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(IE) PER: Curriculum and Instruction III
7/13/2022 | 9:10 AM to 10:10 AM
Room: CC: Grand Gallery Overlook A/B
Moderator: / Co-Organizer:
Session Code: IE | Submitting Committee: Committee on Research in Physics Education / Co-Sponsoring Committee:
IE02 (9:20 to 9:30 AM) | Contributed | ACORN Physics Tutorials for building on seeds of science
Presenting Author: Sarah McKagan, American Association of Physics Teachers
Additional Author | Amy D. Robertson, Seattle Pacific University
Additional Author | Lisa M. Goodhew, Seattle Pacific University
Additional Author | Lauren C. Bauman, University of Washington Bothell
Additional Author | Adrian M. Madsen, American Association of Physics Teachers
ACORN Physics (“Attending to Conceptual Resources in Physics”) Tutorials are a part of a broader effort to understand and cultivate the wonderful ideas that students use as they learn physics. These tutorials are designed to help instructors pay attention to and build from students’ common, fruitful ideas (“ conceptual resources”) that represent seeds of science. We have done research to identify conceptual resources that students use as they learn about kinematics, linear momentum, forces, circuits, mechanical waves, and heat and temperature -- so that we can bring you tutorials that elicit and build from student resources and provide you with pragmatic support to implement these tutorials. You can access all of our materials, including the tutorials, videos of students using them, questions to help you prepare to use them, conceptual questions that you can build in to your curriculum, and overviews of our research, free from our website at https://www.physport.org/curricula/ACORN
IE03 (9:30 to 9:40 AM) | Contributed | Scaffolding Writing in Physics Labs
Presenting Author: Anna Mederer, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Additional Author | L Dana, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Additional Author | Benjamin Pollard, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
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Communicating physics is an essential learning outcome for undergraduate physics courses because it facilitates the synthesis of students’ ideas, is a useful professional skill, and is the basis of sharing knowledge with a broader community. Physics lab courses are an ideal setting to learn these communication skills. Writing is an important subset of communicating physics, which has been explored in the “Framework of Goals for Writing in Physics Lab Classes” from Hoehn and Lewandowski. The overall goal of this project is to use this framework to understand how students acquire writing skills in physics, to structure labs to support learning those skills, and to measure the effectiveness of scaffolding writing skills into the lab sequence. At our institution, we are restructuring the lab sequence to scaffold writing skills. We collected and analyzed student writing samples and open response feedback surveys and will present preliminary results.
IE04 (9:40 to 9:50 AM) | Contributed | Role of Preparatory Physics Foundation Course in Student Success
Presenting Author: Binod Nainabasti, Lamar University
Additional Author | Cristian Bahrim, Lamar University
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For fifteen years, the Physics Department at Lamar has offered a Preparatory Physics Foundation (PPF) course for students with an insufficient physics background (optional), and for those with less than 620 Math SAT scores (mandatory). The goal of this course is to provide a robust conceptual understanding of physics and to help develop mathematical skills that are required for successful completion of calculus-based intro physics courses. We analyzed five years of data (2016-2021) and found that the PPF course has significant influence in reducing the fail/drop rate in the intro physics courses to about 20% less than for students without the PPF course. The PPF course focuses on quality instruction by offering a plethora of physics demos, encouraging peer conversations, and developing our students’ mathematical skills to be applied to physics problems. Its content puts emphasis on basic mechanical concepts of kinematics and dynamics; through graphical analysis and vector manipulation.
IE05 (9:50 to 10:00 AM) | Contributed | Student preferences about instructional explanation strategies in introductory physics classes
Presenting Author: Joe Olsen, Rutgers University
Additional Author | Debbie Andres, Paramus High School
Additional Author | Charles Riggieri, Rutgers University
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Instructional explanations (hereafter explanations) are ubiquitous in all classroom formats in introductory physics. While there is a large body of work exploring the range of strategies that are employed in explanations and their effect on learning, not much is known about the relationship between student preferences for certain explanation strategies and the strategies that are known to be effective. We claim this is important to understand, as student preferences will influence perceptions of instructor efficacy and learning regardless of student learning outcomes. To explore this relationship, we asked first-year engineering students in a large enrollment introductory physics course to compare pairs of explanations generated by highly regarded instructors (including undergraduate learning assistants, graduate teaching assistants, and faculty) and describe the criteria they used to determine which explanation was better. We conclude with commentary about the need to balance student preference with explanation qualities known to positively impact student learning outcomes.
IE06 (10:10 to 10:20 AM) | Contributed | Improving Introductory Physics Students' quantitative Reasoning through Targeted Practice
Presenting Author: Alexis Olsho, United States Air Force Academy
Additional Author | Charlotte Zimmerman, University of Washington
Additional Author | Andrew Boudreaux, Western Washington University
Additional Author | Joseph Olsen, Rutgers University
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Covariational reasoning--considering how changes in one quantity affect another, related quantity--is a foundation of quantitative modeling in physics, and a learning objective of introductory physics instruction at the college level. Our prior work suggests that covariational reasoning in physics contexts differs from that in purely mathematical contexts, and is effortful even for well-prepared students. We also find that students' covariational reasoning does not improve substantially as a result of introductory physics instruction. To address these issues, we have begun work to identify subskills that underlie productive covariational reasoning in physics contexts. We present our preliminary work on the identification of "essential skills" related to covariational reasoning, and the development of a set of targeted online tasks to improve those skills.
(IE) PER: Curriculum and Instruction III
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