In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities transitioned in-person instruction to a new modality we refer to as 'emergency remote teaching' (ERT). As many instructors may be facing this same format in future semesters, and in response to future emergency events, it is important to understand the student experience with ERT in order to inform recommendations and best practices that can be used to improve instruction. In this manuscript, we report on preliminary findings from a survey administered to physics students at a large research institution to gain both qualitative and quantitative feedback on what approaches to ERT are being used as well as which were perceived as most effective at supporting student learning. Here, we present four initial themes relating to: interactivity and student motivation; lecture format; exam format; and new challenges experienced by students as a result of ERT. These findings have significant implications for instructors with respect to optimizing ERT.
As a first step in a larger study of student reasoning in upper-division thermal physics, we conducted thinkaloud interviews with 8 physics graduate students to probe their understanding of entropy. In this paper, we'll discuss results from a question which presented students with a novel system-a string in a bath of water-and asked students to rank the probabilities of particular arrangements of the string, define macrostates of the system, and discuss specifically what is meant by the entropy of the system. Exploring graduate students' understanding of entropy and their ability to solve problems and reason with entropic arguments will provide insights into how physicists develop a mature understanding of entropy as a physical quantity. We find a tendency for graduate students to project properties of macrostates onto constituent microstates, and discuss other observations. We identify connections to previous research and lay out the next steps for this project.
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and problem solving. Students might generate diagrams to orient themselves to a scenario, to organize information to aid in solving a problem, or as a tool of communication to demonstrate their understanding of a physical scenario. By asking 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors to solve a number of multiple-choice physics problems-with no prompting regarding diagrams-and then explicitly asking them to generate diagrams of similar physical scenarios, we are able to compare which elements of a scenario students externalize on their own as compared to when they are prompted. We found that different physical contexts impact how critical it is to draw an accurate diagrams, and we explore implications for teaching and research.
Significant focus in the PER community has been paid to student reasoning in undergraduate quantum mechanics. However, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted 15 exploratory think-aloud interviews with students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university cross-listed in the physics and computer science departments. Focusing on responses to one particular problem, we identify two notably consistent problem-solving strategies across students in the context of a particular interview prompt, which we term Naive Measurement Probabilities (NMP) and Virtual Quantum Computer (VQC), respectively. Operating from a resources framework, we interpret these strategies as choices of coherent (and potentially mutually-generative) sets of resources to employ and available actions to perform.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.