Pub Date : 2022-09-22DOI: 10.1119/perc.2022.pr.myers
Cari Myers, V. Sawtelle, Rachel Henderson
Traditionally, self-efficacy (SE), or the confidence in one’s capability to execute a task, is measured using pre/post-surveys to demonstrate shifts in students’ SE. In this work, we present a preliminary analysis of a single student drawing on a mixed methods approach to examine how their SE fluctuates over time. This novel design employs the Experience Sampling Method, a quantitative technique using surveys of domain-specific self-efficacy, and daily reflections, a qualitative technique investigating threats and supports towards students’ SE. The preliminary analysis was broken into two strands: (1) using interquartile range (IQR) to define low, normal, and high SE for a student based on their survey scores, and (2) using the student’s daily journal reflection responses as proof of concept for defining the student’s SE as low, normal, or high from the IQR analysis of survey responses. Findings indicate the boundaries of a student’s IQR can define high, normal, and low SE and the student’s responses to the daily journal prompts corroborates these definitions.
{"title":"A Mixed Methods Approach Towards Defining A Student's Ranges of Self-Efficacy","authors":"Cari Myers, V. Sawtelle, Rachel Henderson","doi":"10.1119/perc.2022.pr.myers","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.myers","url":null,"abstract":"Traditionally, self-efficacy (SE), or the confidence in one’s capability to execute a task, is measured using pre/post-surveys to demonstrate shifts in students’ SE. In this work, we present a preliminary analysis of a single student drawing on a mixed methods approach to examine how their SE fluctuates over time. This novel design employs the Experience Sampling Method, a quantitative technique using surveys of domain-specific self-efficacy, and daily reflections, a qualitative technique investigating threats and supports towards students’ SE. The preliminary analysis was broken into two strands: (1) using interquartile range (IQR) to define low, normal, and high SE for a student based on their survey scores, and (2) using the student’s daily journal reflection responses as proof of concept for defining the student’s SE as low, normal, or high from the IQR analysis of survey responses. Findings indicate the boundaries of a student’s IQR can define high, normal, and low SE and the student’s responses to the daily journal prompts corroborates these definitions.","PeriodicalId":253382,"journal":{"name":"2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121890420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-15DOI: 10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Young_N
Nicholas T. Young, B. Lewis, Emily Kerr, Prasanth H. Nair
Discipline-based education researchers produce knowledge that aims to help instructors improve student learning and educational outcomes. Yet, the information produced may not even reach the educators it is intended to influence. Prior work has found that instructors often face barriers to implementing practices in peer-reviewed literature. Some of these barriers are related to accessing the knowledge in the first place such as difficulty finding and understanding research and a lack of time to do so. To lower these barriers, we created an online blog, PERbites, that summarizes recent discipline-based education research in short posts that use plain language. Having covered nearly 100 papers to date, we conducted a survey to see if we were addressing the need we had originally set out to address. We posted a 23-item survey on our website and received 24 usable responses. The results suggested that readers do generally agree that we are meeting our original goals. Readers reported that our articles were easier to understand and used more plain language than a typical discipline-based education research (DBER) journal article. At the same time, readers thought that all the important information was still included. Finally, readers said that this approach helped them keep up with DBER studies and read about papers they otherwise would not have. However, most readers did not indicate they changed their teaching and research practice as a result of reading our blog. Our results suggest that alternative methods of sharing research (e.g., non-peer reviewed publications or conference talks) can be an effective method of connecting research with practitioners, and future work should consider how we as a community might build on these efforts to ensure education research can make meaningful changes in the classroom.
