Instilling good laboratory working attitudes in students is a difficult but very important task, especially in the first level courses. The introduction of a grade, based on the observation of work practices during laboratory sessions, can be strongly beneficial towards the acquisition of positive skills covering not only the technical aspects, but also the acquisition of both independence and team work. Explicit suggestions are given for basing the grade on specific observations and a quantitative analysis is performed to guarantee that the higher intrinsic volatility of the Performance Grade does not affect the final laboratory grade.
In previous work we analyzed databases for 95 classes to show that the percent grade scale was correlated with a much higher student fail rate than the 4.0 grade scale. This paper builds on this work and investigates equity gaps occurring under both scales. By employing a "Course Deficit Model" we attribute the responsibility for closing the gaps to those who are responsible for the policies that guide the course. When comparing course grades in classes graded using the percent scale with those in courses graded using the 4.0 scale, we find that students identifying as belonging to racial or e…
Trends and Gender Disparities in Grades and Grade Penalties Among Bioscience and Health-Related Major Students Before, During, and After COVID-19 Remote Instruction
This addendum shows that a demographic grade gap is best understood using a course deficit model rather than the more common student deficit model. Students from a concepts-first class took the same final exam as the three other classes that were offered at the same time so the grade gaps between different demographic groups from each class can be compared. It is found that students identifying as members of a racial/ethnic group underrepresented in physics had higher final exam grades than their peers from the same concepts first class rather than the usual case, lower exam grades than their …
In deciding on a student's grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point scale (where each whole number 0-4 corresponds to a letter grade) and the percent scale (where letter grades A through D are uniformly distributed in the top 40% of the scale). This paper uses grading data from a single series of courses offered over a period of 10 years to show that the grade distributions emerging from these two grade scales differed in many w…
A recent paper used structural equation modeling to infer effects of gender-dependent student attitudes on several outcomes of introductory physics courses. The model used is precisely Markov equivalent to an equally plausible approximation in which a key gender-dependent coefficient in determining attitudes is indistinguishable from zero. I also argue that the qualitative framing may attribute to students motivations that actually belong to their teachers.
Underrepresented minority (URM) students are subjected to historically rooted inequities when pursuing an education, especially in STEM disciplines with little diversity. In order to make STEM education equitable and inclusive, evidence for how students from different racial/ethnic demographics are faring is necessary. We use 10 years of institutional data at a large public university to investigate trends in the majors that Asian, URM, and White students declare, drop after declaring, and earn degrees in as well as the GPA of the students who drop or earn a degree. We find that higher percent…
Peer Influence on Physics Self-Efficacy and Grades: A comparative study of students in an introductory calculus-based course who typically worked alone or in groups before and during the pandemic
Using Large Language Models to Assign Partial Credit to Students' Explanations of Problem-Solving Process: Grade at Human Level Accuracy with Grading Confidence Index and Personalized Student-facing Feedback
Research shows that expert-like approaches to problem-solving can be promoted by encouraging students to explicate their thought processes and follow a prescribed problem-solving strategy. Since grading communicates instructors' expectations, teaching assistants' grading decisions play a crucial role in forming students' approaches to problem-solving in physics. We investigated the grading practices and considerations of 43 graduate teaching assistants (TAs). The TAs were asked to grade a set of specially designed student solutions and explain their grading decisions. We found that in a quiz c…
Bioscience Students in Physics Courses With Higher Test Anxiety Have Lower Grades on High-Stakes Assessments, and Women Report More Test Anxiety Than Men
The lack of an engaging pedagogy and the highly competitive atmosphere in introductory science courses tend to discourage students from pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Once in a STEM field, academic and social integration has been long thought to be important for students' persistence. Yet, it is rarely investigated. In particular, the relative impact of in-class and out-of-class interactions remains an open issue. Here, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, for students whose grades fall in the "middle of the pack," the out-of-class network is the most s…
We use self-reported data from 2011--2014 and determine the academic profile of accepted students at physics graduate programs in the United States. We analyze the accepted students' grade point averages and physics Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores. We also compare the physics GRE scores of accepted students to their grade point averages.
