Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session C15: Physics Education at All StagesEducation Live Outreach Undergrad Friendly
|
Hide Abstracts |
Sponsoring Units: FED Chair: Catherine Crouch, Swarthmore College |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:00PM - 3:12PM Live |
C15.00001: Model Based Instructional Practices for K12 Teachers:EQuIPD Professional Devlopment to support effective teaching Nancy Ruzycki Models and Modeling Instructional practices are known in physics with a plethorea of publications related to modeling instructional practices. In many cases, teachers are not engaged in developing the concept models, linking them to standards and staging activities, limiting the effectiveness of model stages for development of core concept knowledge in students.This grant provides >250 hours a year of professional development and "one on one" facilitative coaching in a "train the trainer" model. The grant focuses on modeling instructional pedagogy, system thinking, inquiry, sensors and probes for data collection, computational thinking for modeling and data analysis, as well as relevent workforce applications. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:12PM - 3:24PM Live |
C15.00002: Student Responses to Changes in Introductory Physics Learning due to COVID-19 Pandemic Matthew Dew, Jonathan Perry, Albert Lewis Ford, Dawson Nodurft, Tatiana Erukhimova Due to the rapidity of the transition to remote learning, instructors had to significantly -- if not completely -- change their instructional style on very short notice. In this study, we report on student experiences and reactions to the switch to emergency remote learning at two large, land-grant, research intensive universities. We aimed to explore how students have received and dealt with the shift to remote learning that began in March 2020, specifically in introductory physics and astronomy courses. To explore how students responded to these changes, we developed and administered a questionnaire gauging the impacts on students' motivation and interactions with their courses, peers, and instructors during the Summer 2020 semester. We also examined how student responses depended on various demographic factors. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:24PM - 3:36PM Live |
C15.00003: Writing-to-Learn in Introductory Materials Science and Engineering Leah Marks, Hongling Lu, Timothy Chambers, Solaire Finkenstaedt-Quinn, Ginger Shultz, Anne Ruggles Gere, Rachel Goldman Writing to Learn (WTL) enables students to apply content knowledge to “real-world” situations via writing, which promotes deeper thinking and compels students to explain concepts in their own words. The subsequent peer review and revision processes provide additional learning opportunities as the students give and receive feedback and critically assess their work. In this talk, we describe the effectiveness of WTL assignments and their impact on student learning of introductory materials science/engineering. Using pre/post assessments and analysis of writing products, we examine student gains in conceptual understanding and critical reasoning. Our research suggests that the polymer recycling WTL assignment was effective in promoting understanding of stress-strain behavior of polymers, but that further support is needed to help students connect polymer microscopic properties to macroscopic behavior.1 The effectiveness of WTL assignments associated with other key concepts including ductile vs. brittle failure, interpretation of phase diagrams, and corrosion as it relates to the Flint water crisis will also be discussed. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:36PM - 3:48PM Live |
C15.00004: Teaching First Year Physics Without Homework or Tests Steve Alexander In 2013 Southwestern received a 3 year Howard Hughes grant that encouraged all of the science departments to incorporate more active learning in our classes. In the 2015-2016 academic year, the Southwestern physics department began teaching two first-year physics sections. In the first section (our control group), students were assigned weekly homework problems and took three hour-long exams during each semester. In the second (our experimental group), students took randomized weekly quizzes. Students accumulated quiz points during the semester and these counted for the same weight in their overall grade as the homework and the exams in the control group. In this talk I will discuss the details of our experiment and how it has been received by students as well as faculty. I will then mention a few of the directions our experiment has recently taken especially in this age of virtual instruction. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:48PM - 4:00PM Not Participating |
C15.00005: Making Physics Inclusive Leonardo Colletti Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (part of UN's Resolution "2030 Agenda") is about ensuring inclusive education. Usually, this means that students with diverse abilities should be supported so that they too can meet formative success. But the perspective of inclusiveness should also lead physics teachers into reconsidering their teaching: while traditional approaches may provide a solid background to future STEM-students, they fail to engage most of the other students, for whose cultural maturity physics will therefore play no role. This is a cultural pity and an enormous waste of resources. The school has the task of fostering students' ability to make sense of their experiences, and physics must also contribute to this task and be able to do so for the largest possible number of students. It is then necessary to reflect on how to redesign the way of teaching physics to make it more inclusive. One possibility is that of highlighting physics' ability to create images that have a powerful value also on a metaphorical level, and that therefore lend themselves to be used also in other disciplines. Here I provide a list of real school life examples and discuss why this can be a great, innovative opportunity for physics teachers and for physics itself. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:00PM - 4:12PM Live |
C15.00006: Promoting active matter field through a Vicsek model-based simulation and an online teaching module Meng Lian, Teagan Bate, Kun-Ta Wu Active matter is differentiated from conventional passive matter due to its unique capability of locally consuming fuels to generate kinetic energy. Such a unique feature of active matter has led to unprecedented phenomena and associated applications. While active matter has been developed for decades, its significance is not recognized by the public. To remedy this gap, we developed an online teaching module introducing collective dynamics of active matter, targeting high school and undergraduate students. The collective dynamics were illustrated via the Vicsek model-based simulation because it reveals the collective dynamics of active matter with one simple rule: nearest-neighbor alignment. With this rule, the simulation demonstrated the collective motion of active matter particles depended on particle number, radius of neighbor aligning, and noise that disturbed alignment. To allow students to hands-on experience the simulation, we developed a graphical user interface, allowing users to perform the Vicsek simulation without a programming background. The simulation and teaching module are available on an online platform: The Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics, allowing teachers in the US to bring the active matter lecture to their classrooms. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:12PM - 4:24PM On Demand |
