First-year Physics Research Articles

Gender gaps and gendered action in a first-year physics laboratory

Examination of gender gaps and potential sources of gender gaps through laboratory observations.

The role of the iPad in collaborative learning in a large-enrollment first-year physics module

The role of the iPad was investigated in the possible enhancement of collaborative learning within a tutorial setting in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. Every tutorial session was divided into an ‘iPad group’ and a ‘non-iPad group’. A set of core apps was chosen to facilitate discussion within the group. In order to maintain parity across the two groups, all the tutorial questions had to be refitted into a form suitable for use with the iPad. The results of a survey done after each tutorial indicates that, qualitatively, the iPad significantly enhanced the learning experience and strongly contributed to discussion within the group.

Choosing to Major in Physics, or Not: Factors Affecting Undergraduate Decision Making

For the past 40 years, there has been apprehension in North American society, and particularly in the scientific community, concerning the decline of interest and enrollment in science degree programs at the post- secondary level. This trend has proven very difficult to reverse. The purpose of this study was to explore why students at an Atlantic Canadian university pursue a major in physics, and why other eligible students make different choices. Both the students themselves and their physics professors were consulted in the course of this investigation. With a poststructural, constructivist theoretical framework, an instrumental case study of this university is presented using a qualitative online survey for students and semi-structured interviews with their professors. Data from this study supports the theory of physics identity proposed by Hazari et al. (2010). The themes reflected the four dimensions of physics identity, namely, interest, recognition, performance, and competence, with interest appearing as the most important of the four. One additional dimension, the career prospects problem, was reflected within the themes of this study. This research begins to address the concern of declining enrollments by examining the decision-making process of first-year physics students to stay-the-course or to pursue other options with a clear indication that as physics educationalists, we need to clearly articulate viable career options available to those who hold an undergraduate physics degree. Else, students will choose degrees whose career paths have been clearly labeled by society.

When and Why Are the Values of Physical Quantities Expressed with Uncertainties? A Case Study of a Physics Undergraduate Laboratory Course

The understanding of measurement is related to the understanding of the nature of science—one of the main goals of current international science teaching at all levels of education. This case study explores how a first-year university physics course deals with measurement uncertainties in the light of an epistemological analysis of measurement. The data consist of the course documents, interviews with senior instructors, and laboratory instructors’ responses to an online questionnaire. During laboratory work, uncertainties are expressed in the large majority of the measurements made by the students but only in less than half of their calculation results. The instructors’ expectations are that students systematically estimate uncertainties so that they become aware that measurements and calculations are never exact. However, since uncertainties are not specified for the values given in the laboratory guides, uncertainties are often missing from the results of students’ calculations. The potential side effects of students’ measurement understanding are discussed and suggestions for improvements are proposed.

Exploring possible selves in a first-year physics foundation class: Engaging students by establishing relevance

Students often complain that they cannot see the relevance of what they are being taught in foundation physics classes. While revising and adjusting the curriculum and teaching are important, this study suggests it might also be useful to help students view their learning in relation to their future career aspirations. This paper reports on a study conducted with first-year students enrolled in a compulsory foundation physics unit with a history of low pass rates. Working within a “possible selves” framework, activities were designed to help students position their learning in relation to possible future lives and careers. Two cohorts of students (N=93) engaged in an intensive workshop comprising multiple activities relating to self and career. Self-reflection worksheets were analyzed using content analysis. The results indicate that students experience immediate benefits from these activities through self-reflection on the current self, future possible professional selves, and the role of current studies in narrowing the gap between the two.Received 9 July 2015DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.010120This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasEpistemology, attitudes, & beliefsProfessional TopicsLower undergraduate studentsPhysics Education Research

How does grit impact college students’ academic achievement in science?

Research has suggested that achievement is not solely based on the cognitive abilities of the learner, but rather on the combination of cognitive ability and personality traits. This paper explores how grit affects student academic performance and success in first-year college physics students in the context of a Quebec College d'enseignement general et professionnel (CEGEP). Two hierarchical linear regressions were performed using scores on a 12-item 5-point Likert scale survey measure of Grit on student cumulative GPA and on final exam mark for a gateway physics course, controlling for gender and high school GPA. Prior academic performance was found to be a significant predictor of college performance, as well as success in the gateway physics course. Grit was not found to be a significant predictor of student academic achievement or course success.

