Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2021 Joint Spring Meeting of the Texas Sections of APS, AAPT and Zone 13 of the SPS
Volume 66, Number 2
Thursday–Sunday, April 8–11, 2021; Virtual
Session D11: AAPT/APS: Physics Education Research and Physics in the Era of Pandemic |
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Sunday, April 11, 2021 1:00PM - 1:12PM |
D11.00001: Teaching First Year Physics Without Homework or Tests Steven 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. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 11, 2021 1:12PM - 1:24PM |
D11.00002: Team-based learning in lower-division mechanics and upper-division astrophysics classes offered online Jorge Munoz Online classes offer advantages such as more flexibility for students who work and lectures that are on demand and can be played again if necessary. Nevertheless, some challenges remain, particularly the limited amount of socialization and the limited face-to-face time. Team-based learning (TBL) is an effective technique to engage students that results in greater long-term knowledge retention than passive learning, but its implementation is easier in face-to-face settings. In this talk I will describe the weekly TBL activities that I designed for a large lower-division introductory mechanics class and a small upper-division astrophysics class offered recently at The University of Texas of El Paso (UTEP). In the lower-division class, homework problems were assigned for which video solutions were also provided and the TBL activities centered around solving similar problems and making a short recording of the group solution. In the upper-division class, articles from the literature were assigned and questions that could serve to start a discussion were provided and the TBL activities centered around a discussion of the articles and making a short recording of the group conclusions. Feedback from the students will be discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 11, 2021 1:24PM - 1:36PM |
D11.00003: STEPP: A New Resource for Physics Classrooms Starting This Fall! Mary Urquhart, Ken Suura, Midori Kitagawa, Michael Kesden, Paul Fishwick STEPP (Scaffolded Training Environment for Physics Programming) is an interactive instructional tool designed to support the teaching of kinematics and Newton's Laws of Motion in introductory physics at the high school or university levels. Funded by the NSF's STEM$+$C program and developed by a multi-disciplinary team, STEPP focuses on the overlap between physics and computer science, specifically in the context of computational thinking. No programming experience is expected or required. Rather, STEPP provides an opportunity for students to model and visualize the motion described in physics problems already in their curriculum. Carefully designed with scaffolded levels and dynamic display of motion and graphing, STEPP also has tutorial videos to assist with online and individual exploration. Join us to learn about STEPP, how to get preview access to STEPP at stepp.utdallas.edu, and how to access a recorded workshop introduction to this resource. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 11, 2021 1:36PM - 1:48PM |
D11.00004: Development of a Written Assessment to Analyze Student Teaching Assistants' PCK-Q Beth Thacker, Stephanie Hart, Kyle Wipfli, Jianlan Wang We report on the development of a written assessment designed to analyze pedagogical content knowledge in the context of questioning (PCK-Q). We discuss the process of analyzing and coding classroom videos and writing and testing a preliminary written assessment. The classroom observations have first been coded using a coding scheme that analyzes levels of questioning in an inquiry-based classroom. A written instrument was then developed based on the classroom videos, administered to student teaching assistants (SAs) and compared with video results. We report on the coding scheme and the video/written comparison results of this ongoing project. [Preview Abstract] |
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