A set of virtual experiments were designed to use with introductory physics I (analytical and general) class, which covers kinematics, Newton laws, energy, momentum, and rotational dynamics. Virtual experiments were based on video analysis and simulations. Only open educational resources (OER) were used for experiments. Virtual experiments were designed to simulate in-person physical laboratory experiments. All the calculations and data analysis (analytical and graphical) were done with Microsoft excel. Formatted excel tables were given to students and step by step calculations with excel were done during the class. Specific emphasis was given to student learning outcomes such as understand, apply, analyze and evaluate. Student learning outcomes were studied with detailed lab reports per each experiment and end of the semester written exam (which based on experiments). Lab class was fully web-enhanced and managed by using a Learning management system (LMS). Every lab class was recorded and added to the LMS. Virtual labs were done by using live video conference technology and labs were tested with the both synchronous and asynchronous type of remote teaching methods.
Commercial video games are increasingly using sophisticated physics simulations to create a more immersive experience for players. This also makes them a powerful tool for engaging students in learning physics. We provide some examples to show how commercial off-the-shelf games can be used to teach specific topics in introductory undergraduate physics. The examples are selected from a course taught predominantly through the medium of commercial video games.
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…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions in electricity and magnetism as revealed by the CSEM. For each item on the CSEM, the TAs were asked to (1) identify the most common incorrect answer choice of introductory physics students and (2) predict the percentage of introductory students who would answer the question correctly in a post-test. Then, we used the CSEM post-test data from approximately 40…
Computation is a central aspect of modern science and engineering work, and yet, computational instruction has yet to fully pervade university STEM curricula. In physics, we have begun to integrate computation into our courses in a variety of ways. Here, we discuss a method for integrating computation into calculus-based mechanics where the lecture and laboratory for the course are decoupled. At Michigan State University, we have developed a "lecture" course, called "Projects and Practices in Physics", where science and engineering students solve complex problems in groups of four using analyt…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by a variety of educators and physics education researchers. One reason for this extensive use is that many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices that correspond to students' alternate conceptions in mechanics. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account students' initial knowledge state in their instructional design. Here, we discuss re…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding the use of example solutions in introductory physics. In particular, we examine how the goal of promoting expert-like problem solving is manifested in the considerations of graduate TAs choices of example solutions. Twenty-four first-year graduate TAs were asked to discuss their goals for presenting example solutions to students. They were also provided wit…
Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). We have performed a review and analysis of FCI and FMCE data published between 1995 and 2014. We confirm previous findings that interactive engagement teaching techniques are significantly more likely to produce high student learning gains than traditional lecture-based instruction. We also establish …
Most introductory quantum physics instructors would agree that transitioning students from classical to quantum thinking is an important learning goal, but may disagree on whether or how this can be accomplished. Although (and perhaps because) physicists have long debated the physical interpretation of quantum theory, many instructors choose to avoid emphasizing interpretive themes; or they discuss the views of scientists in their classrooms, but do not adequately attend to student interpretations. In this synthesis and extension of prior work, we demonstrate: (1) instructors vary in their app…
This is the third series of the lab manuals for virtual teaching of introductory physics classes. This covers fluids, waves, thermodynamics, optics, interference, photoelectric effect, atomic spectra, and radiation concepts. A few of these labs can be used within Physics I and a few other labs within Physics II depending on the syllabi of Physics I and II classes. Virtual experiments in this lab manual and our previous Physics I (arXiv.2012.09151) and Physics II (arXiv.2012.13278) lab manuals were designed for 2.45 hrs long lab classes (algebra-based and calculus-based). However, all the virtu…
Introductory electricity and magnetism lab manual was designed to use with virtual Physics II class. The lab manual consists of experiments on electrostatics, electric potential and energy, current and resistance, DC circuits, electromagnetism, and AC circuits. Virtual experiments were based on simulations. Open educational resources (OER) were used for all experiments. Virtual experiments were designed to simulate in-person physical lab experiments. Special emphasis was given to computational data analysis with excel. Formatted excel sheets per each lab were given to students and step by step…
The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner in 1994 to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which correspond to students' common difficulties with kinematics graphs. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common difficulties of introductory physics students and explicitly take them into account in their instructional design. We evaluate the pedagogical content knowledge of first year physics graduate students enrolled in a teac…
Quantum field theory has formed the conceptual framework of most of physics for more than sixty years. It incorporates a complete revision of our conception of the nature of matter and existence itself. Yet it is rarely taught, or even mentioned, in introductory physics---from high school, college, and university survey courses through upper-division "modern physics" courses. This omission is not necessary: This paper describes an approach through which the fundamental concepts and consequent insights of quantum field theory can be grasped, building upon familiar notions from classical and qua…
Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions in electricity and magnetism as revealed by the CSEM. For each item on the CSEM, the TAs were asked to identify the most common incor…
This Resource Letter draws on discipline-based education research from physics, chemistry, and biology to collect literature on the teaching of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the three disciplines. While the overlap among the disciplinary literatures is limited at present, we hope this Resource Letter will spark more interdisciplinary interaction.
