Session F20: Topics in Physics Education I

Integrating Anti-Bias Education into Traditional Physics Teaching

Women and people of color remain dramatically underrepresented in physics and, along with other minority groups such as LGBTQ+ physicists, report experiencing hostile environments [1]. A case study of a physics department at a primarily white liberal arts college suggests why: classrooms and departments remain rife with unacknowledged bias and privilege, even when populated by well-meaning faculty and students. This manifests itself, for example, in the use of textbooks focused solely on the achievements of white men, widespread accounts of not-so-“micro”-aggressions, and the conflation of privilege with aptitude. A great deal of prior work has been done to identify and mitigate biases acting in the classroom [2]. We present an integrated approach in which anti-bias education is woven into a sophomore level Modern Physics course, via a series of readings, reflections, and activities alongside the conventional technical content. We also present our progress on developing a means of assessing the effectiveness of this approach in building a more inclusive department climate.

1. “LGBT Climate in Physics: Building an Inclusive Community,” APS, 2016.
2. For example: Daane, et al, “Teaching about Racial Equity in Introductory Physics Courses,” The Physics Teacher, vol. 55, 2017.   

Measuring and reducing the gender gap in students’ performance among non-Physics majors in an Introductory Physics Laboratory

Physics educators commonly refer to the apparent gender gap in performance among their students. However, this is usually based on anecdotal experiences derived from their courses. While there is no rigorous evidence to support these ideas, they are still present in many Physics departments worldwide and are reinforced by the gender distribution among different non-Physics majors. For example, engineering students (mostly males), are expected to perform better in Physics courses than students from Biology or Pre-med majors (mostly females). To test the existence of a gender gap in students’ performance, a quasi-experiment was designed and executed in a first Physics course at a US University. Participants were undergrads of two majors: (1) engineering, and (2) biology and pre-med, enrolled in an introductory physics lab course. Treatment groups of each major were exposed to a pedagogy based on the integration of theory and experiment. Results showed that while the gender gap was evident in the control group, the treatment group significantly reduced the differences between males and females within and between majors. This encourages further research to understand the reasons behind the measured gender gap and to identify more strategies to reduce it through innovative pedagogies.
  

How blind students understand light: a comparison between blind and nonblind students' ideas

Physics education for blind students is a research field that still lacks systematic and detailed investigation. What has been done so far is the study of isolated cases. Our interest in this subject comes from epistemological questions about teaching physics to blind students. Thus, we ask: How do blind students understand physics concepts and apply them? How do these students manage to construct their physics knowledge? As physics and other sciences are based on visual references, it is interesting to know if blind students' previous ideas about light, gathered through sound and tactile experiences, is different from those of nonblind students. In this work we interview blind students using the oral history methodology (life history and thematic), seeking information about their visual ability, school experience and previous concepts about their general understanding of light and geometrical optics. We analyse the collected data and compare them with nonblind students' ideas about the same subject.
  

Artistic and Contemplative Pedagogical Practices in the Physics Classroom

The first part of this paper concerns a Modern Physics class at San Diego State University that was redesigned in hopes that hands-on experiential learning would improve grades in general and those of Undergraduate Minority (UGM) students in particular. The redesign resulted in a decrease of D/F grades from 25% to 5%. The GPA of UGM students increased from 2.5 to 3.0 and is now on par with that of the other students. Visualization, art, and group sharing exercises help students to engage and open up their minds to the “weird” quantum world. Also included are video projects, animations, and virtual immersion through gaming, to help students tap into their creativity. This in turn gives them the courage to engage with difficult physics problems. Discussed in the second half is a Polymer Science class that I co-teach with Prof. Alter from the Dance department. One fifth of all class sessions are attended by science students and dance students jointly. These sessions have shown that students can effectively collaborate, while synthesizing knowledge of creative practices and scientific inquiry. We are convinced that the use of these emergent pedagogies not only improves the students’ learning experience, but also better prepares them to be creative partners in the workplace.   

Can weekly workshop physics labs change strongly held student misconceptions?

All science majors at UBC's Okanagan campus are required to take two terms of first year physics. For the past three years students in the entrance-restricted algebra-based stream have performed poorly on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) held annually prior to the first (week 3) and last (week 11) lab sessions of the first term course, showing only moderate gains with persistent misconceptions despite group problem solving tutorials, the adoption of new physics education-based texts, online interactive homework, the daily use of clicker questions and two-stage testing. For the 2017W1 term this stream was repackaged as an unrestricted entrance calculus-based physics for the life sciences, with new (or reworked) labs focused on challenging the most strongly held student misconceptions. Here we report the results of our most recent FCI student survey, and whether this approach proved effective in its first semester of implementation.   

