Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2009 APS April Meeting
Volume 54, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, May 2–5, 2009; Denver, Colorado
Session H13: Focus Session: Professional Preparation of Teachers of Physics |
Hide Abstracts |
Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: David Haase, North Carolina State University Room: Plaza Court 3 |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
H13.00001: Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics: Preliminary Results Invited Speaker: The nation currently produces a significantly smaller number of well-prepared teachers of physics than it needs. The American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics have instituted the Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics, which seeks to study exemplary teacher preparation programs and identify generalizable characteristics of them. The Task Force will author a report of its findings, which will be distributed to all physics departments and schools of education in the US. In addition, the Task Force will disseminate its findings through presentations, workshops, and other mechanisms, under the auspices of the sponsoring professional organizations. In this talk, preliminary results from site visits and other data collection means will be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
H13.00002: College Ready: A \$7M NSF MSP project to prepare pre- and in-service teachers Gay Stewart, John Stewart The College Ready in Mathematics and Physics Partnership is comprised of 38 school districts, UA Fort Smith, and UA, Fayetteville, which will serve as the lead among these core partners, with supporting partners AAPT, APS, College Board, Mathematical Association of America, Maplesoft, and Northwest Arkansas Community College. College Ready will build vertical and horizontal learning communities among school and college faculty in order to improve major articulation issues that impact the successful transition of students from high school to college, targeting physics. College Ready will achieve these ends through a series of interconnected activities including vertical alignment of high school and college expectations, intensive content driven workshops, articulation conferences, university course revisions, the creation of professional learning communities, and the opportunity for teachers to earn advanced degrees and endorsements. It builds on and looks to establish synergy between established efforts of PhysTEC and PMET. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
H13.00003: Measuring Physics Teacher Knowledge: Is it Domain-Specific? Robert Talbot, Valerie Otero, Derek Briggs The development of reliable and valid measures of science teacher knowledge is essential for teacher education program evaluation purposes. A particular challenge to this effort lies in the fact that most programs serve pre-service teachers who have a range of disciplinary specialties and teaching areas (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics). Is it best to measure science teacher knowledge within an individuals' area of science specialty, or can this be measured domain-generally for the sciences? In this research, we investigate this question by developing a physics-specific measure of science teacher knowledge. We then conduct an experiment in which we randomly administer a domain-general measure or the parallel physics-specific measure to individuals within a population of pre-service science teachers. We also observe the teaching practices of a subset of individuals in order to contribute to a validity argument for interpretations resulting from these measures. The empirical evidence gathered will serve to further develop an existing measure of science teacher knowledge---the Flexible Application of Student-Centered Instruction instrument---and will contribute to our theoretical understanding about a specific construct of teacher knowledge: pedagogical content knowledge. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
H13.00004: Rutgers Physics Teacher Preparation Program Chris D'Amato, Eugenia Etkina In this talk I will describe my experiences in the Rutgers Physics Teacher Preparation program as a future physics teacher and share how these experiences shaped my career as a physics teacher. The uniqueness of the Rutgers Program is that it prepares physics teachers separately from other science teachers, thus providing them with a firm foundation of how to engage high school students in deep conceptual and quantitative learning of physics concepts. While in the program I was exposed to the findings from the physics education research and science education that helped me not only understand how students learn in general but also how they learn physics, what ideas they have to begin with and how to engage them in the active construction of physics knowledge. After I finished the program I have been involved in the induction program that helped me overcome many difficulties that beginning teachers have.~ [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:57AM - 12:09PM |
H13.00005: Enhancing Student Attitudes about Physics: A multi-university study Kara Gray, Valerie Otero Despite improvements in students' conceptual learning associated with research-based teaching techniques, studies in physics education research continue to show that student attitudes toward physics get worse over a single semester of physics instruction. Even courses that measure very high conceptual learning gains show degradation in students' attitudes. This is observed in courses designed for physics majors as well as in courses designed for non-physics majors. The Physics and Everyday Thinking (PET) curriculum is designed especially for non-science majors, particularly prospective and practicing elementary teachers. In addition to the foundational content in physics, the PET curriculum explicitly helps students think about what it means to learn physics as well as introducing them to broader issues about the nature and practice of science. Because the curriculum explicitly addresses issues about learning physics and the nature of science, we hypothesized that PET students' attitudes about physics would improve over one semester. We studied students from seven different universities and found small to large positive shifts in attitudes about physics among students enrolled in PET courses. We will discuss these unusually high shifts and compare them to pre/post measurements using the same attitude instruments and different curricula. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 12:09PM - 12:21PM |
H13.00006: Bringing Technology into Physics Classrooms Nouredine Zettlili Through our outreach initiative at Jacksonville State University, we have been supporting a number of school districts in Northeast Alabama to improve the teaching of physics at the high school level. This initiative is part of Project IMPACTSEED (IMproving Physics And Chemistry Teaching in SEcondary Education), a grant funded by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. This project is motivated by a major pressing local need: A large number of high school physics teachers teach out of field. The main aim of project IMPACTSEED is to help teachers learn and master the various physics topics required by the Alabama Course of Study. Teachers are offered year-round support through a rich variety of program. In this presentation, we want to present ideas on ways of bringing technology to physics classrooms. We have identified a number of ways of bringing technology into physics classrooms, most notably through a series of make-and-take technology workshops that were developed over several years of research. In turn, when the teachers assign these make-an-take projects to their students, the students will be able to see first-hand---by doing, rather than being told---that physics is not a dry, abstract subject. We found this approach to be particularly effective in heightening the students' interest in math and science. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 12:21PM - 12:33PM |
H13.00007: Professional Development for K-12 Teachers of Physics and Physical Science Jim Nelson With the assistance of the National Science Foundation and the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) has developed the Physics Teaching Resource Agent (PTRA) Professional Development Model for physical science and physics teachers. This model includes development of peer mentors and professional development leaders, systemic infrastructure, assessment instruments, and a professional development curriculum based on experienced mentors and Physics Education Research (PER). The AAPT/PTRA Professional Development Model provides an opportunity for teachers to experience professional growth from training in the content areas of physical science and physics (e.g., Energy, Kinematics, Newton's Laws, etc.), integration of instructional technology into curricula (e.g., Computer-based Measurements, Graphic Calculators, Simulations, etc.), and teaching strategies based on PER (e.g., Inquiry Learning, Ranking Tasks, Modeling, Learning Cycle Model of a Lesson, etc.). The AAPT/PTRA Program has developed several assessment instruments used to track teacher improvement in the areas of content, learning progress and to identify areas of improvement. [Preview Abstract] |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700