Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2020
Volume 65, Number 2
Saturday–Tuesday, April 18–21, 2020; Washington D.C.
Session L17: Physics Education ResearchEducation Live
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Sponsoring Units: FEd GPER Chair: Andrew Heckler, Ohio State University Room: Delaware A |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 3:30PM - 3:42PM Live |
L17.00001: Do course grades account for demographic disparities in Physics? Andrew Heckler By analyzing registrar and survey data of a large sample of over 20,000 student in 112 lecture sections at Ohio State University, a large public research university, we investigate the relationships among grades, gender, minority status, first generation status, ACT/SAT scores, age, and self-reports of several social-motivation factors such as belonging. Controlling for ACT/SAT, age, and lecture section, we find that women have slightly higher grades than men, underrepresented minorities and first generation students have slightly lower grades than their comparison groups, and that there are small but significant interactions between both gender and ACT/SAT and minority status and ACT/SAT. We also find that social factors such as belonging predict grades as strongly as ACT/SAT scores, and there are significant differences in mean social factor scores according to gender, minority and first generation status. Finally, we analyze exam and homework grades and find significant differences between all three demographic factors in how each grade component correlates with ACT/SAT score, suggesting that grade component weights can affect demographic grade differences. Overall, these results suggest that the relatively small demographic grade differences in physics courses may at best only partially contribute to some of the large demographic disparities in physics degree attainment. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 3:42PM - 3:54PM Live |
L17.00002: Guided Group Work in Graduate-Level Physics Christopher Porter, Andrew Heckler There have been a handful of studies that have looked at graduate physics education that report generally poor performance on conceptual questions. One instructional technique that has led to significant improvements in performance on conceptual questions at the undergraduate level is guided group work (GGW). Given the substantial selection effects between graduate and undergraduate populations, it is an open question whether group work might be useful at the graduate level. GGW sessions have been developed and run over the past five years at the Ohio State University in the Department of Physics. Sessions exist for each core course, but this work will focus on quantum mechanics. Students were given pretests and posttests that consist of some calculations, but mostly of conceptual questions. We will discuss trends in student performance across four years (\textasciitilde 160 students), using many assessment questions covering various standard quantum mechanics content areas. We find a statistically significant effect of GGW attendance on student performance on related conceptual questions, even many weeks after instruction. Potential confounding effects are discussed, including student self-selection into treatment groups. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 3:54PM - 4:06PM Live |
L17.00003: Understanding Parameters Affecting the Accuracy of Machine Learning Algorithms John Stewart Machine learning algorithms represent an exciting new class of quantitative methods to understand physics classes and students. Recent work has applied these algorithms to understand physics major retention to degree and the risk factors influencing success in introductory physics. This talk will explore some of the requirements of successfully applying these algorithms including required sample sizes, optimal test/training dataset sizes, and review various methods of characterizing the quality of the models produced. We will also explore the issues of unbalanced independent and dependent variables and the requirements for the accurate use of categorical variables. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 4:06PM - 4:18PM Live |
L17.00004: A Neutrino Pathway to Particle Physics Outreach and Education Kenneth Cecire International Masterclasses (IMC) is a project of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) to make high school students and teachers into ``particle physicists for a day.'' Since 2010, this has been associated with LHC physics. In the past year, however, there has been an explosion of masterclasses from other branches of particle physics. QuarkNet, Fermilab, and partners have built and are building neutrino masterclasses. The MINERvA masterclass debuted successfully in IMC 2019 and IMC 2020 brings MicroBooNE masterclasses. Other experiments are welcome to join the collaboration. DUNE masterclasses are a longer-term goal. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 4:18PM - 4:30PM On Demand |
L17.00005: LawPhysics Webinars as a Tool to Communicate Research in Physics Alejandro Cardenas-Avendano, Roberto Lineros, Joel Jones, Nicol\'as Bernal The way of sharing information between scientists has evolved from personal letters to live streaming of breakthroughs, as it occurred with the Higgs discovery announced by ATLAS and CMS collaborations, and with the gravitational wave detections by LIGO and Virgo Collaborations. In 2015, we created the Latin American Webinars on Physics (lawphysics), a webinar cycle oriented to physicists and science enthusiasts, which covers the topics related to high energy physics, astroparticle physics and astrophysics. Lawphysics typically hosts two or three webinar sessions per month, which for over five years has archived an average of 300 views per talk. In this talk, I will present an overview of lawphysics, including its goals and status, and an analysis of its impact after almost one hundred webinars. I will additionally offer recommendations for how to hosts live webinars and about ways to offer opportunities for students in developing countries to hear a cutting-edge research talk and being able to interact with the speakers. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 4:30PM - 4:42PM |
