Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2013
Volume 58, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 18–22, 2013; Baltimore, Maryland
Session F38: Physics Education Programs, Policy and the Media |
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Aaron Wade, University of West Florida Room: 347 |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:00AM - 8:12AM |
F38.00001: Engaging community college students in physics research Megan Valentine, Maria Napoli, Arica Lubin, Liu-Yen Kramer, Ofelia Aguirre, Jens-Uwe Kuhn, Nicholas Arnold Recruiting talent and fostering innovation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines demands that we attract, educate, and retain a larger and more diverse cohort of students. In this regard, Community Colleges (CC), serving a disproportionate number of underrepresented minority, female and nontraditional students, represent a pool of potential talent that, due to a misguided perception of its students as being less capable, often remains untapped. We will present our strategies to attract and support the academic advancement of CC students in the STEM fields through our NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program entitled Internships in Nanosystems Science Engineering and Technology (INSET). For more than a decade, INSET has offered a physics research projects to CC students. The key components of INSET success are: 1) the involvement of CC faculty with a strong interest in promoting student success in all aspects of program planning and execution; 2) the design of activities that provide the level of support that students might need because of lack of confidence and/or unfamiliarity with a university environment; and 3) setting clear goals and high performance expectations. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:12AM - 8:24AM |
F38.00002: Pathways to Excellence Scholarship Program for women in STEM fields Joseph Di Rienzi Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) has an NSF S-STEM grant, Pathways to Excellence, that gives 10 scholarships annually to academically talented women undergraduates with demonstrated financial need who are pursuing degrees in mathematics, physics, computer information systems, or engineering. NDMU has been cited (Whitten, et al. (2007)) as providing a female friendly environment for the study of physics. In this program we are using a tri-part mentoring system involving a faculty member in the student's discipline, a peer mentor from the program and an external alumnae mentor. The program also has a thematic seminar course for the scholars. Each student in the program is tasked to construct a career development plan in assistance with her faculty mentor and set measured annual goals. In addition, all scholarship students are requested to have an experiential experience. As a result, NDMU aims to strengthen its role in increasing the numbers of well-educated and skilled women employees from diverse backgrounds, including mostly first-generation college students, in technical and scientific areas. Early assessment of the success of the program will be presented as well as modifications that resulted from the formative evaluation. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:24AM - 8:36AM |
F38.00003: Diversity in Physics: Impact of Using Minimum Acceptable GRE Scores for Graduate Admissions Casey W. Miller About 180 graduate programs in physics are listed in the AIP Graduate Programs book. $\sim$ 96{\%} require the general GRE test; a quarter of these have an explicitly stated minimum score for admission, with the median stated cut-off being 700 (64$^{\mathrm{th}}$ percentile) on GRE Quantitative; $\sim$ 48{\%} require the physics GRE; about half of these have an explicitly stated minimum score for admission, with the median being 600 (32$^{\mathrm{nd}}$ percentile). It does not seem unreasonable to expect students to be among the top test scorers, until you dissect the test results by race and gender. In this talk, I will present data showing that the use of minimum acceptable scores on the GRE exam will have (have had?) a negative impact on diversity in Physics. I will remind the community that this practice is in opposition to ETS's Guide to the Use of Scores. I will make some suggestions for admissions committees, based in part on analyses I have performed. I will then pose challenges related to reducing the influence of GRE scores to the community, ranging from the department and university administration, to ranking bodies and professional societies. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:36AM - 8:48AM |
F38.00004: Interdisciplinary Research and Education in STEM in a Discipline Dominated Academic Structure- Research and Education at the Cross Roads Solomon Bililign Major issues in society - developing alternate sources of energy and a sustainable environment, improving health, and minimizing the effects of climate change require a collective effort by different disciplines working in interdisciplinary groups. Many major breakthroughs in science take place at the boundaries or intersections of disciplines. The need to create a new generation of students who combine a rigorous disciplinary depth with the ability to reach out to other disciplines and work in interdisciplinary teams is more urgent. There is a consensus that the current academic administrative structure is the most important barrier to interdisciplinary collaboration; other barriers like poor communication, etc., emanate from it. How can interdisciplinary education and research flourish while maintaining strong backgrounds in the disciplines? How can universities lower or remove barriers to faculty participation in interdisciplinary education and research and create porous, flexible, less redundant environment that facilitates the flow of ideas, people and resources across disciplinary boundaries? Is possible to have disciplines without disciplinary departments? In this short paper, the barriers and the challenges for developing interdisciplinary education and research will be summarized, lessons from some successful attempts and failures will be presented, and some approaches will be recommended for further discussion. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:48AM - 9:00AM |
