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Proficiency in units/dimensional analysis is a useful skill in the sciences and engineering, and STEM instructors often presume competence from their students in this area. However, unit analysis techniques and unit systems are not always formally taught, and even with explicit emphasis during instruction, many students lack the repeated exposure necessary to master them. To assess student understanding of units and unit systems, we administered a brief, itemized survey to N=53 calculus-based introductory university physics students. The survey was intended to uncover possible misconceptions and identify previously unknown obstacles to student success within this topic. Our results suggest that as many as half of surveyed participants may not recognize the adaptability of symbolic physical equations to different unit systems. Furthermore, a similar proportion failed to eliminate non-viable answer choices involving analytic functions with units inside their arguments. Consequently, we believe units/dimensional analysis is a topic ripe for further investigation.

PERC SM 20

Excerpts from an exploratory survey of units/dimensional analysis in introductory physics

dimensional analysis

units

introductory physics

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.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

poster

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.

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?

As a first step in a larger study of student difficulties in upper-division thermal physics, we conducted think-aloud interviews with 8 physics graduate students to probe their understanding of entropy. In this paper, we'll discuss results from a question which presented students with a novel system---a string in a bath of water---and asked students to rank the probabilities of particular arrangements of the string, define macrostates of the system, and discuss specifically what is meant by the entropy of the system. Exploring graduate students' understanding of entropy and their ability to solve problems and reason with entropic arguments will provide insights into how physicists develop a mature understanding of entropy as a physical quantity. We find a tendency for graduate students to project properties of macrostates onto constituent microstates and other similar difficulties. We discuss connections to other research in this field and identify observations warranting further study.

Investigating how graduate students connect microstates and macrostates with entropy (PERC)

Recent undergraduate laboratory recommendations emphasize the importance of helping students develop their scientific documentations skills throughout the curriculum. Learning proper lab notebook practices is important for students in preparation for graduate school and the STEM workforce. Laboratory notebooks can also be a valuable tool for instructors to assess a student's understanding of lab activities and the underlying physics principles. This study analyzes students' development of standard notebook practices during introductory physics lab courses. This research was conducted through a series of pre- and post-surveys given in introductory physics lab classes. The surveys cover topics of how students use lab notebooks, how they learned notebook practices, and their attitudes toward beliefs about using lab notebooks. This paper uses a mixed methods approach to examine student growth in specific laboratory notebook practices and reviews the instructional methods and feedback that were most effective for first semester physics students.

Evaluating and Improving Laboratory Notebook Practices

Group work provides valuable opportunities for students to actively participate in classroom conversations. Instructors often emphasize generating and sharing ideas in group work, but how these ideas are shared in small-group discussions can be complicated by social dynamics within that group. In this project, we applied techniques from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze the interpersonal meanings in students discourse in a college physics lab section. By examining how students socially positioned themselves in the episode, we found that students steered the groups conversation not only by explicitly offering ideas, but also by positioning as not-knowing, raising questions, and appealing to authority. This episode provides another example to a growing body of research describing the consequential role of social dynamics in how physics students contribute to small-group discussions.

Examining the Social Dynamics of Small-Group Discussions (PERC)

[course name] is a flipped, problem-based learning course for introductory, calculus-based mechanics. [course name] 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. Scientific practice development is then facilitated through formative feedback and assessments aligned with the growth in these 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 paper 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

Although we have found that students in our Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course describe physics as more relevant to their primary interests than do their counterparts in a traditional introductory physics environment, we do not yet know whether IPLS courses better prepare life science students to use physical reasoning in contexts that extend beyond those explicitly encountered in IPLS. To answer this question of whether IPLS better prepared our students for future learning, we designed and administered a task related to fluid dynamics at the conclusion of both traditional and IPLS introductory physics courses. We describe the construction of the task and the ways in which IPLS students approached the task differently than did students in the traditional course. We interpret the results in light of the goal of the IPLS course, supporting transfer within the preparation for future learning paradigm around which our course is designed.

