High School Physics Classroom Research Articles

Exploring the Teacher’s Role in Discourse and Social Regulation of Learning: Insights from Collaborative Sessions in High-School Physics Classrooms

Science educators incorporate collaborative engagement in model-based argumentation to meet curricular goals and build students’ capacity for scientific epistemic and social practices. During collaboration, groups encounter various challenges (e.g., lack of task understanding) and engage in social regulation to overcome them. However, little is known about whether and how various contextual factors (e.g., teacher presence, classroom climate, or academic discipline) can influence the nature of students’ collaboration and social regulation. The purpose of our qualitative case study was to examine how one such contextual factor, teacher presence, related to high school students’ discourse interactions and social regulation of learning during a collaborative model-based scientific argumentation task. In one classroom, the teacher was continuously present during groups’ discussions. In the other classroom, the teacher was intermittently present. We found that groups with a continuously present teacher had high on-task engagement that was teacher-led, with the students relying on the teacher for regulation. Groups with intermittent teacher presence had more off-task interactions but also engaged in more dialogic argumentation discourse with each other, initiating and enacting more modes of social regulation of learning than the other groups. These findings suggest that teachers must thoughtfully manage their presence and absence to instruct, model, scaffold, and fade their support for both scientific argumentation and the social regulation skills necessary to productively enact that argumentation, intentionally varying emphasis on one or the other. These findings highlight the importance of future research on teacher presence and other contextual factors that can affect how students collaborate and learn.

Skillfully Set Up High School Physics Classroom Questions to Cultivate Students’ Critical Thinking

Skillfully Set Up High School Physics Classroom Questions to Cultivate Students’ Critical Thinking

Expanding opportunities to learn in secondary science classrooms using unconventional forms of classroom assessments

AbstractThis study explores the role of unconventional forms of classroom assessments in expanding minoritized students' opportunities to learn (OTL) in high school physics classrooms. In this research + practice partnership project, high school physics teachers and researchers co‐designed a unit about momentum to expand minoritized students' meaningful OTL. Specifically, the unit was designed to (a) expand what it means to learn and be good at science using unconventional forms of assessment, (b) facilitate students to leverage everyday experiences, concerns, and home languages to do science, and (c) support teachers to facilitate meaningful dialogical interactions. The analysis focused on examining minoritized students' OTLs mediated by intentionally designed, curriculum‐embedded, unconventional forms of assessments. The participants were a total of 76 students in 11th or 12th grade. Data were gathered in the form of student assessment tasks, a science identity survey, and interviews. Data analysis entailed: (a) statistical analysis of student performance measured by conventional and unconventional assessments and (b) qualitative analysis of two Latinx students' experiences with the co‐designed curriculum and assessments. The findings suggest that the use of unconventional forms of curriculum‐embedded assessment can increase minoritized students' OTLifthe assessment facilitates minoritized students to personally and deeply relate themselves to academic tasks.

Diversified Teaching Strategies in Senior High School Physics Classroom

Diversified Teaching Strategies in Senior High School Physics Classroom

Problems and Solutions in Junior High School Physics Classroom Teaching

Problems and Solutions in Junior High School Physics Classroom Teaching

The Construction of High-efficient Junior High School Physics Classroom from the Perspective of Core Literacy

The Construction of High-efficient Junior High School Physics Classroom from the Perspective of Core Literacy

The Implementation of Physics Core Literacy in Senior High School Physics Classroom Teaching

The Implementation of Physics Core Literacy in Senior High School Physics Classroom Teaching

Promoting Interactive Teaching with ICT: Features of Intervention for the Realities in the Ghanaian Physics Senior High School Classroom

<p>This research reports on the design aspect of a bigger project which sought to design and implement information and communication technology (ICT)-based interventions for the purpose of developing pre-service teachers’ ICT competency for teaching physics in an interactive manner using a three-stage (design stage, implementation and evaluation stage, and documentation and reflection stage) design-based research approach. Using literature as a lens, this research examines the interventions that we designed in the first stage of the project with the intent to determine its features that promote interactive teaching and fit the Ghanaian senior high school physics classroom context. Findings show that the intervention with inherent features comprising of: a readily available, sustainable, context- and content-specific ICT teaching and learning environment; an ICT-oriented knowledge base for teachers’ uptake of ICT; an underlining framework for defining interactive and learner-centred teaching approach with ICT; ICT-driven interactive lesson objectives; an inquiry-driven, activity- and ICT-based learning material; and a collaborative classroom arrangement is appropriate and sensitive to the needs of the Ghanaian physics classroom context and, hence, possess the potential for promoting interactive teaching. The features of the interventions, as situated in the specific context of the research and implications of the findings are discussed.<strong></strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p>

Wave Reflections in a Circular Ripple Tank

Although ripple tanks have been used in the past to perform wave simulations for electromagnetic and acoustic phenomena, especially before the advent of computers, they are still often used to demonstrate wave propagation in high school and college physics classrooms. Usually ripple tanks have a rectangular shape. The wave propagating through the tank interacts with smaller slits, reflecting surfaces, and similar objects. Sophisticated circular ripple tanks have been built in the past, but their main purpose was for the study of wave phenomena in rotating systems. John Fleming in his book describes an elliptical ripple tank, but it is not clear if he actually built one. He discusses the possibility of generating a wave at one of the focal points of an ellipse and focusing it at the other.

