Session M6: Identifying and Training Best Practices, Communicating Meaning, and Probing Student Reasoning

\textit{Periscope:} Looking into learning in best-practices physics classrooms

Periscope is a set of instructional materials designed to support university physics instructors -- including teaching assistants, learning assistants, and faculty -- in learning to notice and interpret classroom events the way an accomplished teacher does. Periscope is organized into short lessons that highlight significant questions in the teaching and learning of physics, such as ``How do I bring out students' physics ideas?'' and ``Does it matter if students are unhappy in my class?'' Lessons are centered on captioned video episodes of introductory physics students in best-practices classrooms. By watching and discussing authentic teaching events, instructors enrich their experience with noticing and interpreting student behavior and practice applying lessons learned about teaching to actual teaching situations. Periscope also gives instructors a view of other institutions' transformed courses, which can support and expand the instructors' vision of their own instructional improvement and support the transfer of course developments among faculty. Periscope materials are free to educators.   

How Physicists Communicate Conceptual Meaning with Math

Physics embeds conceptual meaning within a complex mathematical formalism. In this talk, I present a discourse analysis of faculty teaching with mathematical derivations, rearranging and simplifying equations to illuminate physical principles. Observations are interpreted through the lens of symbolic forms, conceptual and contextual meanings that are embedded in the equation. As an equation is manipulated, different forms are emphasized, subtly changing the physical interpretation. The symbolic forms framework can make explicit the motivations behind the mathematical ``moves'' in a derivation. Some manipulations change the dominant context from physics to mathematics. Other thematic manipulations --- e.g. grouping terms of a common variable --- reveal important conceptual points. While direct observational evidence supports the inference of these motivations, the reasoning is often hidden from the students. The study of mathematical discourse represents a new direction in which physics education researchers can study and inform the classroom.   

Dynamics of How Students Conceptualize the Particle in a Box

The ``particle in a box'' is one of the simple systems that every introductory quantum mechanics student learns to solve exactly, but behind the mathematical simplicity is conceptual complexity. For example, it is not intuitively obvious what are the physical implications of an infinite potential, or why energy eigenstates are not also momentum eigenstates (even though there is zero potential energy at every position where the wavefunction is nonzero).\footnote{See also F.E. Cummings, The particle in a box is not simple, Am. J. Phys. 45, 158 (1977); R.C. Sapp, Ground state of the particle in a box, Am. J. Phys. 50, 1159 (1982); D.S. Rokhsar, Ehrenfest's theorem and the particle-in-a-box, Am. J. Phys. 64, 1416 (1996)} We use the particle in a box to probe the dynamics of student thinking about quantum systems. By analyzing both spoken language and gestures, we observe students reasoning about quantum ``particles'' using properties associated with classical particles, with classical waves, and with neither, and switching among these ways of conceptualizing the quantum ``particle.''   

Student decision making in large group discussion

It is increasingly common in physics classes for students to work together to solve problems and perform laboratory experiments. When students work together, they need to negotiate the roles and decision making within the group. We examine how a large group of students negotiates authority as part of their two week summer College Readiness Program at Rochester Institute of Technology. The program is designed to develop metacognitive skills in first generation and Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) STEM undergraduates through cooperative group work, laboratory experimentation, and explicit reflection exercises. On the first full day of the program, the students collaboratively developed a sign for the word ``metacognition'' for which there is not a sign in American Sign Language. This presentation will focus on three aspects of the ensuing discussion: (1) how the instructor communicated expectations about decision making; (2) how the instructor promoted student-driven decision making rather than instructor-driven policy; and (3) one student's shifts in decision making behavior. We conclude by discussing implications of this research for activity-based physics instruction.   