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own perspective and from the perspective of typical introductory physics students whom they were teaching. We compare their categorizations with the categorizations by introductory physics students and physics faculty who categorized the same problems. The utility of categorization as a tool for teaching assistant training and faculty development workshops is disc…
The ability to categorize problems is a measure of expertise in a domain. In order to help students learn effectively, instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) should have pedagogical content knowledge. They must be aware of the prior knowledge of students they are teaching, consider the difficulty of the problems from students' perspective and design instruction that builds on what students already know. Here, we discuss the response of graduate students enrolled in a TA training course to categorization tasks in which they were asked to group problems based upon similarity of solution first…
Given a physics scenario, different problem types presenting that scenario in various ways can emphasize different instructional goals. In this investigation, we examined the views of physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) about the instructional benefits of different types of introductory problems based upon the same problem scenario. Here we report on TAs' views about two of these problem types that were regarded by TAs as the least instructionally beneficial of all problem types--the context rich and multiple-choice formats. Many TAs listed no pros at all for these problem types, despit…
Recently there have been multiple calls for curricular reforms to develop new pathways to the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines. The Marble Game answers these calls by providing a conceptual framework for quantitative scientific modeling skills useful across all the STEM disciplines. The approach actively engages students in a process of directed scientific discovery. In a "Student Assessment of their Learning Gains" (SALG) survey, students identified this approach as producing "great gains" in their understanding of real world problems and scientific research. Using…
We report on research carried out to improve teaching and student engagement in the introductory astronomy course at the University of Cape Town. This course is taken by a diverse range of students, including many from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. We describe the development of an instrument, the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ), which we administered as pre- and post-tests to students enrolled in the course. The instrument comprised a small number of questions which probed three areas of interest: student motivation and expectations, astronomy content, and worldview. Amo…
We occasionally include projects in our learner-centered introductory astronomy college course to enable non-science major students explore some astronomical concepts in more detail than otherwise. Such projects also highlight ongoing or upcoming astronomical events. We hope that students will feel more interested in astronomy through projects tied to astronomical events. In Spring 2012, we offered short essays focused on eclipses, transits and occultations to promote the rare transit of Venus that occurred on June 5th, 2012. We asked students to write two short essays from three that were off…
The purpose of this article is to present a simple solution of the classic dog-and-rabbit chase problem which emphasizes the use of concepts of elementary kinematics and, therefore, can be used in introductory mechanics course. The article is based on the teaching experience of introductory mechanics course at Novosibirsk State University for first year physics students which are just beginning to use advanced mathematical methods in physics problems. We hope it will be also useful for students and teachers at other universities too.
Introductory astronomy is one of the most widely-taken university science courses and a common means of satisfying general education requirements. This course is frequently taught in large sections by a variety of instructors, some with little formal training in astronomy. Thus, instructors often struggle to help students connect with what is typically their last formal science experience. At California State University Fullerton, we have engaged in reform efforts in the teaching of introductory astronomy. We report on the model of reform implementation with several key features that we believ…
Teaching physics to biologists requires far more than making the course for engineers mathematically less rigorous and adding in a few superficial biological problems. What is needed is for physicists to work closely with biologists to learn not only what physics topics and habits of mind that are useful to biologists, but how biologists work is fundamentally different from ours, and how to bridge that gap. In this article, we discussed what we have learned about these issues from years of conversations with colleagues in biology.
We report on the evolution of the largest physics course at the Technical University Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic, which boosted the development of online learning content, electronic assessments, and, not at least, the reconceptualization of our teaching methods. By shifting to distance education, we created features that can be easily implemented and combined with any physics-type course at a university level. Thereby, we incidentally made introductory physics sustainably accessible to students having difficulties visiting the university. Besides our experiences gained on blended lear…
In this paper we put forth a model for physics course reform that uniquely uses proven, research-based active learning strategies to help students improve their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills. In this study, we compared the exam performance of students in two sections of the same introductory physics course. One section (the traditional section, N = 258) was taught by an instructor who is highly regarded for his lectures, but did not use any active learning teaching strategies. The other section (the reformed section, N = 217) was taught by an instructor who had never before taug…
Most STEM students experience the introductory physics sequence in large-enrollment (N $\gtrsim$ 100 students) classrooms, led by one lecturer and supported by a few teaching assistants. This work describes methods and principles we used to create an effective "flipped classroom" in large- enrollment introductory physics courses by replacing a majority of traditional lecture time with in-class student-driven activity worksheets. In this work, we compare student learning in courses taught by the authors with the flipped classroom pedagogy versus a more traditional pedagogy. By comparing identic…
We report on the initial phase of an ongoing, multi-stage investigation of how to incorporate Virtual Reality (VR) technology in teaching introductory astronomy concepts. Our goal was to compare the efficacy of VR vs. conventional teaching methods using one specific topic, Moon phases and eclipses. After teaching this topic to an ASTRO 101 lecture class, students were placed into three groups to experience one of three additional activities: supplemental lecture, "hands-on" activity, or VR experience. All students were tested before and after their learning activity. Although preliminary, our …
