Session AA01: V: Experiential Learning, Virtual Instruction, Expanding Attitudes & Instruction

Interesting, difficult and exam-oriented: exploring Chinese high school students' attitudes toward physics learning

Attitude study is one of areas receiving much attention from physics education researchers. It is found that students' attitudes about physics can play a crucial role in their learning behavior, achievements, and can strongly influence their motivation and pursuit of physics-related careers. However, Previous assessments of attitudes toward physics tend to overlook students' own feelings, motivation and unique experience in learning physics. Thus, a qualitative method was used to fully and deeply explore Chinese high school students' attitudes toward physics learning. Semi-structured interviews were conducted between July and October 2023 to enable students to share their understandings, feelings, learning strategies, motivation and experience in learning physics. Of all 32 participants, 17 come from western China and 15 from eastern China. Results found that the majority of participants considered physics interesting, but nearly all of them thought physics was difficult. In addition, the college entrance examination (Gaokao) and more employment options in the future were considered to be the main reasons and significance of learning physics, but beyond that, few students found out the exact meaning and value of learning physics for themselves. These findings are not positive, which is different from prior studies. For future work, it is worth to follow up and investigate our participants, so as to better understand their development of attitudes toward physics in the learning process.   

Analysis of the "student-centered" classroom: how to implement instructional activities in project-based learning

Governments, researchers in many nations encourage project-based learning for core literacy. Many academics have theoretically examined the benefits of project-based learning, but few have examined classroom's "student-centered" learning. This study examines student-centered project-based learning in Chinese classrooms' pros and cons. The Nature of Discourse Component in Global Teaching InSights: A Video Study Teaching can quantify how "student-centered" a classroom is, but the measure is too imprecise to employ directly. Productive Disciplinary Engagement promotes "student-centered" engagement. It was used to summarise and deductively analyze classroom segments, creating an operational "nature of discourse" analytical level that was used to analyze the case school's project learning situation. The study found that the project introduction was less "student-centered", the presentation more, and the enquiry moderately. In the introductory phase, teachers thought that pupils had limited engineering design skills and designed more guided activities to boost learning. In the presentation phase, students independently presented production issues and methods to fix them, so they set the class's path. During project-based learning classroom study, a sort of instructional activity that enhances student issue formulation was also found. The teacher helped students analyze contextual phenomena and identify difficulties. Students guided the classroom activity without choosing it.   

Diversity and inclusion in the recognition of excellence in teaching and research : An India Study

We analyse the gender fraction of the reward system for the recognition of excellence in research and in teaching in the Indian system where many

educational and research institutions are supported by the Government of India. Although many nationwide programmes for the inclusion of women and gender minorities at various levels of science have been initiated over the past several years, the recognition of the contributions of women at high levels is very sparse. We analyse the gender fraction of the reward system for the recognition of excellence in research and in teaching in the India system. The specific examples are drawn from some of the prestigious national level annual prizes/awards. These are the Infosys Prize, the S.S. Bhatnagar award, the Indian National Science Academy medals and prizes and the R.D. Birla prize of the Indian Physics Association (given biennially). This covers private and public bodies, as well as the government and nongovernment sector. Data for the last five years shows that a very small proportion of these awards are given to women, as compared to men. We discuss possible reasons (e.g. very few nominations) as well as suggest the potential solutions. It is important to address this aspect to attract and retain talents of all genders in science profession.

Vandana Nanal and Neelima Gupte   

Planning, design, construction and operation of a Pedagogical mini plate resistive chamber.

The design, planning, construction and of two Resistive Plate Chambers are  presented. The Chambers consists of two phenolic plates of fiberglass and copper assembled in an   chassis with a High Voltage power supply (between 450 and 2200V) where signals of the order of mV are obtained, produced by the incidence of cosmic rays. Two designs are presented, one where the chamber was designed and printed with a 3d design software and one where an aluminium case was used. The dimensions of the printed resistive plate chamber are 64 mm x 100 mm x 25 mm and the one with the aluminium case was  a 60 mm x 70 mm x 40 mm.  Similar results occur in both chambers. 

As a result of their low cost and great resolution, they are used in  applications in particle physics and astrophysics. 

The chassis cover is constructed to accommodate the bare minimum of electronic circuitry required to correctly collect the signal. Printed circuit boards, or PCBs, are made with the minimal circuit in mind to accommodate the electronics enclosed by the covers. The signal from the collector is obtained using those PCBs. The detected signals serve as proof that charged particles are moving through the chambers.

Over 100 students were inspired to present their own chambers, constructed at the International Elementary Particle Laboratory as part of their regular courses, by the experience, which was used in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Quanta 2023 event.

We present technical details and some physical results, and pedagogical experiences, from these two mini resistive resistive plate chambers.    

A Shorter Wikipedia Biography Assignment for the Introductory Physics Classroom

Fewer than one in five Wikipedia biography articles are about women. I present results and lessons from three semesters of piloting a short Wikipedia biography assignment in introductory physics courses at a primarily undergraduate institution. Students locate biographical sources for a notable woman in physics who does not yet have a Wikipedia page and submit a short writing assignment. Their sources are made available to the wider community through the physics "redlist" maintained by WikiProject Women in Red. This short-form assignment is compared to the more substantial Wiki Education Wikipedia assignment.   

Freely Available Complete Highly Polished Video Physics Courses

Despite recent great technological advances, lecture preparation remains a time-consuming task, performed in isolation with only the help of a textbook. Fortunately, technology now allows for the possibility of exciting video lectures with full-color images, animations, and movies. Unfortunately, creating such lectures is even more time-consuming, so it is rarely done.  However, once created, high-quality, appealing, exciting, even fully narrated lectures can easily be shared, significantly reducing teacher preparation time and vastly increasing the quality and excitement of the lectures. 

So, for the past two decades, I have been developing highly polished, full-color, complete, fully narrated courses of PowerPoint lectures for college-level physics courses, complete with pictures, movies, animations, and derivations (of which, Optics and Modern Physics are fully, essentially professionally narrated). And I freely distribute these entire courses (at frog.gatech.edu).  They are fully self-contained and completely replace live lectures.  Students watch them at their leisure (for a flipped classroom), or the videos can be played in class, pausing occasionally for discussion. Either way, the effort required by the teacher is minimal, and, I believe, the result is a vast improvement over the traditional chalk-and-talk, talking-head lecture.

My hope is that they would serve as a template for a philanthropically funded effort to do the same for all high-school and low-level college courses.   

New Quantum Operators Bring Quantum Phenomena into Macro Domain for Intro Physics

We have invented a version of the Quantum Operators developed at Harvard in the ‘60s by Kostas Papaliolios*. They use an analogy with the behavior of polarized light in the macro domain to investigate the behavior of photons in the micro domain. This sparks hands-on learning of key quantum concepts by students in introductory courses.

 

Our Quantum Operators are implemented as two types of octagon-shaped blocks with various types of polaroid mounted inside and with the Dirac symbols on the outside of the eight sides. Experiments consist of arranging the blocks in a sequence with specific outside surfaces aligned and seeking to predict the relative intensity of light transmitted through the block sequence by manipulating and interpreting the Dirac symbols.

 

Experiments with the Quantum Operators stimulate thinking about the process of measurement and the inevitable interaction with the observer. Thus leading to an understanding of how measurement works in Quantum Mechanics and the key concept of quantum superposition.

 

We will provide a link to the files used to manufacture the octagons via 3-D printing.

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*J. F. Gauvin, “Playing with Quantum Toys: Schwinger’s Measurement Algebra …,” Phys. Perspect. 20 (2018) 8-42.