Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Spring 2011 Meeting of the New England Sections of the APS and the AAPT
Volume 56, Number 2
Friday–Saturday, April 8–9, 2011; Lowell, Massachusetts
Session F5: Physics Education |
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Chair: David Pullen, UMass Lowell Room: Olney Science Center 0-218 |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:00AM - 8:12AM |
F5.00001: Becoming Galileo in the Classroom Elizabeth Cavicchi Galileo's contributions are so familiar as to be taken for granted, obscuring the exploratory process by which his discoveries arose. The wonder that Galileo experienced comes alive for undergraduates and teachers that I teach, when they find themselves taking Galileo's role by means of their own explorations. These classroom journeys include: sighting through picture frames to understand perspective, watching the night sky, experimenting with lenses and motion, and responding to Galileo's story. In teaching, I use critical exploration, the research pedagogy developed by Eleanor Duckworth that arose historically from both the clinical interviewing of Jean Piaget and B\"{a}rbel Inhelder and the Elementary Science Study of the 1960s. During critical explorations, the teacher supports students' investigations by posing provocative experiences while interactively following students' emergent understandings. In the context of Galileo, students learned to observe carefully, trust their observations, notice things they had never noticed before, and extend their understanding in the midst of pervasive confusion. Personal investment moved students to question assumptions that they had never critically evaluated. By becoming Galileo in today's classroom, we found the ordinary world no less intriguing and unsettling to explore, as the historical world of protagonists in Galileo's \textit{Dialogue}. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:12AM - 8:24AM |
F5.00002: Discover Mathematics in the Physical World Yan Yang Playing with perspective windows generated an initial idea related to mathematics; an extended experiment with paper cards along the desk helped me to discover the geometry; reading Galileo's Sidereal Messenger allowed me to apply the geometry that I discovered to understand the magnitude of Galileo's telescope. Galileo's study of motion, like pendulum and inclined plane, deepened my (and my classmates') curiosity and fascination with his ingenious use of mathematics. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:24AM - 8:36AM |
F5.00003: ITOP: graduate courses for physics teachers Andrew Duffy, Manher Jariwala, Peter Garik In this talk, we will describe Project ITOP, a set of 10 two-credit graduate courses for in-service physics teachers, offered through the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University (BU). ITOP (Improving the Teaching of Physics) is based at BU, but we also teach the courses in Chicopee, MA, for teachers in western and central Massachusetts. The physics content in the courses ranges from Newton's laws of motion through to quantum mechanics, special relativity, and computer modeling. In addition, we discuss both the conceptual history of physics, as well as readings from the Physics Education Research literature. Our primary goal is to develop the pedagogical content knowledge of participating teachers, enabling teachers to be more effective in their own classrooms. ITOP web site: http://physics.bu.edu/teachers/ [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:36AM - 8:48AM |
F5.00004: Particle Physics Masterclass as a Context for Learning about NOS Michael Wadness This research addresses the question: Do secondary school science students attending the U.S. Particle Physics Masterclass change their view of the nature of science (NOS)? The U.S. Particle Physics Masterclass is a national physics outreach program run by QuarkNet, in which high school physics students gather at a local research institution for one day to learn about particle physics and the scientific enterprise. Student activities include introductory lectures in particle physics, laboratory tours, analysis of actual data from CERN, and the discussion of their findings in a conference-like atmosphere. Although there are a number of outreach programs involving scientists in K-12 education, very few of them have been formally evaluated to determine if they provide adequate learning of NOS. Therefore, the significance of this study is that it investigates the claim that science outreach programs may be designed to address science literacy, specifically as a context for explicit NOS instruction. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:48AM - 9:00AM |
F5.00005: Gay-Lussac Did Better Than He Knew Charles H. Holbrow, Joseph C. Amato In his 1802 paper Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac reported the first definitive experimental evidence that many different gases exhibit the same fractional expansion of volume when heated. This property is known as Charles Law, Amontons Law, Dalton's Law, or the law of volumes. Gay-Lussac concluded from his experiments that many gases expand by 37.5\% when heated from $0 \,^{\circ}{\rm C}$ to $100\,^{\circ}{\rm C}$. Although his result is within 2.5\% of the modern value of $36.6\% = 100/273.15$, the discrepancy is surprising because his direct and simple experimental method allowed him to measure changes in volume with a precision of a few tenths of a percent. An examination of his original paper suggests, however, that he did not take into account that his measurements of the initial and final volumes of gas were made at slightly different pressures. With reasonable assumptions about the diagrams in his paper, one can use Pascal's law and the ideal gas law to correct the measured volumes so that they correspond to the same initial and final pressure. With this correction the results imply $\Delta V/V = .366$. Gay-Lussac did better than he knew. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 9, 2011 9:00AM - 9:12AM |
F5.00006: Misconception in Physical Science at the Middle School Grades Zenobia Lojewska, Robert Barkman, Peter Polito, Julianne Smist, Richard Konicek- Moran The presentation will focus on the physical science content and pedagogy workshops addressing student's misconceptions at the middle school level. These workshops were conducted at Springfield College during summer 2010 for in- service teachers from Springfield MA Public Schools. A partnership among Springfield MA Public Schools, Springfield College, and the City of Springfield Science Museum was developed to implement an innovative program to prepare highly- qualified educators. Concepts of force, motion, energy, and energy transformation were explored in a physics laboratory setting and student's misconceptions were addressed. [Preview Abstract] |
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