Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 2
Monday–Friday, March 4–8, 2019; Boston, Massachusetts
Session B69: The Role of Physics Departments in Educating TeachersEducation Invited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FED Chair: Monica Plisch, American Physical Society APS Room: BCEC 052A |
Monday, March 4, 2019 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
B69.00001: The national landscape for STEM teacher education Invited Speaker: Michael Marder For 35 years, STEM education for secondary students in the US has been in a state of crisis. Less than 40% of US high school students take physics, when in most of Europe and Asia 4 years of physics are customary. Computer science is in such shortage that states do not even try to require it, and we scarcely know how many students take it. |
Monday, March 4, 2019 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
B69.00002: Get the Facts Out: Changing the conversation around physics teacher recruitment Invited Speaker: Wendy Adams The Get the Facts Out campaign is a joint effort between four societies and the Colorado School of Mines to change the conversation about high school and middle school physics, chemistry, and math teaching careers. We have developed a toolkit, based on pilot interventions that show positive results in shifting perceptions among students and faculty, and which have been shown to outperform traditional recruitment efforts, which is designed to be customizable and adaptable to the local situation. The materials and strategies include: (1) both student-facing and faculty-facing resources and a how-to guide for running interactive events, including but not limited to slide decks, clicker questions, and handouts with national survey data on retention, job satisfaction, and student loan forgiveness; (2) sample informational handouts on teacher salaries, comparisons of teacher and faculty salaries, and retirement benefits, with instructions on how to customize these with local data; and (3) brochures and posters that incorporate tested messaging strategies. In this presentation both the tools and the research and development behind them will be shared. |
Monday, March 4, 2019 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
B69.00003: Improving undergraduate physics instruction and physics teacher preparation through the use of Learning Assistants Invited Speaker: Valerie Otero Undergraduate Learning Assistants (LAs) help faculty make changes to their courses by encouraging active engagement. Through their work with students along with a special pedagogy course, LAs establish empathy for their peers as they learn physics, and they help them navigate large amounts of course material and motive students to persist. Through this process, students, their professors, and the LAs become more attuned to research-based strategies for teaching physics and to the complexities of building equitable learning environments that lead to student success. This sets the stage for better prepared physics teachers and for physics majors to find their way to physics teacher certification programs. In addition, the presence of LAs in courses leads to better learning outcomes, decreased failure rates, and improved outcomes for students from groups traditionally underrepresented in physics. The LA program will be described and program outcomes will be discussed. Conjectures about the mechanisms that are effecting change will also be discussed. |
Monday, March 4, 2019 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
B69.00004: A thriving physics teacher preparation program at Rowan University Invited Speaker: Karen Magee-Sauer The Department of Physics & Astronomy at Rowan University received a 3-year (2015 – 2018) Comprehensive Grant from the PhysTEC program. As part of this grant, Rowan attempted to build a sustainable framework for recruiting, retaining, training, inducting and mentoring future high school physics teachers. Rowan closely followed PhysTEC’s “Key Components” for successful high school physics teacher education programs. A strong emphasis at the Rowan PhysTEC site was creating student research opportunities in Physics Education Research, early teaching experiences in a high school setting, an LA program to help recruit interest to teaching, and creating a vibrant high school physics teacher network in the South Jersey region. Another notable aspect was Rowan’s success in creating a community within the department dedicated to supporting PhysTEC activities and leveraging our PhysTEC experience into helping gain other external grant opportunities. In this talk, we will present ideas and actions that were particularly successful in sustaining our PhysTEC activities. Rowan University is a Carnegie-classified Doctoral University (Moderate Research Activity) with approximately 19,000 students. Its main campus is located in Glassboro, N.J., 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia. |
Monday, March 4, 2019 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
B69.00005: Next Gen PET: An effective, NGSS-aligned curriculum for future elementary teachers Invited Speaker: Edward Price The physical science preparation of prospective elementary school teachers has the potential for long-lasting and far-reaching impact. To this end, the Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (Next Gen PET) curriculum has been designed to provide students with learning experiences aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. Versions of the research-based, guided-inquiry materials are available for either small or large enrollments, and covering either physics or physical science content. These options provide instructors with flexibility regarding content and implementation format, as documented by case studies of faculty members’ course designs. An extensive online instructor's guide* includes student and instructor materials, homework activities, videos of experiments and demonstrations, classroom video clips of student interactions, test banks, and more. An associated online faculty learning community** provides an opportunity for faculty to collaboratively improve their instruction, study student thinking and conduct classroom-based research using the Next Gen PET curriculum. The materials are in use by over 50 faculty around the U.S., and a study of over 1,500 students found significant improvements on multiple-choice and constructed-response tasks following the course. This talk will describe the curriculum, instructor resources, student learning outcomes, and online faculty community. |
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