Over the past decades, researchers have explored the relationship among home resources, school environment, and students' mathematics achievement in a large amount of studies. Many of them suggested that rich home resources for learning were related to higher average academic achievement. Some also suggested that the home background was closely associated with the learning environment, and therefore, influenced students' achievements. Thus, this study hypothesized that students who own more home resources would perform better than students who possess fewer resources and that schools that have…
Efforts to promote equity and inclusion using evidence-based approaches are vital to correct long-standing societal inequities that have disadvantaged women and discouraged them from pursuing studies, e.g., in many STEM disciplines. We use 10 years of institutional data at a large public university to investigate trends in the majors that men and women declare, drop after declaring, and earn degrees in as well as the GPA of the students who drop or earn a degree. We find that the majors with the lowest number of students also have the highest rates of attrition. Moreover, we find alarming GPA …
A self-training scheme geared at inducing students to improve their skills through independent homework is presented. The motivation is to identify an inexpensive, yet effective tool for raising the competence level of students in the Fundamental Sciences (in particular Physics). Since globally existing financial restrictions do not allow for extensive supervised work, a scheme is devised where the additional personal training is rewarded through bonuses in the grade, while safeguarding against the danger of cheating. Overburdening the instructors is avoided through the use of computer-based g…
Recent efforts to identify non-cognitive predictors of academic achievement have especially focused on self-constructs, whose measurement is concerned with a specific domain (e.g., mathematics). However, other important factors, such as character and motivation, have received less attention. Additionally, the predictive accuracy of non-cognitive factors lacks evidence from subjects including English and Science. In this study, we take a person-centered approach and focus on students' intrinsic motivation, need for cognition, grit, and growth mindset. We mainly focus on how these factors predic…
Student learning in instructional physics labs is a growing area of research that includes studies exploring students' beliefs and expectations about experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies about experimental physics and support broader lab transformation efforts both at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and nationally, we developed the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Previous work focused on establishing the accuracy and clarity of the instrument through student interviews and preliminary testing. Ongoing vali…
Changes to the TN Middle Grades Science Curriculum According to NGSS
国家资源委员会（NRC）制定的K-12科学教育框架（2011年7月）借鉴了当前的科学研究和学生有效学习科学的方法。这为2013年春季发布的下一代科学标准（NGSS）奠定了基础。田纳西州是26个牵头州伙伴之一，为标准编写小组提供领导，并为各州审议通过和实施NGSS提供指导。我们建议，从目前的国家科学标准过渡到NGSS展示了广泛的共识，所有学生应该知道什么，并能够在特定的K-12年级水平，什么主题可以推迟或排除在发展准备的前提下。为了促进这项工作，STEM研究员之一Larry Bowman（作者）创作了一系列18张海报，展示了当前田纳西州科学教育标准（Huffman，2009）和NGSS（Achieve，2013）之间的相关性。本文专门针对NGSS中年级学科核心思想（DCIs）相比，现有的6-8科学标准，从田纳西州科学课程框架。一些年级水平的期望（GLEs）中年级科学已搬迁到其他年级水平，和其他人已经推出。“中间年级”一词用于10至15岁的学生，这是儿童从具体操作阶段过渡到正式操作阶段的关键年龄。（Piaget and Inhelder 2013）。
Problem Roulette: Studying Introductory Physics in the Cloud
Problem Roulette（PR）是密歇根大学的一项基于网络的学习服务，它提供了一个大型的物理入门课程考试问题库的主题内随机访问。建立在公共-私有云计算基础设施上，PR在2012年秋季学期为近1000名学生提供了服务，提供了超过60，000个问题页面。这项服务通过提供由当地教授撰写的问题来补充商业出版社的服务。我们描述的服务架构，包括报告和分析能力，并提出了初步评估其使用的影响。在大约500名学习电磁学的学生中，我们发现有229名学生在这学期中解决了50道或更多的问题，他们的成绩比其他学生高出了0.40分（在4.0分的量表上）。这种改善部分反映了一种选择偏见，即更好的学生更频繁地使用该服务。通过使用整体平均成绩（GPA）作为分类器调整这种选择偏差，我们发现普通PR用户的成绩提高了0.22，显著高于0.04的随机噪声水平。简单地说，学生谁工作一个或多个额外的问题，每个工作日赚取近四分之一个字母的平均成绩提高，无论GPA。学生评论强调随机性在帮助他们综合概念方面的重要性。PR源代码在bitbucket存储库中公开。