Freshman Journal Club: Sneaking recent research papers into introductory physics courses

We investigate the impact of introducing material from contemporary research papers to undergraduates much earlier than is usually practised. In particular we show that our methodology can reveal appropriately-defined impact on the model-making and model-breaking performance[1] of students from two introductory physics-based courses. Approximately half of the students in each (otherwise conventional course) are exposed to animations based on material from recent research papers. Such animations are included as part of one of two versions of Jupyter notebooks which are provided as supplementary course materials. These web-based notebooks are additionally used as PowerPoint substitutes whenever appropriate. We compare quiz scores between students who did and did not access the notebooks. The differences in the background of the students are taken into account by normalizing their performance on the paper-related questions with scores on the quizzes that did not involve material from the papers. These data are further cross-analyzed with performance data from final exams[2]. We hope that our findings can open the door to the development of education research methodologies that are less limited by issues of sample-size, model-selection, quantifying concept-learning, et cetera.   

Vertical Course Alignment between Introductory Physics and Sophomore Engineering Courses

Introductory physics forms a significant part of the foundation of knowledge for engineering disciplines, and as such it is vital that courses be well aligned within the progression of undergraduate curriculum. This work begins from a perceived misalignment of course content in introductory physics relative to sophomore level engineering courses. Inventories of concepts and mathematical skills used in problem solving are done by the creation of a Q-matrix for three versions of introductory physics and two follow-on engineering courses at Texas A&M University (TAMU). Alignment of course content is investigated using direct comparison and principal component analysis. Using grades received in introductory physics, paired with q-matrices, this work endeavors to create a model for student scores in subsequent engineering courses using item response theory, incorporating guess and slip parameters, as an additional evaluative measure.
  

Influence of the PACSETPRO Simulated Experiments on Physics Teaching/Learning

This study demonstrates on two categories of students designated Groups 1 and 2 the influence of the PACSETPROducts from a project to use Python to model and simulate laboratory experiments to aid the teaching/learning of physics. Group 1 has a total of 27 first year undergraduate students randomly selected into three sets: Set I used PACSETPROducts, Set II carried out physical experiment and Set III was a control set neither exposed to the PACSETPROducts nor physical experiment. Group 2 has 18 third year undergraduate students randomly selected into two sets: Set I used PACSETPROducts and Set II was a control set not exposed to the PACSETPROducts. Conceptual tests on Hooke’s law were administered to the three sets in Group 1 to assess their understanding before and after teaching them and then to only Sets I and II after using the PACSETPROducts and physical experiment respectively. Conceptual tests on Schrodinger particle wave on a step potential were administered to the two sets in Group 2 to assess their understanding before and after teaching them and then to only Sets I after using the PACSETPROducts. The relevance of the positive influence of the PACSETPROducts from the results is discussed.   

Formal and Informal Biophysics Education enabled by Interactive Biotechnology in the Cloud

Cloud experimentation labs, akin to the cloud computation paradigm, promise collaborative time-sharing of and lowered access barriers to life-science instruments for academia, industry, and education. We conceptualized and implemented a realtime biophysics cloud lab for interactive experimentation. This lab enables millions of Euglena phototaxis experiment/year at <1 cent/experiment, and scales to millions of users/year. This cloud technology is suited for paradigm changing and global impact on classic on-site as well as (massive open) online STEM education. We evaluated our cloud lab with over 700 participants in various settings, e.g., middle and high-school, college, and as open edX online course also reaching developing countries. Users were enabled to execute key scientific practices (open-ended and controlled experimentation, data collection, visual and quantitative data analysis, biophysical modeling – ending with self-initiated projects including discovery and hypothesis testing). This represents a paradigm shift of what students currently can do in either on-site or online STEM education, i.e., to passively observe cells through a microscope. This fills an unmet need for novel, deep inquiry approaches in STEM education as voiced by many national science standards.   

Student Responses to Out-of-Classroom and In-Classroom Activities in a Flipped Physics Class

Within the flipped classroom approach, out-of-classroom activities such as watching lecture videos and answering pre-class quizzes are important in delivering content to students prior to coming to class. In-classroom activities such as tutorials, problem-solving, mini-discussions, and other active-learning activities are then used to engage students dynamically. We will discuss student responses to out-of classroom and in-classroom measures that we have used in several Introductory Physics classes. These include pre-class, post-video online quizzes and a video physics project. Inside the classroom, we used problem-solving, tutorial handouts, and mini-lectures. Students were surveyed anonymously to measure student satisfaction and learning gains from pre-/post- physics diagnostic tests (FCI/CSEM) were measured. Our results show that normalized gains in diagnostic tests were significant, and that students reacted positively to online quizzes as a mechanism to validate their understanding. Students preferred in-classroom activities that maximized student participation.