. We used the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (CCIHE) public database to compare schools with and without LA programs, looking at a variety of institutional characteristics to determine whether the distribution of LA programs is equitable across different types of institutions. We will discuss the implications of our findings and identify areas for future research using critical quantitative perspectives in physics education research.

Characteristics of institutions with Learning Assistant programs: An equity investigation

We present student learning gains in each of a two-part introductory algebra-based physics sequence for a multidisciplinary student population taught with and without the use of undergraduate learning assistants (LAs). We report on our pilot program design, inspired by the Learning Assistant Alliance model and adjusted to suit the particular considerations of this physics sequence, including student population, class size, and existing course structure. We specifically discuss the results of assigning our LAs to submit written feedback to their groups, as well as issues arising from whether or not the group work is for a grade. Additionally, we discuss the development of our LAs throughout this program, closing with lessons learned and plans for Fall 2020. As we are extremely pleased with the results of this program, we plan to continue it and are glad to offer our experience to the physics teaching community.

Using Learning Assistants in a Multidisciplinary Algebra-Based Physics Classroom

We present preliminary work on a method of assessing students' level of understanding experimental uncertainty in undergraduate physics laboratory courses. We devised a set of assessment problems in a nested structure, where we isolated each component of what a "major" question asks into a set of stand-alone "minor" questions. By isolating each key step or knowledge as separate minor questions, we find that our method helps identify the specific pitfalls in the training a student has received in lab, providing useful information for revising future lab instructions and curriculum.

ELUSA: Elementary Laboratory Uncertainty Skills Assessment

Computationally integrated physics classes lack assessment of the approaches to computation. The recent call for integration of computation within physics curricula should be supplemented with the appropriate assessment. We present analyses of an initial set of interviews geared toward determining the learning goals in computationally integrated introductory physics classes. These interviews are the first part of a larger study aimed at creating an assessment for computationally integrated physics classes. Interviewees were chosen based on our perception of their involvement in computation, introductory mechanics, and physics education research. Interviewees were either categorized in academia or industry and the interview protocol was adapted to both populations. Semi structured interviews were performed through recorded video calls which were transcribed. We used grounded theory to analyze the interviews. The analysis of these interviews is ongoing. Data collected from these interviews will be used to design a survey for further consensus of the learning goals.

Analyzing Interviews About Learning Goals in Computational Integrated Introductory Physics

Projects and Practices in Physics (P-Cubed) is a flipped, problem-based learning course for introductory, calculus-based mechanics. P-Cubed was designed using the communities of practice framework, with a principle learning goal to develop scientific practices. To promote students’ development of practices, students spend their in-class time working in groups of 4 to 5 members to solve complex physics problems. Practice development is then facilitated through formative feedback and assessments aligned with growth in practice. Each student receives weekly, individualized feedback from their instructor (either a faculty member, teaching assistant or learning assistant) as a practice-based assessment. The feedback focuses on helping students improve their individual understanding and group collaboration through the development of key group-based practices such as decision making and planning. This presentation reports on a series of semi-structured interviews that were conducted with students at various points in the semester to understand the impact feedback had on them.

Student perspective about the impacts of feedback in P-Cubed

I’ve spent nearly 30 years navigating the physics and, more recently, astronomy communities advocating within the professional society space for women, people of color, LGBT+ people, and others from marginalized groups so that they might thrive in their educational spaces and careers. At the same time, I’ve had to navigate these communities from the identity of a Black Woman without a physics degree, which has contributed to the experiences I’ve had throughout my career and has shaped my approach to this work. In this talk, I’ll share some of my views, motivations, and experiences doing DEI work in the professional society space; discuss some of the work I’ve done including my most recent work leading the AIP Task Force to Elevate the representation of African Americans in Undergraduate Physics (TEAM-UP) project; and reflect on the ways in which each of us can uplift students and scientists from marginalized communities to create a better environment for them and all of us.

“Doing Physics” and being a Champion for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Professional Society Arena

One of the ubiquitous problems in classical mechanics is that of a simple pendulum attached to a support that oscillates in time. Under certain conditions, such a pendulum can be modeled as a driven harmonic oscillator, and, as a result, the pendulum can undergo large-amplitude oscillations when the driving frequency of the oscillating support matches the natural frequency of the pendulum. To accompany analysis of this problem in mechanics courses, a simple apparatus has been built to model the system described above. The apparatus will be presented, along with a Lagrangian mechanics analysis of the motion. In addition, several other applications of the demonstration will be discussed.

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