Session H02: Physics Education Research

We should be teaching students how to solve real problems

Problem-solving is an essential skill for aspiring scientists to develop. Yet, the kinds of problems we ask students to solve in most physics courses are devoid of real-world context, artificially constrained, or remove many of the opportunities for students to make their own decisions (e.g., what kinds of assumptions to make). Though this makes grading easier, it does not adequately prepare students to solve the kinds of problems they will encounter as working scientists or engineers. Recent research has investigated how expert scientists solve problems they routinely encounter in their work, and has characterized the problem-solving process as 29 different decisions to be made. The way to become an expert physicist, then, is to practice making each of these decisions with timely and specific feedback from an instructor. In this talk, I will show examples of how this decision-making can be assessed in detail. I will also discuss how we have adapted an introductory physics 1 course to focus on teaching these kinds of problem-solving skills. Preliminary results show that it is possible to teach real-world problem-solving skills while covering all of the same content as you would otherwise. The data also show that students who receive problem-solving instruction perform better on a common final exam, and receive higher grades in physics 2 compared with students who received traditional instruction. Finally, problem-solving instruction has proved to be more equitable than traditional instruction: there is no correlation between exam performance and high school physics preparation. This means that students who have never taken a physics class before college are able to succeed just as well as students with one or two years of high school physics instruction. We hypothesize that the primary driver of these results is giving students opportunities to practice solving more realistic physics problems, meaning that any instructor should be able to achieve these results if they change the way they think about writing homework and exam problems.   

Developing a comprehensive graduate TA preparation program

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are key partners in the education of undergraduate students. It is important to adequately prepare them for teaching since they have the potential to have a large impact on student learning outcomes. But GTAs are also students themselves, and have many demands on their time. The School of Physics at Georgia Tech has been offering a GTA preparation course for first-year PhD students since 2013, and over time the course has evolved into a robust and comprehensive professional development program that prepares GTAs for the classroom and beyond. In this talk I describe the program's development and evolution, focusing on the key elements that have made it successful.   

An Examination of Group Dynamics from an Active Classroom Setting using K-Means Clustering

The use of group work to maximize the learning outcome in the physics classroom is a well-established idea. However, one challenge that instructors often face in implementing collaborative learning is the creation of effective student teams. The complex nature of student groups as collective learning entities is often mediated by the demographics and experiences of the different group members. In this study we apply K-Means clustering to peer survey data, collected using the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness system, and institutional census data to identify features of well-functioning groups in an active learning classroom. Initial results have revealed interesting patterns; for example, the groups with the lowest levels of effectiveness were not the groups with the lowest levels of prior physics knowledge. When replicated on a larger scale, these results could inform the development of automated systems for effective and equitable team formation in active learning classrooms. 

    

Entanglement in a model of inelastic spectroscopy

The treatment of a quantum harmonic oscillator excited by an external classical beam is embedded in the physics curriculum, and it is straightforward to obtain probabilities for the beam exciting the oscillator into its various energy eigenstates. Realistic probes, however, are themselves quantum objects, which introduces both pedagogical challenges and opportunities. Treating the harmonic oscillator and external beam each as part of a combined quantum system gives an easily visualized (if less easily calculated) example of entanglement that can augment undergraduate treatments of quantum dynamics, and can provide an additional bridge between wave mechanics and scattering theory.