Using Time-on-Task Measurements to Understand Student Performance in a Physics Class: A Ten-Year Study

The amount of time spent on out-of-class activities such as working homework, reading, and studying for examinations is presented for $10$ years of an introductory, calculus-based physics class at a large public university. While the class underwent significant change in the $10$ years studied, the amount of time invested by students in weeks not containing an in-semester examination was constant and did not vary with the length of the reading or homework assignments. The amount of time spent preparing for examinations did change as the course was modified. The time spent on class assignments, both reading and homework, did not scale linearly with the length of the assignment. The time invested in both reading and homework per length of the assignment decreased as the assignments became longer. The class average time invested in examination preparation did change with the average performance on previous examinations in the same class, with more time spent in preparation for lower previous examination scores ($R^2=0.70$).   

Network Analysis of Force Concept Inventory Responses to Improve Diagnostic Utility

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a diagnostic instrument designed to investigate students' understanding of Newtonian Mechanics and is widely used in Physics Education Research. One of the strengths of the FCI is that the distractors are drawn from student conceptions based in their experiences. The distractors chosen are often more informative about student's understanding as they identify the particular nature of students' alternative conceptions. We propose a network based analysis of the FCI which will enhance the utility of the FCI as a diagnostic tool for identifying student conceptions. In this approach, student responses are treated as a bipartite network which is then projected into two networks - students and responses. The response network includes all responses that are shared among students. We use the LANS backbone extraction algorithm to identify patterns in student responses. We use community detection algorithms on the backbone networks to identify clusters of common responses which map to models held by students, for example, ``force is needed for movement'' and ``the active agent uses the most force.'' This method has utility across a variety of instruments and could be used to improve instruction by providing in-depth knowledge of student conceptions.   

Meta-analysis of teaching methods: a 50k+ student study

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) are the two most widely-used conceptual tests in introductory mechanics. Because they are so popular, they provide an excellent avenue to compare different teaching methods at different kinds of institutions with varying student populations. We conducted a secondary analysis of all peer-reviewed papers which publish data from US and Canadian colleges and universities. Our data include over fifty thousand students drawn from approximately 100 papers; papers were drawn from Scopus, ERIC, ComPADRE, and journal websites. We augment published data about teaching methods with institutional data such as Carnegie Classification and average SAT scores. We statistically determine the effectiveness of different teaching methods as measured by FCI and FMCE gains and mediated by institutional and course factors. As in the landmark 1998 Hake study, we find that classes using interactive engagement (IE) have significantly larger learning gains than classes using traditional instruction. However, we find a broader distribution of normalized gains occurs in each of traditional and IE classes, and the differences between IE and traditional instruction have changed over time and are more context dependent.   

Comparing the Attitudes of Pre-Health Professional and Engineering Students in Introductory Physics Courses

This talk will discuss using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) to compare student attitudes towards the study of physics of two different groups. Northern Illinois University has two levels of introductory mechanics courses, one geared towards biology majors and pre-health professionals, and one for engineering and physics majors. The course for pre-health professionals is an algebra based course, while the course for engineering and physics majors is a calculus based course. We've adapted the CLASS into a twenty question survey that measures student attitudes towards the practice of and conceptions about physics. The survey is administered as a pre and post assessment to look at student attitudes before and after their first course in physics.   

Analyzing NEXUS/Physics Laboratory Curriculum in a Large-enrollment Environment

UMd-PERG's NEXUS/Physics for Life Sciences laboratory curriculum, piloted in 2012-2013 in small test classes, has been implemented in large-enrollment environments at UMD from 2013-present. These labs address physical issues at biological scales using microscopy, image and video analysis, electrophoresis, and spectroscopy in an open, non-protocol-driven environment. We have collected a wealth of data (surveys, video analysis, etc.) that enables us to get a sense of the students' responses to this curriculum in a large-enrollment environment and with teaching assistants ``new'' to the labs. In this talk, we will provide a brief overview of what we have learned and comparisons of our large-enrollment results to the results from our pilot study. Additionally, we will share data examining the changes in self-reported student goals, which we believe is an indication of our lab curriculum's impact on student thinking.