L17.00006: Values Affirmation Replication at the University of Illinois Tim Stelzer, Brianne Gutmann Values affirmation exercises have been implemented in many contexts to combat stereotype threat in students from marginalized populations; the exercises are intended to fortify students by prompting them to self-affirm their values in short writing activities. Within the physics education research community, the style of intervention was underlined by a positive result from the University of Colorado Boulder; researchers were able to use the intervention to minimize the achievement gap between men and women in an introductory physics course. These results inspired a replication experiment in two physics courses at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and this article provides some history and context of these interventions, describes our specific implementation, and reveals that we were unable to reproduce the positive results despite thorough attention to the details of the replication. Our findings suggest that the values affirmation exercises are not understood at a level where they could be considered a positive intervention to help marginalized populations. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 4:42PM - 4:54PM Not Participating |
L17.00007: Longitudinal impact of flipped and traditional introductory physics courses Benjamin W. Dreyfus, Rebecca M. Jones, An T. Hoang The first two semesters of introductory calculus-based physics at George Mason University are taught in two parallel formats: a flipped section (taught in a SCALE-UP-style active learning classroom, replacing lecture and recitation) and a traditional lecture section. To assess the influence on these formats on student performance and retention, we analyzed a data set of over 1000 students who took the traditional and/or flipped introductory courses in 2013-15, and tracked them longitudinally through their subsequent physics and engineering courses. Initial results suggest that taking flipped Physics I is associated with higher grades in later courses, and taking flipped Physics II is associated with lower grades. However, the full picture is more complicated. A greater fraction of the students who take flipped Physics II go on to take advanced courses, which suggests that flipped Physics II is associated with higher overall retention in physics and related fields. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 4:54PM - 5:06PM Not Participating |
L17.00008: Developing a diagnostic instrument designed to disentangle student reasoning~from~conceptual understanding Mila Kryjevskaia, Brianna Santangelo, Alexey Leontyev, MacKenzie Stetzer, Beth Lindsey, J. Caleb Speirs A common overarching goal of physics instruction is to help students improve the conceptual understanding and reasoning necessary to analyze basic physics situations successfully.~However, existing physics assessments tend to focus on improvements in \textit{overall} student performance, and do not readily help instructors ascertain whether observed performance issues primarily stem from reasoning difficulties or conceptual difficulties (or both). As such, our collaborative multi-institutional research group has been developing a two-tier instrument, the \textit{Dimensions of Conceptual Understanding and Reasoning Instrument (DCURI),} designed to disentangle the two dimensions of productive thinking (conceptual understanding and reasoning). The instrument allows instructors to diagnose the likely source(s) of poor student performance, which, in turn, can inform instructional modifications. The instrument also allows for an assessment of improvements along each of the two dimensions separately. As a result, instructors, researchers, and curriculum developers not only can examine overall improvement in student performance but also can pinpoint the impact of instructional interventions on each dimension. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 19, 2020 5:06PM - 5:18PM Not Participating |
L17.00009: Probing and Supporting Student Reasoning Using Modified Chaining Tasks MacKenzie Stetzer, Ryan Moyer, J. Caleb Speirs, Beth Lindsey, Mila Kryjevskaia As part of a larger effort to investigate and support student reasoning in physics, tasks have been designed that examine student ability to generate qualitative, inferential reasoning chains. In an online “chaining” task, students are provided with correct reasoning elements (i.e., true statements about the physical situation as well as correct concepts and mathematical relationships) and are asked to assemble them into an argument in order to solve a physics problem. Modified versions of the task, in which students are first asked to categorize the reasoning elements as being useful or not useful for solving the problem, have also been administered. Data from these modified tasks provide further insight into the extent to which some reasoning phenomena in physics may be accounted for by dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR). Ongoing work is also exploring the potential of such modified chaining tasks to be integrated into research-based instructional interventions aligned with DPToR. [Preview Abstract] |
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