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices corresponding to students' alternate conceptions in mechanics. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not explicitly take into account students' initial knowledge state in their instructional design. We discuss research involving the FCI to evaluate the pedagogical content knowledge of instructors of varying teaching experience. For each item on the…
Despite the negative stereotypes still overshadowing community colleges, scores of freshmen nationwide are deliberately beginning their college careers at these institutions, and the numbers are increasing more than twice as fast as those of four-year schools. Approximately 300,000 of these students take introductory astronomy each year as the last formal exposure to science most of them will ever have, and at least one-third of these students do so at a community or two-year college. The importance of investing in and devoting resources and training to serve this population - everyone, demogr…
This paper examines the educational impact of the implementation of "Changes in Energy and Momentum" from the Tutorials in Introductory Physics in five different instructional settings. These settings include (1) a completely computer-based learning environment and (2) use of cooperative learning groups with varying levels of instructor support. Pre- and post-tests provide evidence that a computer-based implementation falls significantly short of classroom implementations which involve both collaborative learning groups and interactions with a teaching assistance. Other findings provide insigh…
Physics education research has consistently shown that students have higher learning outcomes when enrolled in interactive-engagement courses. Consequently, many schools are actively reforming their introductory curricula. For courses where the interactive sections (labs, tutorials, and/or workshops) are mostly taught by graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), good TAs are instrumental to the success of the reform. Many studies have investigated specific interactions between TAs and students, but more can be learned through a holistic examination of TA-student interactions. Over the course…
Recently, there has been increased attention to improving laboratory instruction at all levels. At the introductory level, research results have shown differing levels of success based on the nature of the desired learning outcomes. In response to these findings, the University of Colorado's introductory physics lab course was transformed to improve students' development of experimental skills and experimental physics epistemology. We describe the details of the transformation process and initial self-reported learning gains from the first implementation of the transformed course.
In its most general form, a `secret objective' is any inconsistency between the experimental reality and the information provided to students prior to starting work on an experiment. Students are challenged to identify the secret objectives and then given freedom to explore and understand the experiment, thus encouraging and facilitating genuine inquiry elements in introductory laboratory courses. Damping of a simple pendulum is used as a concrete example to demonstrate how secret objectives can be included. We also discuss the implications of the secret objectives method and how this can prov…
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…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns of student difficulties in introductory physics and quantum mechanics. Based upon our framework, we argue that the qualitative patterns of student reasoning difficulties in introductory physics bear a striking resemblance to those found for upper-level quantum mechanics. The framework can guide the design of teaching and learning tools.
R is a language and computing environment that has been developed for data manipulation, statistical computing, and scientific graphing. In the paper, we demonstrate its use analyzing data collected in a few experiments taken from an introductory physics laboratory. The examples include a linear dependence, a non-linear dependence, and a histogram. The merits of R are discussed against three options often used for data analysis and graphing: manual graphing using grid paper, general purpose spreadsheet software, and specialized scientific graphing software.
We describe an introductory data science course, entitled Introduction to Data Science, offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course introduced general programming concepts by using the Python programming language with an emphasis on data preparation, processing, and presentation. The course had no prerequisites, and students were not expected to have any programming experience. This introductory course was designed to cover a wide range of topics, from the nature of data, to storage, to visualization, to probability and statistical analysis, to cloud and high performa…
Assessing student performance becomes challenging when course enrollment becomes very large (~10^4 students). As part of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in introductory physics offered by Georgia Tech in 2013, students submitted video reports on mechanics labs. Peer evaluation of these reports provided the primary method for evaluating student laboratory work. This paper describes the methods developed and used to guide students in evaluating each other's video lab reports. We also discuss how students' peer evaluation behavior changed with different interventions provided in the course.
A bouncing rubber ball under a motion sensor is a classic of introductory physics labs. It is often used to measure the acceleration due to gravity, and can also demonstrate conservation of energy. By observing that the ball rises to a lower height upon each bounce, posing the question "what is the main source of energy loss?" and requiring students to construct their own measured values for velocity from position data, a rich lab experience can be created that results in good student discussions of proper analysis of data, and implementation of models. The payoff is student understanding that…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed the pedagogy to include research-validated practices in interactive engagement, and accomplished our goals of enhanced learning gains, sustainability, and adoptability of our course reforms. The active engagement at the heart of the Lecture/Studio format results in comparable or enhanced learning gains (as measured by validated concept surveys) when compared…
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…
Calculating a journey to Mars with introductory physics
Facultad de Ciencias Básicas, Departamento de Física（基础科学学院物理系）；Centro de Desarrollo de Investigación CEDI-UMCE（CEDI-UMCE研究中心）；Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación（教育与科学都会大学）
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 …
The Georgia Tech blended introductory calculus-based mechanics course emphasizes scientific communication as one of its learning goals, and to that end, we gave our students a series of four peer-evaluation assignments intended to develop their abilities to present and evaluate scientific arguments. Within these assignments, we also assessed students' evaluation abilities by comparing their evaluations to a set of expert evaluations. We summarize our development efforts and describe the changes we observed in student evaluation behavior.