F38.00005: Personifying self in physics problem situations involving forces as a student help strategy A.E. Tabor-Morris How can physics teachers best guide students regarding physics problem situations involving forces? A suggestion is made here to personify oneself as the object in question, that is, to pretend to be the object undergoing forces and then qualify and quantify those forces according to their vectors for the system at hand. This personification is not meant to empower the object to act, just to sense the forces it is experiencing. This strategy may be especially useful to beginning physics learners attacking problems that involve both multiple forces AND multiple objects, since each object acted upon needs to be considered separately, using the idea that one cannot be two places at once. An example of this type of problem expounded on here is Atwood's machine: two weights hung over a pulley with a single rope. Another example given is electromagnetic forces on one charge caused by other charges in the vicinity. Discussion is made on implementation of classroom strategies. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:00AM - 9:12AM |
F38.00006: High School Physics Teacher Outreach Programs at California State University Long Beach Chuhee Kwon, Galen Pickett, Laura Henriques One of the goals of the CSULB PhysTEC project has been to establish a physics teaching community that partners CSULB faculty, high school teachers, pre-service teachers, and physics students. In two years, we have created a solid sustainable Physics Teacher Network with local high school teachers. We will discuss the successful outreach programs for high school physics teachers at CSULB and the detailed logistics. Teacher-In-Residence (TIR), high school physics teachers working with the CSULB PhysTEC team, has provided invaluable input for designing and implementing outreach events. The department organizes biannual open house for local high school teachers and their students. The open house event is attended by pre-service teachers, physics undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty. We also host the monthly demo-sharing day that physics teachers bring and share topical demos, which has about 30 - 50 attendees each month. The CSULB PhysTEC project also distributes a monthly newsletter for local physics teachers with upcoming events and information about teaching, and this newsletter is organized and written by TIR. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:12AM - 9:24AM |
F38.00007: Using the science of granular materials to engage middle and high school students in the process of scientific enquiry Jennifer Podel, Nalini Easwar, Shubha Tewari, Karl Martini, Kristin Dolcimascolo, Eric Newman We describe outreach efforts that use the science of granular materials to engage middle and high school physics students in local public schools in scientific investigations. In the middle school, the students were provided with a set of questions, and starting materials to set up their experiments. Examples of investigations pursued by the students include looking at the influence of the size and shape of grains on (i) their rate of flow through a hopper and (ii) their tendency to desegregate in a flow. The high school students were introduced to the properties of granular materials via a series of activities that explored the complex behavior of these materials. Following this, groups of students were challenged to pose a question and design an experiment to investigate a particular aspect of the properties of granular materials. Examples of questions that the students chose to investigate include: How does the shape of grains influence how well they stack in a pile? What factors affect the probability of avalanches down an incline? Both sets of students worked in groups over a period of two months to take quantitative data to test their hypotheses. The investigations culminated in a set of presentations by the students to local faculty and students. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:24AM - 9:36AM |
F38.00008: Science Days: Graduate Student Run Outreach on a Budget Justin K. Perron, George P. Lindberg We will describe a new and ongoing program at the University at Buffalo (UB) aimed at exposing underrepresented K-12 students to the Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. This program has been an entirely graduate student run effort, from idea to inception and finally through implementation. Graduate students, under supervision from faculty members, received a grant from NYSS-APS and matching funds from Physics, Chemistry, and Biology departments at UB. Graduate students set up an outreach program that buses students from inner city Buffalo to UB campus to participate in STEM-based activities. We have held two three hour events so far. Each event involved $\sim$30 students, 99{\%} of which are from underrepresented demographics. Their responses to brief questionnaires showed overwhelming positive views of the event and their genuine interest in science. We will discuss what has made this program a success including what faculty members have done and can do, to support the effort while still leaving it entirely in the graduate students' hands. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:36AM - 9:48AM |
F38.00009: Bringing education to your virtual doorstep Vitaliy Kaurov We currently witness significant migration of academic resources towards online CMS, social networking, and high-end computerized education. This happens for traditional academic programs as well as for outreach initiatives. The talk will go over a set of innovative integrated technologies, many of which are free. These were developed by Wolfram Research in order to facilitate and enhance the learning process in mathematical and physical sciences. Topics include: cloud computing with Mathematica Online; natural language programming; interactive educational resources and web publishing at the Wolfram Demonstrations Project [1]; the computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha [2]; Computable Document Format (CDF) and self-publishing with interactive e-books; course assistant apps for mobile platforms. We will also discuss outreach programs where such technologies are extensively used, such as the Wolfram Science Summer School [3] and the Mathematica Summer Camp [4].\\[4pt] [1] http://demonstrations.wolfram.com\\[0pt] [2] http://www.wolframalpha.com\\[0pt] [3] http://www.wolframscience.com/summerschool\\[0pt] [4] http://www.mathematica-camp.org [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:48AM - 10:00AM |
