Session G1: Contributed: Physics Education OSAPS/MIAAPT Joint Session II

Expanding conceptions of relevance with a systems view

National policy recommendations and major requirements position physics reasoning and content knowledge as being essential and relevant to students earning a degree in STEM or a career in the health sciences. Meanwhile, research has documented that students typically demonstrate an unfavorable shift in attitudes toward physics and leave the physics classroom stating that physics is less connected to the world than when they started the course. Students unfavorable responses to items on these measures are often interpreted as students not perceiving the relevance of physics to the different facets of their lives: the real world, their everyday life, their personal interests, or their future careers. We discuss how current approaches to measure students' attitudes and beliefs around relevance are limited in the contexts that they probe. Utilizing case studies of students in an introductory physics for the life-sciences course, we present how a systems-view of students connections to physics develops a richer account of the ways in which students may find physics relevant.   

Investigating the characteristics of teams working to improve STEM instruction

"Effective instructional change often requires teams. But, what makes a team successful? Using grounded theory, we have analyzed interviews with team-based project leaders from thirty departments across the U.S. In this talk, we will describe the initial results of that analysis, which focuses on factors that could influence team processes and team dynamics. We will also describe the planned next steps of our research: to collect empirical data from team members and modify our framework accordingly. Our ultimate goal is to create recommendations for what teams can do to increase their chances of success.   

Progression of student feedback and computational skills in P-Cubed

Projects and Practices in Physics is a sequence of two introductory, calculus-based physics courses, covering mechanics (P-Cubed) and electricity and magnetism (EMP-Cubed). Both P-Cubed and EMP-Cubed are flipped classrooms, where students read online notes and complete homework assignments at home and spend class time working on complex problems (or projects) in small groups. The projects are designed to be intricate and challenging, often asking students to model the situation using minimally-working VPython code. This requires students to work together to create a plan, make simplifying assumptions, and make choices as work through their solution. In addition to incorporating basic computational modeling, a key feature of P-Cubed and EMP-Cubed are that students get individualized feedback from an instructor on how well they understood the material and how they functioned in the group. We present the progression of the student feedback and development of computational skills through the P-Cubed and EMP-Cubed curricula.   

Reimagining Education at Scale: the University of Michigan's Foundational Course Initiative

The University of Michigan educates at scale, introducing thousands of students every year to topics as various as Linguistics, Physics, and Screen Arts. Large foundational courses play an outsize role in this process. This year, we are launching a $5 million campus-wide Foundational Course Initiative to establish a new, 21st century collaborative approach to the creation and instruction of these courses. Faculty, staff, and students from departments will work with instructional consultants from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching over a multi-year period to design, develop, and deliver next generation versions of foundational courses.   

Instructor approaches to teaching computational physics problems in problem-based courses

Increasingly, introductory physics courses are focusing on “authentic practices”, for example, by including computational problems that allow students to engage with programming practices and numerical problem-solving methods used by physicists. Understanding how instructors teach such problems is important for improving instruction. We interviewed instructors in a problem-based mechanics course that incorporates computational problems. These instructors were undergraduates who were previously successful as students in the course. Their prior involvement as students, along with their fewer experiences with programming and physics compared to faculty instructors, give them a unique perspective on teaching in the course. We present here thematic analysis of these interviews.   

Student pathways through the physics major

As students go through their undergraduate careers, they take courses, interact with other students, and sometimes change their majors. Understanding what factors may act as precursors to major change can help advising faculty understand their students. This work uses data from the Michigan State registrar to examine factors when students in physics change their major. Our data includes time stamped courses taken, grades, and student demographics. This data set has been used previously to describe the pathways students take into and out of the physics major.