Mary Bridget Kustusch

An Expert Path Through a Thermo Maze

Several studies in recent years have demonstrated that upper-division students struggle with partial derivatives and the complicated chain rules ubiquitous in thermodynamics. We asked several experts (primarily faculty who teach thermodynamics) to solve a challenging and novel thermodynamics problem in order to understand how they navigate through this maze. What we found was a tremendous variety in solution strategies and sense-making tools, both within and between individuals. This case study focuses on one particular expert: his solution paths, use of sense-making tools, and comparison of different approaches.

Name the experiment! Interpreting thermodynamic derivatives as thought experiments

We introduce a series of activities to help students understand the partial derivatives that arise in thermodynamics. Students construct thought experiments that would allow them to measure given partial derivatives. These activities are constructed with a number of learning goals in mind, beginning with helping students to learn to think of thermodynamic quantities in terms of how one can measure or change them. A second learning goal is for students to understand the importance of the quantities held fixed in either a partial derivative or an experiment. Students additionally are given an experimental perspective—particularly when this activity is combined with real laboratory experiments—on the meaning of either fixing or changing entropy. In this paper, we introduce the activities and explain their learning goals. We also include examples of student work from classroom video and follow-up interviews.

Using Social Network Analysis on classroom video data

We propose a novel application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) using classroom video data as a means of quantitatively and visually exploring the collaborations between students. The context for our study was a summer program that works with first generation students and deaf/hard-of-hearing students to engage in authentic science practice and develop a supportive community. We applied SNA to data from one activity during the two-week program to test our approach and as a means to begin to assess whether the goals of the program are being met. We used SNA to identify groups that were interacting in unexpected ways and then to highlight how individuals were contributing to the overall group behavior. We plan to expand our new use of SNA to video data on a larger scale.

Exploring Student Difficulties With Observation Location

Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the objects center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple objects are involved, and further when electric and magnetic fields are present. In the latter, sources of the fields are often identified as a set of electric charges or current-carrying wires, and students are asked to determine the electric or magnetic field at a separate location defined as the observation location. Previous research suggests students struggle with accounting for how a measurement or calculation depends on the observation location. We present preliminary results from a studio-style, algebra-based, introductory electricity and magnetism course showing the prevalence of correct and incorrect responses to questions about observation location by analyzing student written work involving vector addition of fields.

Supporting and sustaining the holistic development of students into practicing physicists

This PERC workshop leveraged the broad expertise inherent in the PERC community to begin structuring a research agenda that might guide future efforts to support the holistic development of students into practicing physicists. In small groups, participants identified and discussed those concepts, habits of mind, skills, and representations that thread through the sub-disciplines of upper-division physics. Then separate small groups and later the whole group discussed the following questions: 1) What are the characteristics of curricula that scaffold student acquisition of these concepts, habits of mind, skills, and representations throughout the upper-division? 2) What aspects of institutional culture might facilitate the development, support, and sustainability of these curricula? 3) What models of research are currently available to address the questions above and where are new models needed? The conclusions of this workshop are summarized here for the benefit of the entire community.