F38.00010: A Mobile Nanoscience and Electron Microscopy Outreach Program Tonya Coffey, Kyle Kelley We have established a mobile nanoscience laboratory outreach program in Western NC that puts scanning electron microscopy (SEM) directly in the hands of K-12 students and the general public. There has been a recent push to develop new active learning materials to educate students at all levels about nanoscience and nanotechnology. Previous projects, such as Bugscope, nanoManipulator, or SPM Live! allowed remote access to advanced microscopies. However, placing SEM directly in schools has not often been possible because the cost and steep learning curve of these technologies were prohibitive, making this project quite novel. We have developed new learning modules for a microscopy outreach experience with a tabletop SEM (Hitachi TM3000). We present here an overview of our outreach and results of the assessment of our program to date. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:00AM - 10:12AM |
F38.00011: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Using Movies to Teach Science Joanne Budzien Can the plane outrun the explosion? Could the heroes escape injury from the bomb by hiding in the bathtub? Are we in danger of being overrun by 50-foot-tall bugs that have been exposed to radiation? Many people in the general public do want to know the science behind much of what they see in the movies and on television. However, those people are unlikely to take a whole class because ``everyone knows'' that science classes are boring and irrelevant. On the other hand, an evening with an hour or so of video clips interspersed with explanations of the science can be a big hit both to raise general science fluency and recruit students into general education science classes. Film-editing technology has advanced to the point that anyone who has a computer and is willing to invest a couple days in learning to use the software can make a clips-with-PowerPoint DVD that can be shown to a local audience for discussion or used in a science class to show the exact scenes to save time. In this presentation, I'll show an example of my work and talk about how you can make your own DVD. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:12AM - 10:24AM |
F38.00012: The Physics of Babies Philip Shemella Since the 2011 birth of my daughter I have been a 100\% as a stay-at-home dad and 50\% researcher. My ``Routine Adventures'' in the baby universe are the subject of this fun talk that presents the unique challenges of baby physics. Topics include ``Schroedinger's Baby'' and ``The Entropy of Rice.'' [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:24AM - 10:36AM |
F38.00013: An IYPT-based undergraduate physics tournament in China ChuanYong Li, Feng Song, Yubin Liu, Qian Sun International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) is a team-oriented scientific competition of secondary school students. The participants present their solutions to scientific problems they have prepared over several months and discuss their solutions with other teams. It can also be implemented in university level as its physics problems are all open questions and have no standard answers, especially suitable for undergraduates' ability training in China. The annual tournament of physics learning of undergraduates in our school of physics was started in 2008. Each year, there are 15-18 teams, 20 more student volunteers and 30 more faculty jurors involved. The students benefited in different ways. It is project-based, requiring students to solve the problems in a research way. Team work is developed in both experimenting and discussing stages. The knowledge learned in classrooms can be used to solve these practical and life-related problems, raising their interest and initiative in physics learning. Finally, they are building up their skills in scientific presentation and communication. An IYPT-based program called CUPT (China undergraduate physics tournament) was launched in 2010 and annually attracts about 40 universities to attend. It gains its important role in physics education. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:36AM - 10:48AM |
F38.00014: Met The Press: What It's LIke to Talk to Reporters about Physics Rebecca Thompson Someone from the Huffington Post just called you because they are doing a story about science and you are a physicist. The problem is that they need you to take time away from your grapheme experiments to talk about the physics of exploding anvils. It's been a long time since you've shot an anvil in the air so you think you might not be right for this. But, as long as you understand general physics and can explain things well, you can be a real asset. This talk will recount first-hand experiences talking to a range of news outlets from the PBS New Hour to Real Simple Magazine about everything from quick-freezing water to pumpkin boats. It will include helpful information about preparing for an interview, learning new physics fast, timelines and follow-up. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:48AM - 11:00AM |
F38.00015: Talking to Journalists about Your Research James Riordon Many physicists have the opportunity to speak to members of the media from time to time. A journalist may want to ask about your work, or they may be in search of expert comments on the work of others in your field. I will offer some thoughts on ways to prepare for various types of interviews. I will also suggest some things you should always try to bring up in an interview, and others that you might want to avoid entirely. Finally, I will talk about what you can do when a reporter gets it wrong. [Preview Abstract] |
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