When assessing student work, graders will often find that some students will leave one or more problems blank on assessments. Since there is no work shown, the grader has no means to evaluate the student's understanding of a particular problem, and thus awards 'zero' points. This practice punishes the student behavior of leaving a problem blank, but this zero is not necessarily an accurate assessment of student understanding of a particular topic. While some might argue that this practice is 'fair' in that students are aware that they can't receive points for problems they don't attempt, we sh…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more on achieving a better grade. For this reason, students want to study as efficiently as possible by using the most optimal study methods. We have taken surveys over the past three years to determine how students study for exams and compared that to their exam grades. We found that students who studied using methods that they rated as more helpful did better o…
Instructional physics labs are critical junctures for many STEM majors to develop an understanding of experimentation in the sciences. Students can acquire useful experimental skills and grow their identities as scientists. However, many traditionally-instructed labs do not necessarily involve authentic physics experimentation features in their curricula. Recent research calls for a reformation in undergraduate labs to incorporate more student agency and choice in the learning processes. In our institution, we have adopted open-ended lab teaching in the introductory physics courses. By using r…
Grades provide students with their primary performance feedback: signals which affect academic choices. Variations in grading practice among courses impose grade penalties (and bonuses) on students who take them. These grade penalties are sometimes gendered. Using extensive data from the University of Michigan, we report on patterns of grade penalty and gendered performance difference across 116 large courses. We find that significant gendered performance differences are ubiquitous in large introductory STEM lecture courses. They are largely absent in both STEM labs and in lecture courses in o…
Pencasts are videos of problem solving with narration by the problem solver. Pedagogically, students can create pencasts to illustrate their own problem solving to the instructor or to their peers. Pencasts have implications for teaching at multiple levels from elementary grades through university courses. In this article, we describe the use of pencasts in a university level upperdivision Electromagnetic Fields course usually taken by junior and senior physics majors. For each homework assignment, students created and submitted pencasts of ordinary problems several days before the problem set…
We report on preliminary results of a statistical study of student performance in more than a decade of calculus-based introductory physics courses. Treating average homework and test grades as proxies for student effort and comprehension respectively, we plot comprehension versus effort in an academic version of the astronomical Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (which plots stellar luminosity versus temperature). We study the evolution of this diagram with time, finding that the "academic main sequence" has begun to break down in recent years as student achievement on tests has become decoupled fr…
While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students' physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we performed in-lab observations of student actions over two semesters in two pedagogically different sections of the same introductory physics course. We used a cluster analysis to identify different categories of student behaviour and analyzed how they correlate with lab structure and gender. We find that, in lab structures which fostered collaborative group…
Framing affects how students interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. Little is known, however, about how students frame tasks in physics labs. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical thinking with data, students test a simple model of a pendulum that breaks down with improved measurements. Using in-lab video and follow-up interviews, we identified students' frequent use of a model-verifying frame that substantially interferes with the instructional goals. We present a case study analysis of two students who approach the lab with a model-veri…
We design a Teaching laboratory experience for blind students, to measure the linear thermal expansion coefficient of an object. We use an open-source electronic prototyping platform to create interactive electronic objects, with the conversion of visual signals into acoustic signals that allow a blind student to participate at the same time as their classmates in the laboratory session. For the student it was the first time he managed to participate normally in a physics laboratory.