C15.00007: Electric Field Energy and Potential Energy Lianxi Ma, Sheng Wang While electric field energy is the same as potential energy in some special cases, in general they are two different concepts. Field energy stands for the energy caused by the existence of the electric field such as the electric field in the electromagnetic waves; it doesn’t require the existence of the charges. Potential energy stands for the energy needed to assemble the charge system. It’s not a surprise to see the difference between these two concepts in a simple system composed of a positive charge q1 and a negative charge q2. Its field energy is positive while the potential energy is negative. The apparent conflict has been explained by Jackson by showing that if the self energy is excluded from the field energy, the field energy is the same as the potential energy. We show in this paper that the self energy needs to be considered only in a system of discrete point charges. The self energy needs not to be considered in the systems of charges on spherical shells, cylinders, and parallel sheets, where field energy is the same as the potential energy. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:24PM - 4:36PM Live |
C15.00008: Education for Sharing - Social-emotional learning meets play-based physics education Sarah Goodman, Dina Buchbinder Auron, Abraham Muñoz Barbosa, Adriana de la Cruz Bolaños, Alonso Isaac Tovar Figueroa, Ana Laura Ferraro Hernández, Andrés Pérez Rivero, Carlos Castillo Ortega, Gabriela Lozano Campos, Karen Aguilar Martínez, Magda Elvira Riquer Fernández, Misael García Sámano, Monica Burba Children in grades K-12 will become leaders who tackle 21st century challenges such as climate change, extreme poverty, and inequality. It is imperative that we empower these students as agents of change to make an impact in their communities and beyond through STEM knowledge, leadership skills, and civic values. Education for Sharing (E4S) is an international non-profit organization committed to forming better global citizens through educational innovation based on the power of active play. Our programs are structured around a framework of social-emotional learning that uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to teach about STEM topics, social inequities, and core values. Since its founding in Mexico in 2007, E4S has served over 1.3 million beneficiaries in 8 different countries including the US, Argentina, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. E4S began operations in the US in 2013 and has reached hundreds of beneficiaries in Washington DC and New York, where it operates since 2019. We will discuss our program Science for Sharing and our play-based educational model to teach topics in physics such as electricity, simple machines, and climate change alongside social-emotional skills and social awareness. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:36PM - 4:48PM Not Participating |
C15.00009: Use of Scilab-Xcos Models for Physics Education in Undergraduate Programs Hussain Jeevakhan Scilab X-cos based models have been designed for the learning and teaching of various concepts and principle of physics. These models can also be utilized for designing virtual lab experiments. The advantages of using a model-based simulation environment and its limitation have also been presented. The comparison with conventional teaching and laboratory method with Scilab based model method is also given in the paper. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:48PM - 5:00PM Live |
C15.00010: Measuring the interplay of prior background with instructional method in a highly heterogeneous classroom: a case study Vernita Gordon, Jacob Helwig, Jane Huk Much physics education research has shown that peer instruction, wherein students discuss questions in small groups, results in better learning than does traditional lecture. However, peer instruction requires that students engage material before each class meeting; this is much easier for students with a strong prior background. In this case study, we examine the outcomes in introductory mechanics courses taught back-to-back by the same instructor and covering the same material, but using two different pedagogies – peer instruction and interactive lecture, in which the discussion was between the whole class and the instructor rather than within small groups of students. Students with incoming SAT scores below the median (disproportionately including low-income, under-represented minority, and first-generation students) performed worse in the peer instruction courses than in the interactive lecture courses. This may connect to the very high level of heterogeneity in prior background, which arises from an unusual university admissions policy and from the fact that these courses, while intended for physics and astronomy majors, contained more than 60% non-majors. We suggest that peer instruction might not always work well for highly heterogeneous populations. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 5:00PM - 5:12PM Live |
C15.00011: Changes in the number of doctoral degree holders in computational materials science in Japan -recent diversity of research fields- Yayoi Terada, Tetsuo Mohri There have been few quantitative analyses regarding the change in the number of doctoral degree holders (doctors) in computational materials science (CMS) in Japan. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 5:12PM - 5:24PM Live |
C15.00012: Learning physics by experiment: VII. Moment of inertia (Instructor edition) Saami Shaibani The first part of many introductory courses in physics involves topics in mechanics, beginning with aspects of linear motion. When this is continued into the angular domain, many students are known to struggle; in particular, the progression from mass to inertia, and then on to the concept of moment of inertia, can be awkward for some students. A remedy for this was devised in this research by conducting experiments before presenting any associated lecture material. Students tested the dynamic properties of various objects without being constrained to produce specific numerical findings. Preliminary understanding gained from the first few experiments stimulated students to pursue additional experiments to develop their reasoning of what governs angular motion. The positive atmosphere created by such an open environment of free inquiry inspired students to be highly receptive to the subsequent explanation of the underlying basis for their results, even when this involved some calculus. Other details are provided in a companion paper having a similar title with “Student edition”, along with references for previous research. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 5:24PM - 5:36PM On Demand |
C15.00013: Development of virtual introductory physics class and lab manual for virtual experiments with open educational resources (OER) Neel Haldolaarachchige, Kalani Hettiarachchilage A virtual interactive introductory calculus-based physics class was developed for engineering majors. The class was virtually managed by a learning management system (LMS) and students were interactively engaged in synchronous type remote teaching implemented by video conference technology. Weekly quizzes and exams were proctored via video conference technology. Most importantly the student learning outcomes were investigated and compared to the in-person classes in previous semesters. |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700