Drawing and using free body diagrams: Why it may be better not to decompose forces

In this study we investigated how two different approaches to drawing free body diagrams influence the development of students' understanding of Newton's laws including their ability to identify real forces. For this purpose we developed a 12- item two-tier multiple choice survey and conducted a quasi-experiment. This experiment included two groups of first-year physics students from Rijeka (RG) and Split (SG) University. Students from both groups solved mechanics problems for a period of two class hours. The only difference was that RG students used the superposition of forces approach to solving mechanics problems and in SG the decomposition of forces approach has been used. The ANCOVA showed a statistically significant difference in favour of RG, whereby the effect sizes were moderate to large, and largest differences have been observed in the ability of identifying real forces. Students from the control group (SG) more often exhibited the misconception that forces and their components act on a body independently and simultaneously. Our results support the idea that the practice of resolving forces into components may not be the most effective way to develop understanding of Newton's laws and the concept of force.

Non-physics peer demonstrators in undergraduate laboratories: a study of students’ perceptions

Laboratory demonstrators play a crucial role in facilitating students’ learning in physics subjects. Inspired by the success of peer-led activities, we introduced peer demonstrators to support student learning in first-year physics subjects that enrol students not intending to major in physics. Surveys were administered to 1700 students over 4 years in four subjects to examine student perceptions of how demonstrators assisted them in the laboratory. Scores awarded to peer demonstrators by students were no lower than those awarded to demonstrators traditionally employed in the first year physics laboratory. These latter demonstrators were drawn mainly from the ranks of physics research students. The findings validate the recruitment of peer demonstrators and will be used to inform the recruitment and support programmes for laboratory demonstrators.

Pursuing lines of flight: Enacting equity-based preservice teacher learning in first-year teaching

This article examines how one first-year physics teacher translated his inquiry-based, socially just pre-professional learning into classroom practice in his first several months of teaching, using rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of social activity, as a theoretical and methodological frame. This case highlights the complexity of enacting a social justice-oriented pedagogical practice as a new teacher in a constrained school environment. Although the participant experienced positive interactions with his students, he faced multiple external challenges as well as his own internal conflicts about teaching methods. These conditions influenced him to adopt more traditional practices than those that were espoused in the participant’s teacher education programme, although some evidence of progressive teaching surfaced inconsistently. Authors provide recommendations for teacher educators and policy makers to better support new teachers as they transition into the first year of teaching, and call on researchers to explore methodologies and theories that can account for nonlinearity, complexity and multiplicity in investigating teaching and learning.

New assessment process in an introductory undergraduate physics laboratory: an exploration on collaborative learning

A new team learning assessment process was designed and tested in a first-year university physics laboratory class. The assessment process was designed to provide a strong incentive for students to cooperate and feel responsible for each other’s learning and fostering a sense of collaboration rather than competition. Specifically, the new assessment process involves randomly dividing students into teams of four to work on a physics experiment and, at the end of the laboratory session, randomly selecting only one team member to carry out a post-laboratory session performance task. The results indicate that learning outcomes were not compromised in the new assessment process and that peer instruction was employed to a greater extent compared to our standard process. Student responses from a post-assessment survey revealed that 76% of students considered our new assessment process to be fair, whereas 57% of students felt our standard process was fair. The new assessment process used in this study led to a 75% reduction in grading duties – an advantage for large class management.

Recognizing Prefixes in Scientific Quantities

Although recognizing prefixes in physical quantities is inherent for practitioners, it might not be inherent for students, who do not use prefixes in their everyday life experiences. This deficiency surfaces in AP Physics exams. For example, readers of an AP Physics exam reported “a common mistake of incorrectly converting nanometers to meters.” Similar students' mistakes were reported also by AP Chemistry readers “as in previous years, students still had difficulty converting kJ to J.” While traditional teaching focuses on memorizing the symbols of prefixes, little attention is given to helping learners recognize a prefix in a given quantity. I noticed in my teaching practice that by making the processes of identifying prefixes more explicit, students make fewer mistakes on unit conversion. Thus, this paper presents an outline of a lesson that focuses on prefix recognition. It is designed for a first-year college physics class; however, its key points can be addressed to any group of physics students.

