Session N02: Physics and Astronomy Education

A Research-Informed Approach to Teaching Physics and Astronomy to Non-Majors

Physics and astronomy instructors are often called upon to teach courses that are primarily taken by students who will not major in our discipline. These courses often have the largest enrollments of any offered by the department, and they may satisfy a general education requirement (e.g, ASTRO 101) or they may exist to serve students from other departments (e.g., biology). Many of these students do not share our intrinsic interest in our discipline, and they may lack the mathematical background and quantitative problem-solving skills that we value. How can we create vibrate learning environments that effectively engage these students and lead to substantial learning gains? In this talk, I will describe my work in this area, focusing on two key ideas. First, I will describe how to design and utilize pedagogical discipline representations (PDRs). A PDR is a representation that is explicitly designed to enhance the teaching and learning of a topic. In some cases, PDRs are significantly simplified or altered versions of typical discipline representations (graphs, data tables, etc.); in others they may be novel and highly contextualized representations with unique features that purposefully engage novice learners' pre-existing ideas. I will discuss how PDRs can enable students to reason about complex modern astrophysical topics. Next, I will address how to teach quantitative problem solving. Teaching the skills necessary for problem-solving is often limited to solving sample problems in front of the whole class and hoping that students understand the relevant techniques we attempt to model. This approach creates a passive experience that fails to reach many students. I will describe an alternative approach that uses active engagement with sequences of Think-Pair-Share (TPS) questions. This technique allows instructors to effectively, efficiently, and simultaneously engage classes of any size in a problem-solving activity. The TPS questions frequently contain answer choices with mathematical expressions, each of which represents a common difficulty that many students experience when attempting to translate their conceptual understandings into mathematical representations. This technique leads to dramatic improvements in students' quantitative skills.   

A Sampling of Active Astrophysics Lessons

Instructors versed in physics but not astronomy often struggle with teaching astronomy largely due to unfamiliarity with the subject matter. But modern astronomy taps into all aspects of physics and therefore offers opportunites for such instructors both for their own sakes and the knowledge and skills they can impart to their students. Such lessons also naturally lend themselves to active learning techniques. We demonstrate several sample lessons linking physics with astronomy.   

Motivational and performance consequences of over-estimating exam performance: notable differences by gender and ethnicity

A well-known finding from popular psychology is the Dunning-Kruger effect – the tendency of low-performers to overestimate their own performance and high performers to underestimate their own performance. In much of the literature on this effect, it is taken as a given that more accurate self-assessments of performance are crucial for not just the success of individuals, but for the success of industries like education and healthcare. Yet, we have not found a study that directly measured differences in outcomes that were correlated with inaccurately estimating one's performance. In the present study, we investigate changes in physics knowledge and physics motivational beliefs that are correlated with overestimating one's performance on physics exams. We find that students who overestimate their exam performance do not see any gains in physics knowledge over the course of a semester, compared with a 0.30 standard deviation increase for students who do not overestimate their performance. In addition, we find that students who overestimate their performance see increases in test anxiety, increased interest in physics, and increased stereotype threat. When we further examine these changes for different demographic groups, we find that women who overestimate their own exam performance are able to self-correct and perform just as well as women who underestimate their performance on the post-test physics knowledge assessment. We further find that ethnic and racial minority students who underestimate their performance see large decreases in test anxiety and stereotype threat, whereas these minoritized students who overestimate their performances see increases on these metrics. In sum, the results suggest that an inability to accurately assess one's own performance may have negative impacts on both learning and motivational beliefs in physics.   

A Web Tool for Visualizing Kerr Spacetime and Bound Geodesics

The purpose of this web tool is to be an educational resource by providing visualization of the dynamics of test particles in Kerr spacetime. Many packages made to model Kerr geodesics do so by parameterizing the trajectory by the constants of motion: E, Lz, and Q. However, it can be difficult for a user to determine the combinations of values for these parameters that will result in interesting orbits. This Javascript program parameterizes trajectories in terms of the black hole spin a, semi-latus rectum p, eccentricity e, and inclination parameter x. The program dynamically calculates a parameter boundary for marginally-stable orbits. This allows the user to explore a range of stable, bound orbits. Additional features, such as Zero Angular Momentum Observers (ZAMOs), various camera options, fundamental orbital frequencies, and proper-time tracking, provide an engaging environment to help students gain intuition about geodesic motion including concepts such as frame-dragging.