Session X08: Physics Education Research: Investigating Remote Learning

Live

We surveyed a national sample of United States physics faculty about the COVID-19 transition to online learning. The majority of faculty had 1-2 weeks to prepare and no prior experience with teaching online. They relied on department peers to discuss approaches and used lecture adaptations such as videoconferencing rather than new curricular elements. Their responses were empathetic to the students' situation, and 90{\%} said they were average or above at implementing online instruction. Faculty's preference for local resources and existing methods suggests that in a crisis, strong network ties will dominate as information sources, with consequences for professional development and instructional change.   

Live

Studies across the STEM disciplines found that student engagement and active learning improve student attitudes, retention, and understanding, with greater impact on women and previously low-achieving students (Freeman et al., 2014; Fry, 2014; Kogan {\&} Laursen, 2014; Laursen et al., 2014; National Research Council, 2012). Implementation of these techniques has been limited in scope and is often isolated to individual faculty (Michael, 2007). The Physics department at a large, public, R1 institution, Mid-Atlantic University, has been part of an effort to create and implement new efforts in active learning pedagogy within the calculus-based introductory sequence. This session focuses on the cross-course coordination of instruction and development of tutorials that blend conceptual and mathematical problem solving. The coordination across recitation and lecture sections is tied to the development of these tutorials, which was a mechanism for in-person student engagement but was adjusted to support students in the new online environment. Successes, challenges, and implications of this implementation for structured support in these gateway courses will be discussed, particularly as everything pivoted online.   

Live

As social interactions enhance student motivation and attitudes toward learning, it is important to determine the patterns by which students interact with one another. Physics education researchers, most notably using Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods, have studied how students develop social ties to one another during in-person instruction. With the ongoing worldwide pandemic, however, it is increasingly necessary to determine patterns of and course elements impacting student interactions in remote learning settings. Given the limited nature of the interactions, it is also important to understand how biases in students' interactions and perceptions of peers, previously observed during in-person instruction, may also emerge in remote instruction. Using students’ self-reports of who they believe is strong in the course material and which of their peers they have interacted with about the course, we used SNA to examine what social connections introductory physics students in remote courses form amongst each other. In this talk, I will present data from our study including network graphs of students’ survey responses, how responses correlate with factors such as engagement in online discussion forums, and what biases (if any) exist in these interactions.   

Live

This project produced an online astronomy course based on the free, online OpenStax textbook. The success of the course is examined using a 100-question pretest and posttest. A survey was also completed of the students to evaluate the perceived success of the online course and the acceptance of online courses.   

Live

We report on preliminary results of a statistical study of student performance in more than a decade of calculus-based introductory physics courses at Towson University. For this anonymized sample of over a thousand students, we calculate average termwork and test grades for each student, and treat these as proxies for ``student effort'' and ``student achievement/understanding,'' respectively. We plot ``achievement'' vs. ``effort'' in exactly the same way that astronomers plot luminosity vs. temperature for stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. As in the astronomical case, we find that most students lie along what can be called a ``main sequence,'' but also that there are small groups roughly corresponding to both ``dwarf'' and ``giant'' stars (i.e., students who achieve little despite apparently expending great effort, and vice versa). We then study the evolution of this diagram in time, showing that the academic main sequence has begun to break down in recent years, losing its structure as student achievement has become decoupled from ``effort'' (as measured by graded homework problems). We argue that this breakdown is likely related to the emergence of easily accessible online solutions to most textbook problems, and discuss possible responses and strategies for maintaining and enhancing student learning in the online era.   

Live

Social isolation is a significant challenge for students in online instruction. When the University of Washington moved suddenly to online instruction at the outset of spring quarter 2020, instructors made earnest efforts to adapt their courses quickly. In a survey administered in introductory physics courses at UW, many students reported that they struggled to find motivation to fully engage with the courses, and that they lacked meaningful support or comradery from their peers. In response, we formed online learning communities of small groups of students, connected through Slack, which we dubbed ``Learning Pods''. In the summer quarter Learning Pods became the organizing structure of the introductory calculus-based mechanics course. TAs mentored students to collaborate during synchronous Tutorials and asynchronous labs. Learning Pods were also piloted in Fall quarter in introductory experimental physics. Preliminary observations suggest an impact on student self-efficacy in learning physics, and lowered barriers for engagement with TAs and instructors, and that many students were able to connect with peers in various ways that felt more natural to them. I will describe the Learning Pod interventions, and present preliminary survey results in these settings.