THE EFFECT OF TEACHER ERROR FEEDBACK ON THE ACCURACY OF EFL STUDENT WRITING

This study investigated the effect of teacher error feedback on students' ability to write accurately. Three male first-year Physics graduate students at a university in Taiwan participated in this study. They were asked to write a 100-word passage about the greatest invention in human history. Within days of the teacher’s grammatical feedback, the students were required to revise their work again based on the teacher's suggested revisions. In addition, oral conferencing was conducted in order to help the students obtain a better comprehension of certain grammar points. Four weeks after the oral conferencing, the students were asked, without prior notice, to revise their original passages again. The findings reveal that the students made progress in the revised versions of their passages, but the success was not repeated in their later test versions. In other words, no positive relationship between teacher error feedback and students’ improvement in linguistic accuracy over time was observed. This suggests that teacher error feedback alone may not facilitate the learning of linguistic information. A combination of sufficient exposure to English in reading and writing, plus opportunities to practice the language, for example, may lead to better grammar.

Buoyancy Can-Can

In this paper, a discrepant event is used to initiate a learning cycle1 lesson to help students develop an understanding of the concept and equation for buoyant force. The data are gathered using readily available equipment and then graphically analyzed using a four-step analysis consistent with the modeling instructional approach.2 This laboratory activity is appropriate for high school or first-year college physics, and provides the opportunity for review of free-body diagrams, experimental design, and graphical analysis. We use the “BSCS 5E” version of the Karplus learning cycle idea, popularized by Bybee, in which students are expected to Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate.3

Going Beyond Equations With Disciplinary Thinking In First-Year Physics

Students in first-year physics courses generally focus on hunting for suitable equations and formulas when tackling a variety of physical situations and physics problems. There is a need for a framework that can guide them to disciplinary ways of thinking and help them begin to think like physicists. To serve this end, in this study, a framework of disciplinary thinking in physics was presented to the students and incorporated in the delivery of a first-year course on electricity and magnetism for engineering students. The framework consisted of three types of thinking: principlebased thinking (PBT), case-based thinking (CBT), and experiential-intuitive thinking (EIT). The students’ experiences of learning this framework were tracked through weekly reflection reports, which were analyzed using a coding scheme comprised of the following four categories of increasing cognitive complexity for each type of thinking: mentioning the type of thinking learned without elaboration (code A), mentioning the type of thinking learned with elaboration (code B), applying the type of thinking learned (code C) and making meaning of the type of thinking learned (code D). Examples of students’ reflections for these codes for each type of thinking are included. The students most predominantly reflected on PBT followed by CBT with a very few reflections on EIT. Within both PBT and CBT, most reflections fell under the code B. Overall, the results are encouraging and point to a students’ shift from formula hunting to the thinking framework based strategies.

Compressed-format compared to regular-format in a first-year university physics course

We compare student performance in two sessions of a large first-year university physics course, one with a normal 12-week term and the other with a compressed 6-week term. Student performance is measured by the normalized gain on the Force Concept Inventory. We find that the gains for the regular-format course are better than the gains for the compressed-format course, and while the differences in gains are small they are statistically significant. Not accounted for are the differences in effectiveness of the different instructors in the two versions of the course.

Training to Use the Scientific Method in a First-Year Physics Laboratory: A Case Study

In this work, a specific implementation of a so-called experimental or open-ended laboratory is proposed and evaluated. Keeping in mind the scheduling limitations imposed by the context, first-year engineering physics laboratory practices have been revised in order to facilitate acquisition of the skills that are required in the experimental work. These skills concern different conceptual and procedural abilities related to designing experiments, taking measurements, analyzing the results and reporting properly the whole process. The employed approach is described, and the achieved results are evaluated by a series of tests at the beginning and end of the academic year. Additionally, the students’ laboratory reports are used to quantify the evolution of acquiring these scientific skills. The evaluation of the results obtained from the aforementioned tests and laboratory reports gives enlightening information about students’ apprehension of the experimental method itself, as well as the difficulties they find in each of the different, complex tasks that they must carry out during this process.

