Prior research suggests that using evidence-based pedagogies can not only improve learning for all students, it can also reduce the gender gap. We describe the impact of physics education research-based pedagogical techniques in flipped and active-engagement non-flipped courses on the gender gap observed with validated conceptual surveys. We compare male and female students’ performance in courses which make significant use of evidence-based active-engagement (EBAE) strategies with courses that primarily use lecture-based (LB) instruction. All courses had large enrolment and often had more than 100 students. The analysis of data for validated conceptual surveys presented here includes data from two-semester sequences of algebra-based and calculus-based introductory physics courses. The conceptual surveys used to assess student learning in the first and second semester courses were the force concept inventory and the conceptual survey of electricity and magnetism, respectively. In the research discussed here, the performance of male and female students in EBAE courses at a particular level is compared with LB courses in two situations: (I) the same instructor taught two courses, one of which was an EBAE course and the other an LB course, while the homework, recitations and final exams were kept the same; (II) student performance in all of the EBAE courses taught by different instructors was averaged and compared with LB courses of the same type also averaged over different instructors. In all cases, on conceptual surveys we find that students in courses which make significant use of active-engagement strategies, on average, outperformed students in courses of the same type using primarily lecture-based instruction even though there was no statistically significant difference on the pre-test before instruction. However, the gender gap persisted even in courses using EBAE methods. We also discuss correlations between the performance of male and female students on the validated conceptual surveys and the final exam, which had a heavy weight on quantitative problem solving.
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 one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of first-year physics graduate students enrolled in a teaching assistant training course related to topics covered in the TUG-K. In particular, for each item on the TUG-K, the graduate students were asked to identify which incorrect answer choice they thought would be most commonly selected by introductory physics students if they did not know the correct answer after instruction in relevant concepts. We used the graduate student data and the data from Beichner's original paper for introductory physics students (which was collected from over 500 college and high school students) to assess this aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of the graduate students, i.e., knowledge of student difficulties related to kinematics graphs as they are revealed by the TUG-K. We find that, although the graduate students, on average, performed better than random guessing at identifying introductory student difficulties on the TUG-K, they did not identify many common difficulties that introductory students have with graphs in kinematics. In addition, we find that the ability of graduate students to identify the difficulties of introductory students is context dependent and that discussions among the graduate students improved their understanding of student difficulties related to kinematics graphs. Moreover, we find that the ability of American graduate students in identifying common student difficulties is comparable with that of foreign graduate students.
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by administering conceptual problems on topics covered in undergraduate physics courses before and after instruction in related first year core graduate courses. Here, we focus on physics graduate students' difficulties manifested by their performance on two qualitative problems involving diagrammatic representation of vector fields. Some graduate students had great difficulty in recognizing whether the diagrams of the vector fields had divergence and/or curl but they had no difficulty computing the divergence and curl of the vector fields mathematically. We also conducted individual discussions with various faculty members who regularly teach first year graduate physics core courses about the goals of these courses and the performance of graduate students on the conceptual problems after related instruction in core courses.
Prior research suggests that introductory physics students have difficulty with graphing and interpreting graphs. Here, we discuss an investigation of student difficulties in translating between mathematical and graphical representations for a problem in electrostatics and the effect of increasing levels of scaffolding on students' representational consistency. Students in calculus-based introductory physics were given a typical problem that can be solved using Gauss's law involving a spherically symmetric charge distribution in which they were asked to write a mathematical expression for the electric field in various regions and then plot the electric field. In study 1, we found that students had great difficulty in plotting the electric field as a function of the distance from the center of the sphere consistent with the mathematical expressions in various regions, and interviews with students suggested possible reasons which may account for this difficulty. Therefore, in study 2, we designed two scaffolding interventions with levels of support which built on each other (i.e., the second scaffolding level built on the first) in order to help students plot their expressions consistently and compared the performance of students provided with scaffolding with a comparison group which was not given any scaffolding support. Analysis of student performance with different levels of scaffolding reveals that scaffolding from an expert perspective beyond a certain level may sometimes hinder student performance and students may not even discern the relevance of the additional support. We provide possible interpretations for these findings based on in-depth, think-aloud student interviews.
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating student difficulties with quantum mechanics pertaining to the double-slit experiment in various situations that appear to be counterintuitive and contradict classical notions of particles and waves. For example, if we send single electrons through the slits, they may behave as a "wave" in part of the experiment and as a "particle" in another part of the same experiment. Here we discuss the development and evaluation of a research-validated Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) which makes use of an interactive simulation to improve student understanding of the double-slit experiment and strives to help students develop a good grasp of foundational issues in quantum mechanics. We discuss common student difficulties identified during the development and evaluation of the QuILT and analyze the data from the pretest and post test administered to the upper-level undergraduate and first-year physics graduate students before and after they worked on the QuILT to assess its effectiveness. These data suggest that on average, the QuILT was effective in helping students develop a more robust understanding of foundational concepts in quantum mechanics that defy classical intuition using the context of the double-slit experiment. Moreover, upper-level undergraduates outperformed physics graduate students on the post test. One possible reason for this difference in performance may be the level of student engagement with the QuILT due to the grade incentive.
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