Linking Dialogue with Student Modelling to Create an Adaptive Tutoring System for Conceptual Physics

Jim Greer and his colleagues argued that student modelling is essential to provide adaptive instruction in tutoring systems and showed that effective modelling is possible, despite being enormously challenging. Student modelling plays a prominent role in many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that address problem-solving domains. However, considerably less attention has been paid to using a student model to personalize instruction in tutorial dialogue systems (TDSs)—ITSs that engage students in natural-language, conceptual discussions. This paper describes Rimac, a TDS that tightly couples student modelling with tutorial dialogues about conceptual physics. Rimac is distinct from other TDSs insofar as it dynamically builds a persistent student model that guides reactive and proactive decision making in order to provide adaptive instruction. An initial pilot study set in high school physics classrooms compared a control version of Rimac without a student model with an experimental version that implemented a “poor man’s student model”; that is, the model was initialized using students’ pretest scores but not updated further. Both low and high prior knowledge students showed significant pretest to posttest learning gains. However, high prior knowledge students who used the experimental version of Rimac learned more efficiently than high prior knowledge students who used the control version. Specifically, high prior knowledge students who used the student model driven tutor took less time to complete the intervention but learned a similar amount as students who used the control version. A subsequent study found that both high and low prior knowledge students learned more efficiently from a version of the tutor that dynamically updates its student model during dialogues than from a control version that included the static “poor man’s student model.” We discuss future work needed to improve the performance of Rimac’s student model and to integrate TDSs in the classroom.

A Functional 3D-Printable Magnet Model of the ATLAS Toroid

The ATLAS detector is the largest particle detector at the LHC and one of the most complex machines ever built. It allows precise measurements of particles emanating from proton collisions. Due to its complexity, introducing the ATLAS detector in the high-school physics classroom can be challenging. Nonetheless, we show how to use 3D printing to provide a hands-on classroom activity by constructing a functional 3D model of the toroidal ATLAS magnet system. This model can be used to discover, visualize and explain the shape of a toroidal magnetic field and to start a discussion about the role of magnetic fields in particle detectors in general.

Scrutinising the positions of students and teacher engaged in argumentation in a high school physics classroom

ABSTRACTDespite the importance of scientific argumentation, it rarely occurs in science classrooms. Researchers have designed argumentation interventions to bridge this gap, but those efforts have limited impacts on transforming existing classroom practices. Argumentation is a linguistically social interaction. It is necessary to go beyond understanding the input and output of an argumentation innovation and comprehend the interactive process. In this case study, my focus dealt with understanding how a high school physics class adapted argumentation practices. I scrutinised the intellectual ecology of that classroom with a focus on the social dynamic of individuals during argumentation through the lens of interlocutors’ positions. Through close observation of a physics teacher and his 23 high school students for 6 months, I summarised the patterns of how individual variation in the competences of scientific content knowledge and rhetoric argumentation skills shaped the social dynamic of classroom argumentation, and then the adaption of argumentation practices. With the findings, I suggested features advantageous for argumentation implementation, such as comparably strong academic competences and externally motivating tasks. I also discussed the implications for argumentation implementation in high school science classes.

C2STEM: a System for Synergistic Learning of Physics and Computational Thinking

Synergistic learning combining computational thinking (CT) and STEM has proven to be an effective method for advancing learning and understanding in a number of STEM domains and simultaneously helping students develop important CT concepts and practices. We adopt a design-based approach to develop, evaluate, and refine our Collaborative, Computational STEM (C2STEM) learning environment. The system adopts a novel paradigm that combines visual model building with a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) to scaffold learning of high school physics using a computational modeling approach. In this paper, we discuss the design principles that guided the development of our open-ended learning environment (OELE) using a learning-by-modeling and evidence-centered approach for curriculum and assessment design. Students learn by building models that describe the motion of objects, and their learning is supported by scaffolded tasks and embedded formative assessments that introduce them to physics and CT concepts. We have also developed preparation for future learning (PFL) assessments to study students’ abilities to generalize and apply CT and science concepts and practices across problem solving tasks and domains. We use mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to analyze student learning during a semester-long study run in a high school physics classroom. We document some of the lessons learned from this study and discuss directions for future work.

