Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2020
Volume 65, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 2–6, 2020; Denver, Colorado
Session B18: Bringing Together Biology, Medicine, and Physics in EducationCareers Education Invited Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: DBIO FED Chair: Phil Nelson, University of Pennsylvania Room: 205 |
Monday, March 2, 2020 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
B18.00001: What do 21st century biology students need to know and be able to do? The view from biology education research Invited Speaker: Michelle Smith Many STEM undergraduate students take biology and physics courses, so it is important for both disciplines to understand what is happening in the other classrooms. When people picture undergraduate biology classrooms, they often think about students memorizing disconnected bits of information and repeating classic findings in cookbook labs. However, biology education is undergoing a revolution and today’s classrooms look different from this stereotypical view. Transformed biology classes are emphasizing core concepts and skills that are described in reports supported by the major funding agencies and biological professional societies. Concepts are being integrated across subfields of biology and instructors are encouraged to explore them along a continuum from a single cell to a whole ecosystem. Laboratory courses have also changed; undergraduate students are exploring novel research questions and contributing data to advance the field. New assessment instruments that span multiple time points, including across the entire duration of the undergraduate program, are being used to motivate faculty to discuss and come to agreement on the essential learning outcomes of their program and consider how students will achieve these outcomes regardless of the specific courses they take. Notably, instructors are publishing their innovative lessons in peer-reviewed journals such as CourseSource and contributing to broader discipline-based education research questions. In this talk, I will explore what transformed biology education looks like and discuss connections with the skills learned in undergraduate physics classrooms. I will also explore how research on critical thinking conducted in undergraduate physics classrooms is directly affecting how we are studying the student experience in undergraduate biology field courses. |
Monday, March 2, 2020 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
B18.00002: Transform and Thrive: Large-Scale Change in Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences Invited Speaker: Laurie McNeil The number of undergraduate degrees in biological sciences awarded each year exceeds the number of degrees awarded in physical sciences and engineering combined, so teaching introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) is a substantial part of a physics department’s responsibilities. Before Fall 2012 my department taught a very traditional (and not very effective) IPLS lecture/lab sequence that covered the same topics as our physical science sequence but in less depth. By Fall 2015 we were teaching a new sequence that incorporates physics education research (PER) findings and includes a range of physics topics important to the life sciences, such as diffusion, non-linear stress/strain, and nerve signal propagation. We accomplished this with a team of PER experts, PER users, biologists, chemists, and grad students (plus funding from NSF and AAU). We now teach all ~600 students who enroll in IPLS each semester this way, with much more success. The sequence is fully institutionalized, and faculty members routinely rotate through it. I will describe how we accomplished this transformation, the benefits (and difficulties) it affords, and offer advice to departments contemplating a similar reformation. |
Monday, March 2, 2020 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
B18.00003: Pre-health students may not know what physics is. Invited Speaker: Alison Sweeney Unlike in introductory chemistry or biology courses, pre-health students in introductory physics courses often don't know the premise or purpose of the discipline. Popular stories about, e.g., black holes and quantum computing don't provide a route for lay observers to understand how these topics share fundamental rules about forces and energies, expressed mathematically. About half of U.S. high schools don't offer physics courses, and many that do exist teach a qualitative version of the subject rather teaching than the process of physical abstraction. As high-resource universities and physics departments continue the necessary work of diversifying their student bodies, it is important for us to recognize this divide, potentially new to our classrooms, and learn to teach to it. The traditional approach of diving into mathematically-motivated formalism at the beginning of the course will often leave the least-prepared students, who are most important to reach, bewildered and alienated. This talk discusses my experience and possible insights from reforming a traditional pre-health physics course, to teach the conceptual core of physics to students completely inexperienced with physics. For example, explicitly addressing questions such as "what is an equation in physics, and what is it for?", and initially prioritizing form equally with content in student work, have been helpful measures. |
Monday, March 2, 2020 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
B18.00004: The Purpose of Homework Problems is Insight, Not Numbers: Crafting Exercises for an Intermediate Biological Physics Class Invited Speaker: Bradley Roth Richard Hamming famously said “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” This view is true also for homework problems in an intermediate-level physics class. I constantly tell my students “an equation is not something you plug numbers into to get other numbers; it tells a story.” I will use examples from courses in Biological Physics and Medical Physics to illustrate this idea. A well-formed homework problem must balance brevity with storytelling. Often the problem is constructed by creating a “toy model” of an important biological system, and analysis of the toy model reveals some important idea or insight. A collection of such problems becomes a short-course in mathematical modeling as applied to medicine and biology, which is a skill that needs to be cultivated in biology majors, pre-med students, and anyone interested in using physical and mathematical tools to study biology and medicine. |
Monday, March 2, 2020 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
B18.00005: Essential data science instruction for biophysicists Invited Speaker: Justin Bois Biological physicists, along with researchers across nearly all biological sciences, obtain quantitative data in their experiments. Much of our training of students focuses on theoretical modeling of the phenomena underlying the measurements, often with state-of-the-art physics. As a necessary complement to this training, we should teach students how to manage their data sets and perform statistical inference using state-of-the-art techniques from the rapidly developing fields of data science and applied statistics. In this talk, I will discuss what I view as essential data science principles we should teach students. These are: |
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