Improving students' understanding of the nature of experimental physics is often an explicit or implicit goal of undergraduate laboratory physics courses. However, lab activities in traditional lab courses are typically characterized by highly structured, guided labs that often do not require or encourage students to engage authentically in the process of experimental physics. Alternatively, open-ended laboratory activities can provide a more authentic learning environment by, for example, allowing students to exercise greater autonomy in what and how physical phenomena are investigated. Engag…
There is some evidence that conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics lab curricula, such as RealTime Physics, may improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Thus, these curricula may be attractive for instructors who seek to transform their physics labs to improve student learning. However, the impact of conceptual inquiry-based lab instruction on students' attitudes and beliefs about experimental physics, as measured by the E-CLASS survey, is not yet fully understood. We present data from three curricular approaches over four semesters ($n=701$). We saw no change in E-CLASS sco…
We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but the process of constructing, testing, and refining these models is much less common. We focus our attention on a lab course that has been transformed to engage students in this modeling process during lab activities. The design of the lab activities was guided by a framework that captures the different components of model-based reasoning, called the Modeling F…
Since 1984 INFN scientists performing experiments at Fermilab have been running a two month summer training program for Italian students at the lab. In 1984 the program involved only a few physics students from the Pisa group, but it was later extended to other groups and to engineering students. Since 2004 the program has been supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. The Fermilab training programs spanned from data analysis to design and construction of particle detectors and accelerator components, research on superconductive elements, theory of accelerators,…
Authentic research as a method of teaching science is gaining popularity in high schools and colleges. To make this research experience most efficient, students need adequate preparation in traditional science courses. Existing materials available for inquiry-based teaching methods are not intended to prepare a student for independent research. We discuss principles for organization of laboratory classes with this goal in mind and provide examples that we have implemented for algebra-based physics, calculus-based physics, and honors chemistry for high school students.
In undergraduate research experiences, student development of an identity as a scientist is coupled to their sense of ownership of their research projects. As a a first step towards studying similar connections in physics laboratory courses, we investigate student ownership of projects in a lasers-based upper-division course. Students spent the final seven weeks of the semester working in groups on final projects of their choosing. Using data from the Project Ownership Survey and weekly student reflections, we investigate student ownership as it relates to students' personal agency, self-effic…
This paper explores middle-grade students' conceptions of median. Describes, where and why they struggle and provides learning trajectory to improve their understanding.
Physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading. Physics education research suggests that grading practices that place the burden of proof for explicating the problem solving process on students can help them develop problem solving skills and learn physics. However, TAs may not have developed effective grading practices and may grade student solutions in introductory and advanced courses differently. In the context of a TA professional development course, we asked TAs to grade student solutions to introductory physics and quantum mechanics problems and explain why…
This article explains and illustrates the design of a laboratory experience for blind students to measure the inertia of simple objects, in this case, that of a disc around its axis of symmetry. Our adaptation consisted in modifying the data collection process, where we used an open-source electronic platform to convert visual signals into acoustic signals. This allows one of the blind students at our University to participate simultaneously as their classmates in the laboratory session corresponding to the mechanics unit of a standard engineering course.
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze and explain their results. Another was provided with only the problem and asked to design and execute the experiment, interpret the data, and draw conclusions. These two approaches involved different levels of student inquiry and they have been described as guided and open inquiry respectively. The latter gave students more opportunities to practice "designi…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading in introductory physics courses at large research universities. Their grading practices can shape students' approaches to problem solving and learning. Physics education research recommends grading practices that encourage students to provide evidence of understanding via explication of the problem-solving process. However, TAs may not necessarily grade in a manner that encourages students to provide evidence of understanding in their solutions. Within the context of a semester-long TA professional development course, we investigated …
Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment tool that measures such understanding. The PMQ was designed to characterize student reasoning into point or set paradigms, where the set paradigm is more aligned with expert reasoning. We analyzed over 500 student open-ended responses collected at the beginning and the end of a traditional introductory lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder. We di…
We redesigned an advanced physics laboratory course to include a project component. The intention was to address learning outcomes such as modeling, design of experiments, teamwork, and developing technical skills in using apparatus and analyzing data. The course included experimental labs in preparation for a six-week team project in which students designed and implemented a research experiment. The final assignment given to students was a reflective essay, which asked students to discuss their learning and satisfaction in doing the project. Qualitative analysis of the students' reflections s…