3D Printable Quark Puzzle: A Model to Build Your Own Particle Systems

There is an increasing emphasis on fundamental particles, including quarks, in the high school physics classroom. However, many teachers might not feel comfortable teaching particle physics because it is a highly abstract and complex topic, and there are few hands-on activities to help teachers bring it into the classroom. In 2010, Gettrust presented a two-dimensional quark puzzle, a physical manipulative that allowed students to discover the rules of the Standard Model of particle physics through inquiry. In the paper Gettrust states: “An ideal set of pieces representing quarks would consist of three-dimensional objects that fit nicely together into some basic shape, such as a sphere or some platonic solid, but only for quark combinations allowed by Standard Model rules.” Here we report on our development of such a set of 3D manipulatives.

Supporting classroom orchestration with real-time feedback: A role for teacher dashboards and real-time agents

This paper investigates the role of the physical classroom environment, coupled with a technology environment that includes real-time agents and data analytics, to support the orchestration of complex collaborative inquiry designs in a high school physics classroom. This design-based research contributes to the wider domain of scripting and orchestration (e.g., Dillenbourg 2012; Dimitriadis 2012; Fischer et al. 2013). Guided by a theoretical perspective of learning in knowledge communities (Slotta et al., 2018), we partnered with a physics teacher to co-design curricular activities and assessments that engaged students in collectively solving, tagging and evaluating physics problems, creating a knowledge base of student-contributed examples, and using those examples as a resource in collaborative inquiry challenges. To support the teacher in orchestrating such a complex curricular design, we developed a tablet application that allowed the teacher see the state of the class in real-time, control the flow of activities and helped him know when and where he was needed within the flow of class activities. The tablet leveraged a set of specially designed real-time software agents to process student interactions in real time, allowing dynamic orchestration of student groups, material allocation, and teacher notifications. The paper begins with a review of recent literature on scripting and orchestration, drawing connection to the theoretical perspective of knowledge communities. We then describe our theoretical model, the design-based method, and details of our curriculum and technology environment. The paper concludes with a summary of how the teacher tablet and the real-time software agents helped support the teacher’s real-time facilitation and orchestration.

Learning Logs and the efficacy of autonomous reflecting

This paper examines the educational impact of a prepilot study on the “Learning Logs” literacy strategy as it was used in Louisiana. The study examined how students’ conceptual understanding of kinematics and Newton’s laws were impacted in a ninth-grade physical science course. The findings address a gap within the current research literature concerning the efficacy of the strategy in the high-school physics classroom. Pre- and posttesting evidence demonstrated that participating in the end-of-class activity of autonomous reflection, without instructor feedback, resulted in negative learning gains and reinforcement of misconceptions. The data collected demonstrate a need for a more standardized feedback system to better inform students and teachers on conceptual mastery.

Understanding the relationship between levels of mobile technology use in high school physics classrooms and the learning outcome

AbstractMobile technology has been increasingly adopted in science education. We generally assume that more innovative use of mobile technology leads to a greater learning outcome. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research to support this assumption. To fill in the gap, we drew upon data from 803 high school students who had used mobile devices for five months in physics classrooms. Using the SAMR model (ie, Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition), we distinguished their uses into two levels: Substitution (replacing traditional instructional approach with mobile technology without functional improvement), and augmentation (enhancing instruction with affordances provided by mobile technology). Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling analysis, we found that the augmentation level of use was positively correlated with the physics learning outcome, but the substitution level of use was not. We further identified four sub‐types of uses within the augmentation level. We found that after‐school remediating activities and student–teacher displaying activities were positively correlated with student physics achievement, but teacher‐assigned activities had no significant correlation and learning aid activities had a negative correlation with the learning outcome. This study provided empirical evidence to support the assumption that a higher level of mobile technology use may be related to a greater learning outcome and that the impact of mobile technology may be determined by multiple factors such as who initiates the use and whether the use enhances or distracts students' knowledge construction.

Superconductors in the high school classroom

In this article, we discuss the behavior of high-temperature superconductors and how to demonstrate them safely and effectively in the high school or introductory physics classroom. Included here is a discussion of the most relevant physics topics that can be demonstrated, some safety tips, and a bit of the history of superconductors. In an effort to include first-year physics students in the world of modern physics, a topic as engaging as superconductivity should not be missed. It is an opportunity to inspire students to study physics through the myriad of possible applications that high temperature superconductors hold for the future.

Towards a high quality high school workforce: A longitudinal, demographic analysis of U.S. public school physics teachers

Analysis of a large data set indicates that while the trends are positive, the U.S. still falls short of having a highly qualified teacher in every high school physics classroom.

Determining magnetic susceptibilities of everyday materials using an electronic balance

The magnetic properties of an object and its interaction with an external magnetic field can be described through the magnetic (volume) susceptibility χV, which divides nearly all kinds of matter into diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ferromagnetic substances. Quantitative measurements of χV are usually technically sophisticated or require the investigation of substances with high values of χV to reveal meaningful results. Here, we show that both diamagnetic and paramagnetic effects in everyday materials can be measured using only an electronic balance and a neodymium magnet, both of which are within the reach of typical introductory college and high school physics classrooms. The experimental results match related literature values remarkably well.