Physics

Research experience and mentoring has been identified as an effective intervention for increasing student engagement and retention in the STEM fields, with high impact on students from undeserved populations. However, one-on-one mentoring is limited by the number of available faculty, and in certain cases also by the availability of funding for stipend. One-on-one mentoring is further limited by the selection and self-selection of students. Since research positions are often competitive, they are often taken by the best-performing students. More importantly, many students who do not see themselves as the top students of their class, or do not identify themselves as researchers might not apply, and that self selection can have the highest impact on non-traditional students. To address the obstacles of scalability, selection, and self-selection, we designed a data science research experience for undergraduates as part of an introductory computer science course. Through the intervention, the students are exposed to authentic research as early as their first semester. The intervention is inclusive in the sense that all students registered to the course participate in the research, with no process of selection or self-selection. The research is focused on analytics of large text databases. Using discovery-enabling software tools, the students analyze a corpus of congressional speeches, and identify patterns of differences between democratic speeches and republican speeches, differences between speeches for and against certain bills, and differences between speeches about bills that passed and bills that did not pass. In the beginning of the research experience all student follow the same protocol and use the same data, and then each group of students work on their own research project as part of their final project of the course.

An extension of the Bachelardian notion of epistemological profile allows us to establish the appearance of a strong conformist thinking component following certain formulations of the Galilean concept of the relativity of motion, namely those associated to the idea that the Sun might revolve around Earth from certain points of view. We deduce the existence of a strong remanent paradigmatic pressure related to the Copernican paradigm. A study involving more than 2900 students, primary school teachers and future teachers shows a 97 percent prevalence of (pre-Galilean) Copernican conformism. The epistemological profiles of several high level academics, including professional physicists, a mathematician and a sociologist show that, under strong paradigmatic pressure, even professional scientists can shift from a scientific to a conformist way of thinking, possibly related in some cases to a gate-keeper posture. Even when desired, the personal shift to a more advanced (relativist) understanding of such a high-pressure issue as heliocentrism can be a lengthy process. Some consequences of this disturbing cognitive process for science education are also discussed.

A paper summarizing the discussions that happened during the Physics Education Research (POC in PERC) parallel sessions at the 2017 and 2018 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC).

The Solar System motivates students to interest themselves in sciences, as a large number of concepts may be easily introduced through the observation and understanding of planet's motion. Using a large representation of the Solar System at a human scale ("a human Orrery"), we have conducted different activities with 10 to 16 years old children. In this contribution, we discuss the different scientific concepts covered by the Human Orrery, allowing the connection of both science and mathematics subjects in schools. We then detail how this pedagogical tool may serve to introduce abstract concepts required to understand occultation phenomena through a modelling activity.

The Solar System motivates students to interest themselves in sciences, as a large number of concepts may be easily introduced through the observation and understanding of planet's motion. Using a large representation of the Solar System at a human scale ("a human Orrery"), we intend to show how cognitive activities about kinematics and dynamics are activated and linked to the sensori-motors activities. In the last three years, we have conducted different activities with 10 to 16 years old children. In this contribution, we discuss the different scientific concepts covered by the Human Orrery, and the enaction theory that provides a theoretical background to those activities. We detail the enaction of velocity with a description of the gestures in relation with the abstract concepts involved in kinematics.

We present a game-based approach to teach Bell inequalities and quantum cryptography at high school. The approach is based on kinesthetic activities and allows students to experience and discover quantum features and their applications first-hand. We represent quantum states by the orientation of students, and mimic quantitative random behaviour and measurements using dice and apps.

Most science classes and in particular Physics are delivered through traditional teaching methods. More specifically, in the traditional stand-and-deliver lecture, the information was transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the student and hence the students are only passive participants. Recent studies revealed that traditional lectures are inefficient and even more do not help students understand key concepts or develop critical thinking skills. Mazur described the traditional lecture as the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners. However, one of the approaches that can support students to study Physics more efficiently as well as develop critical and quantitative thinking skills is Engaged pedagogy. Engaged pedagogy, as a novel interactive teaching method and as well as a vector of success in teaching and learning Physics, is discussed in this paper. Additionally, the impact of technology on the proposed teaching pathway is presented.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) education is an increasingly popular topic area for K-12 teachers. However, little research has investigated how AI education can be designed to be more accessible to all learners. We organized co-design workshops with 15 K-12 teachers to identify opportunities to integrate AI education into core curriculum to leverage learners' interests. During the co-design workshops, teachers and researchers co-created lesson plans where AI concepts were embedded into various core subjects. We found that K-12 teachers need additional scaffolding in the curriculum to facilitate ethics and data discussions, and value supports for learner engagement, collaboration, and reflection. We identify opportunities for researchers and teachers to collaborate to make AI education more accessible, and present an exemplar lesson plan that shows entry points for teaching AI in non-computing subjects. We also reflect on co-designing with K-12 teachers in a remote setting.

We introduce a game to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics using a qubit (or spin-first) approach, where students can experience and discover its puzzling features first-hand. Students take the role of particles and scientists. Scientists unravel underlying rules and properties by collecting and analysing data that is generated by observing particles that act according to given rules. We show how this allows one to illustrate quantum states, their stochastic behavior under measurements as well as quantum entanglement. In addition, we use this approach to illustrate and discuss decoherence, and a modern application of quantum features, namely quantum cryptography. We have tested the game in class and report on the results we obtained.

As educators we often ask our physics students to work in groups---on tutorials, during in-class discussions, and on homework, projects, or exams. Researchers have documented the benefits of group work for students' conceptual mastery and problem solving skills, and have worked to optimize the productivity of group work by assigning roles and composing groups based on performance levels or gender. However, it is less common for us as a physics education research community to attend to the social dynamics and interactions among students within a collaborative setting, or to address students' views about group work. In this paper, we define \textit{epistemic stances toward group work}: stances towards what it means to generate and apply knowledge in a group. Through a case study analysis of a collaborative problem solving session among four physics students, we investigate how epistemic stances toward group work interact with social dynamics. We find that misalignment of stances between students can inform, and be informed by, the social positioning of group members. Understanding these fine-grained interactions is one way to begin to understand how to support students in engaging in productive and equitable group work.