Revisiting the Velocity Selector Problem with VPython

The velocity selector is a classic first-year physics problem that demonstrates the influence of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields on a charged particle.1 Traditionally textbooks introduce this problem in the context of balanced forces, often asking for field strengths that would allow a charged particle, with a specific target velocity, to pass through the field region with constant velocity2–4 While this analysis is quite useful from a pedagogical perspective, especially for checking to see if students remember their Newtonian mechanics from first semester, it is just one meaningful application of the velocity selector. In fact, a recent conversation with the author's physics class yielded an important question: What is the shape of a particle's path whose initial velocity does not match the target velocity? While the class was in agreement that the path would be “curved,” they were at a loss for more detail. Solving this problem analytically can be difficult, especially for introductory physics students, given that the direction and magnitude of the magnetic force (and by extension, the particle's acceleration) change in time.

A New Course and Textbook on Physical Models of Living Systems, for Science and Engineering Undergraduates

I’ll describe an intermediate-level undergraduate course developed over several years at University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The only prerequisite is first-year university physics and calculus. The course is a response to rapidly growing interest among undergraduates in several science and engineering departments.Students acquire several research skills that are often not addressed in traditional courses:• Basic modeling skills• Probabilistic modeling skills• Data analysis methods• Computer programming using a general-purpose platform like MATLAB or Python• Dynamical systems, particularly feedback control.These basic skills, which are relevant to nearly any field of science or engineering, are presented in the context of case studies from living systems, including:• Virus dynamics• Bacterial genetics and evolution of drug resistance• Statistical inference• Superresolution microscopy• Synthetic biology• Naturally evolved cellular circuits.Publication of a new textbook by WH Freeman and Co. is scheduled for December 2014.

Student and expert perceptions of the role of mathematics within physics

Students’ perceptions of the role of mathematics within physics were examined. I propose that the identification of physics as a science based ultimately on experiment is a threshold concept: transformation from a naive view that physics is based upon mathematics to an expert view that physics is based on experiment is difficult for students. Seven students taking first-year university physics were interviewed in two focus groups; nine practising physicists from academia and industry (considered as experts) were interviewed as six individuals plus one focus group of three participants. Of particular interest was the ‘expert’ view emphasizing the conceptual nature of physics. This was a threshold in understanding that had not been crossed by students. Rather, students viewed mathematics and physics as being more strongly connected than did practising physicists; specifically that “maths explains physics”. Experts consider this view as holding back a student’s understanding of the subject and preventing them from becoming effective physicists. It is troublesome to students because they are less able to identify the relevant concepts before trying to tackle a problem with mathematics, making their approach less likely to be effective, however, both groups (physicists and students) identified physics as belonging to ‘the real world’ and that mathematics shows how physical entities can be combined or related, indicating student responses are not completely naive. Opinions on how best to teach mathematical concepts in physics varied considerably across participants.

Forelimbs of Tyrannosaurus Rex: A pathetic vestigial organ or an integral part of a fearsome predator?

In this paper, we examine a first-year torque and angular acceleration problem to address a possible use of the forelimbs of Tyrannosaurus rex. A 1/40th-scale model (see Fig. 1) is brought to the classroom to introduce the students to the quandary: given that the forelimbs of T. rex were too short to reach its mouth, what function did the forelimbs serve? This issue crosses several scientific disciplines including paleontology, ecology, and physics, making it a great starting point for thinking “outside the box.” Noted paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter has suggested that the forelimbs of T. rex were an integral part of its predatory behavior. Given the large teeth of T. rex, it is assumed that they killed with their teeth. Lipkin and Carpenter1 have suggested that the forelimbs were used to hold a struggling victim (which had not been dispatched with the first bite) while the final, lethal bite was applied. If that is the case, then the forelimbs must be capable of large angular accelerations α in order to grab the animal attempting to escape. The concepts of the typical first-year physics course are sufficient to test this hypothesis by solving α=τ/I. Naturally, students love solving any problem related to Tyrannosaurus rex!