United States

We have developed a multiple-choice test for measuring students’ quantitative literacy in the context of physics (Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy, PIQL). Items were created based on the framework of conceptual blending in which students’ mathematical reasoning and conceptual physics understanding cannot necessarily be separated. As such, we include several multiple-choice/multiple-response (MCMR) items to which students may select as many answer choices as they think are correct. Common factor analysis techniques for identifying groups of items that share common traits are inappropriate because these methods require MCMR items to be scored dichotomously, which destroys the rich information available in students’ response pattern. As an alternative, we use Modified Module Analysis (MMA) to identify communities based on networks of correlations between answer choices. We present the results from using MMA to analyze networks of correct responses to PIQL items, networks of incorrect responses, and networks of all responses combined.

AAPT WM 21

Examining Response Patterns to Multiple-Response Items Using Module Analysis

module analysis

physics quantitative literacy

test development

factor analysis

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

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We have all experienced it; watching a movie (cartoon or not) where something happens that is a physical impossibility making all the physicists&nbsp;in the room cringe.&nbsp; Someone walks off a cliff and doesn’t fall until the look down (looking at you Wyle E. Coyote) or the path of a launched object looks nothing like a parabola…it can be infuriating.&nbsp; But, instead of raging against the incorrect, why not use it to teach how the world really works? Students are surprisingly good at picking out the incorrect physics when watching cartoons, but they also can fall into traps believing that real life emulates the cartoon world.&nbsp; During this talk, I will detail my experiences using cartoons to teach physics to high school students and pre-service elementary teachers.

Cartoon Physics in the Classroom

Before being solved by Newton and Laplace, explanation of the cause of the tides was a long-standing problem. In this talk, we will look at two failed attempts to explain tides: Galileo’s “alternately accelerated and retarded motion” published in Discourse on Two World Systems in 1632 and George-Louis Leclerc’s hilariously implausible description of tides due to blocking of ocean currents in The System of Natural History, Vol.1 in 1741, over 50 years after Newton.

The Troublesome Tides

Benjamin Franklin was a first-rate physicist. Yet, his experiments and demonstrations almost killed him several times, and once even shocked him completely unconscious. Valiantly carrying on, Franklin was the de facto founder of the science of electricity and even a publishing member of the Royal Society of London. In this talk, allow me to introduce you to Benjamin Franklin the Physicist as I outline his most important and dangerous discoveries, demonstrate them, and explain why the heck he thought that positive charge flowed in conductors.

Benjamin Franklin’s Most Dangerous Experiments

The evolution of NGSS standards and the influence this has had at the HS level has created an important inflection point nationally for&nbsp;new innovation and policy about how we can integrate engineering&nbsp;and design, not just in science, but across entire campuses.&nbsp;Four years&nbsp;ago, the&nbsp;creation of the&nbsp;MakerDen at Ramona Convent Secondary School (the first all-girls makerspace in Southern California)&nbsp;allowed for a&nbsp;transformational&nbsp;change in&nbsp;not only how&nbsp;students,&nbsp;but teachers across all disciplines, integrate engineering skills.&nbsp;The&nbsp;goal&nbsp;was to&nbsp;create&nbsp;policies and procedures&nbsp;that allowed for the&nbsp;building&nbsp;of a&nbsp;new community of collaboration between teachers&nbsp;in&nbsp;an&nbsp;innovative&nbsp;shared physical space. This is a story of collaboration, stake holder engagement, empowering&nbsp;community, and then giving up control to let it thrive. The creation of this fertile soil resulted in the MakerDen being featured at the 2019 International Symp. of Academic Makerspace at Yale.

Freedom, Innovation, and Makerspaces; creating new campus realities.

Most teachers of general physics and other physics courses have been dismayed by the rampant student use of and dependence upon online homework solutions.&nbsp; I have developed a “5-Star Rating,” done by students, to indicate&nbsp;use, or no use, of online solutions in the solving of physics homework problems.&nbsp; A 5-star problem can be achieved if you can work a problem without use of the book, notes, or other people.&nbsp; Or, you can work your way down to a 0-Star problem utterly copying without understanding.&nbsp; The emphasis is on honesty and integrity.&nbsp; If students use&nbsp;an online solution, they must reference it!&nbsp; If someone else helps, give them credit!&nbsp; One’s homework grade is not reduced by star-rating the problem.&nbsp; In fact, a small bit of extra credit is awarded should a student use 5-Star Rating. &nbsp;&nbsp;The 5-Star Rating system and possible correlations between 5-Star Rating and performance will be discussed.

"5-Star" Student Self-Assessment for Online Homework Solutions in General Physics

Promoting engagement in large synchronous sessions can be challenging, particularly for educators who are not used to working in the online format. Students are reluctant to engage in large-format online groups, leaving online synchronous sessions feeling passive. Community-engaged online performers, or streamers, have developed techniques for promoting interest and engagement from a text-based “chat” of viewers. If our goal is to promote engagement with online synchronous class content, this contemporary entertainment medium offers relevant and timely examples of promoting interactivity in a remote synchronous format. These solutions can range from technological add-ons to active engagement techniques that are adaptable to educational technology and active learning. This paper will present techniques, case studies, and examples of application to a remote introductory physics course.

A in the Chat: Remote Engagement Inspiration from Streaming Culture

The Physics and Everyday Thinking Curriculum is built around students talking and working together. In the classroom groups have white boards and the instructor circulates to monitor work and ask questions. In online environments, an instructor can only be present with one group at a time, and an instructor showing up in a breakout room can disrupt the student-student discussions. Providing groups with shared documents, virtual whiteboards and other collaboration tools not only makes their group work more productive, it also provides a way for the instructor to unobtrusively monitor multiple groups simultaneously. In this talk we will present a variety of tools we have used from the Google Suite as well as our experience using Microsoft Teams. This is part of a series of talks stemming from the NextGen PET FOLC project. &nbsp;This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NSF DUE-1626496.

Tools to Support On-line Small Group Activities

Equal access to lucrative careers depends on every student being exposed to coding and science courses are prime territory for this task. Jupyter, Binder, and Colab have been critical tools for making that happen. They’re free, used in research, and enable non-CS-fluent instructors to give their students meaningful exposure to introductory programming and data science. &nbsp; I’ll share lessons learned from helping school districts embed coding activities into core science curriculum for over 15,000 middle schoolers annually. I’ll also report more recent developments using this strategy in remote physics courses at the 2nd largest US university and in Quarknet’s Data Camp for high school teachers.

Teaching Science Content with Jupyter at Scale, Elementary Through University

This summer provided an opportunity to innovate amid the pandemic. Andrews University’s Department of Physics developed an entire series of labs that were completed with equipment that was cheap enough to supply to each student. Pre-recorded lectures were combined with remote, concurrent small-group learning assignments and laboratory exercises to reach students in our summer intensive physics course with the largest ever enrollment. A real laboratory experience, while being away from campus combined with easy access to professors increased student engagement.

An accelerated physics course remotely with SGLs and physical labs.

It is well known that in his pursuit of “ Cosmic Harmony ,” Johannes Kepler believed that the planets were singing musical scales as the speeds of their orbits varied. In no small part because of his Laws of Planetary motion , we now know that these varying speeds are due to orbital eccentricities. It turns out that the eccentricity of the orbit of each planet known in Kepler’s time can be used to calculate the numerical frequency-ratio for the musical interval spanned by the scale Kepler believed each planet was singing. This talk will provide some background on&nbsp;&nbsp;Kepler’s ideas about “Cosmic Harmony,” the mathematics of musical intervals and scales and describe the derivation of the expression used and report the results.

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