Assessing the impact of IPLS on physical reasoning

This study was conducted in a Modeling Instruction Introductory Physics I course and investigates whether students social interdependence is associated to semester-long conceptual and physics identity gains. In Modeling Instruction, students spend the majority of class time working in small groups leading to varying levels of task and outcome interdependence with other group members. Detailed data were collected to measure pre- to post- conceptual learning and identity gains as well as reported task and outcome interdependence for each student. Students pre-semester individualism and cooperation beliefs were also collected as these measures have been shown to be correlated with social interdependence. Linear regressions were conducted to understand associations between interdependence measures and pre-to-post semester differences in students conceptual and physics identity measures; notably, students who reported greater levels of initiated task interdependence also had more positive improvements in their beliefs in being recognized as a physics person. A significant positive shift in students pre-to-post semester cooperation beliefs was also observed.

The Associations between Conceptual Learning, Physics Identity and Social Interdependence

The national preschool curriculum in Mexico considers 80 hours for learning science during the school year. Early child science education is essential for developing skills and positive attitudes toward science. However, for the instruction to be successful, teachers must have adequate knowledge of science and science didactic. In the case of Mexico, preschool science curriculum and teacher preparation are insufficient. There are few professional development courses for in-service and pre-service teachers, and the material and textbooks for this educational level is limited. The Department of Physics Education of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico had different projects that involve the design of curriculum, experiment manuals, evaluation tools, postgrad thesis, and teacher professional development workshops. This work presents the results and analysis of the evolution of these projects and their influence in classrooms.

Research Projects in Science Education for Preschool, Evolution, and Results in Curriculum Development, Evaluation Tools, and Teacher Workshops.

Nationally, about 80\% of two-year college (TYC) students intend to obtain a bachelor`s degree; however, only 13\% successfully do so. Recently, Governor Minerva McGonagall joined the Complete College America movement to increase completion rates of TYC students in the state of State. Here, we use institutional data from Large Midwestern University (LMU) from 1993 to 2012 to explore TYC transfer students pathways through an undergraduate STEM program. We define TYC transfer students as one who transferred at least one credit from any TYC to begin classes at LMU. Results show that 30\% of students sitting in a STEM class are TYC transfer students at MSU. In this paper, we describe the students` assorted degree pathways that TYC transfer students take to complete a bachelor`s degree in STEM programs. We will also investigate how these pathways change for different race/ethnicity markers.

An Investigation of Degree Pathways for Students of Color with Transfer Credits

Recent work by Kanim and Cid [1] suggests that the data used in PER is not representative of students enrolled in physics courses at the national level. Using university-level demographics, Kanim and Cid showed that PER studies oversample from white, wealthy, mathematically-prepared populations of students. What we do not yet know is whether these university-level demographics are representative of introductory physics courses, which are a primary site of research in PER. In this paper we present data from six US institutions, comparing the composition of introductory physics classes to aggregate university demographics in terms of gender and race and/or ethnicity. Our aim is to make progress in characterizing the demographics of introductory physics courses, which is imperative to deepening our understanding of how social disparity is manifested in physics classrooms and the institutions that host them. We discuss limitations of our approach, including problematizing the use of statistics to make sense of who is enrolling in introductory physics.

Toward Characterizing the Demographics of Introductory Physics Courses (PERC)

We use the theory of community of practice to describe engagement in authentic practices in the context of an online discussion board of high school physics teachers. The class, associated with a new Master program in physics with teaching emphasis requires students to participate in weekly problem-solving and biweekly reading reflection discussion boards. We take a social network analysis approach to investigate how members of an online teacher community interact with each other through a nine-week classical mechanics summer course. We found that the participation of students in the problem-solving discussions fluctuates from week to week; a result of the structural features of the course. Comparatively, the reading reflection participation did not show a noticeable variation. In order to gain more insight into our findings, and reveal the course's structural features, we characterized posts by looking for emergent themes Participation in an Online Community of High School Physics Teachers

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Investigating how graduate students connect microstates and macrostates with entropy (PERC)

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Excerpts from an exploratory survey of units/dimensional analysis in introductory physics

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