{"title":"Using blogs to make peer-reviewed research more accessible","authors":"Nicholas T. Young, B. Lewis, Emily Kerr, Prasanth H. Nair","doi":"10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Young_N","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Young_N","url":null,"abstract":"Discipline-based education researchers produce knowledge that aims to help instructors improve student learning and educational outcomes. Yet, the information produced may not even reach the educators it is intended to influence. Prior work has found that instructors often face barriers to implementing practices in peer-reviewed literature. Some of these barriers are related to accessing the knowledge in the first place such as difficulty finding and understanding research and a lack of time to do so. To lower these barriers, we created an online blog, PERbites, that summarizes recent discipline-based education research in short posts that use plain language. Having covered nearly 100 papers to date, we conducted a survey to see if we were addressing the need we had originally set out to address. We posted a 23-item survey on our website and received 24 usable responses. The results suggested that readers do generally agree that we are meeting our original goals. Readers reported that our articles were easier to understand and used more plain language than a typical discipline-based education research (DBER) journal article. At the same time, readers thought that all the important information was still included. Finally, readers said that this approach helped them keep up with DBER studies and read about papers they otherwise would not have. However, most readers did not indicate they changed their teaching and research practice as a result of reading our blog. Our results suggest that alternative methods of sharing research (e.g., non-peer reviewed publications or conference talks) can be an effective method of connecting research with practitioners, and future work should consider how we as a community might build on these efforts to ensure education research can make meaningful changes in the classroom.","PeriodicalId":253382,"journal":{"name":"2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134195883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-29DOI: 10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Meyer
J. C. Meyer, G. Passante, S. Pollock, Bethany R. Wilcox
Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted exploratory interviews with 22 students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university crosslisted in physics and computer science, as well as 6 graduate students in a similar graduate-level QIS course offered in physics. We classify and analyze students' responses to a pair of questions regarding the fundamental differences between classical and quantum computers. We specifically note two key themes of importance to educators: (1) when reasoning about computational power, students often struggled to distinguish between the relative effects of exponential and linear scaling, resulting in students frequently focusing on distinctions that are arguably better understood as analog-digital than classical-quantum, and (2) introducing the thought experiment of analog classical computers was a powerful tool for helping students develop a more expertlike perspective on the differences between classical and quantum computers.
{"title":"Investigating student interpretations of the differences between classical and quantum computers: Are quantum computers just analog classical computers?","authors":"J. C. Meyer, G. Passante, S. Pollock, Bethany R. Wilcox","doi":"10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Meyer","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Meyer","url":null,"abstract":"Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted exploratory interviews with 22 students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university crosslisted in physics and computer science, as well as 6 graduate students in a similar graduate-level QIS course offered in physics. We classify and analyze students' responses to a pair of questions regarding the fundamental differences between classical and quantum computers. We specifically note two key themes of importance to educators: (1) when reasoning about computational power, students often struggled to distinguish between the relative effects of exponential and linear scaling, resulting in students frequently focusing on distinctions that are arguably better understood as analog-digital than classical-quantum, and (2) introducing the thought experiment of analog classical computers was a powerful tool for helping students develop a more expertlike perspective on the differences between classical and quantum computers.","PeriodicalId":253382,"journal":{"name":"2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125002367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-09DOI: 10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Corsiglia
Giaco Corsiglia, S. Pollock, Bethany R. Wilcox
Changing basis is a common task when solving quantum mechanical problems. As part of a research project investigating student understanding of basis and change of basis in quantum mechanics, we developed a tutorial to support students in learning about basis in the context of spin-1/2 systems. We have since created an interactive online version of the basis tutorial as part of a freely available suite of online quantum tutorials called ACE Physics (acephysics.net). The ACE Physics tutorials include dynamic guidance elements and, unlike other tutorials, are intended for use outside the classroom without instructor facilitation. After extensive study in an instructor-supported environment, we assigned the ACE Physics basis tutorial as homework in two semesters of upper-division quantum mechanics, and we report on the effectiveness of the activity based on pre-/post-testing and comparison of student exam performance with a similar semester that did not include the activity. We find that the tutorial produces sufficient learning gains to justify continued assignment as a homework problem in our classes.
{"title":"Effectiveness of an online homework tutorial about changing basis in quantum mechanics","authors":"Giaco Corsiglia, S. Pollock, Bethany R. Wilcox","doi":"10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Corsiglia","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Corsiglia","url":null,"abstract":"Changing basis is a common task when solving quantum mechanical problems. As part of a research project investigating student understanding of basis and change of basis in quantum mechanics, we developed a tutorial to support students in learning about basis in the context of spin-1/2 systems. We have since created an interactive online version of the basis tutorial as part of a freely available suite of online quantum tutorials called ACE Physics (acephysics.net). The ACE Physics tutorials include dynamic guidance elements and, unlike other tutorials, are intended for use outside the classroom without instructor facilitation. After extensive study in an instructor-supported environment, we assigned the ACE Physics basis tutorial as homework in two semesters of upper-division quantum mechanics, and we report on the effectiveness of the activity based on pre-/post-testing and comparison of student exam performance with a similar semester that did not include the activity. We find that the tutorial produces sufficient learning gains to justify continued assignment as a homework problem in our classes.","PeriodicalId":253382,"journal":{"name":"2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings","volume":"706 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115488766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}