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Register a new userPhysics as a Mechanism for Including ELLs in Classroom Discourse
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English Language Learners (ELLs) are frequently left on the periphery of classroom interactions. Due to misalignment of language skills, teachers and peers communicate with these students less often, decreasing the number of opportunities to engage. Exclusion can be avoided with learning activities that invite all students to participate and contribute ideas. We argue that environments and activities that privilege scientific inductive reasoning increase possibilities for emerging bilingual students to engage. This study investigated first-grade students discussions about factors that affect how objects float. Students came from a variety of language backgrounds; all were considered beginner/intermediate ELLs. Results show that the goal of inducing principles from actual phenomena encouraged students to communicate their ideas and reasoning, boosting students confidence in expressing themselves. Following the hybrid space argument of Vygotskys theory of concept formation, we illustrate that physics can be particularly suitable context for the co-development of concepts and English language skills.
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Most STEM students experience the introductory physics sequence in large-enrollment (N $gtrsim$ 100 students) classrooms, led by one lecturer and supported by a few teaching assistants. This work describes methods and principles we used to create an effective flipped classroom in large- enrollment introductory physics courses by replacing a majority of traditional lecture time with in-class student-driven activity worksheets. In this work, we compare student learning in courses taught by the authors with the flipped classroom pedagogy versus a more traditional pedagogy. By comparing identical questions on exams, we find significant learning gains for students in the student-centered flipped classroom compared to students in the lecturer-centered traditional classroom. Furthermore, we find that the gender gap typically seen in the introductory physics sequence is significantly reduced in the flipped classroom.
We report results from a study designed to identify links between undergraduate students views about experimental physics and their engagement in multiweek projects in lab courses. Using surveys and interviews, we explored whether students perceived particular classroom activities to be features of experimental physics practice. We focused on 18 activities, including maintaining lab notebooks, fabricating parts, and asking others for help. Interviewees identified activities related to project execution as intrinsic to experimental physics practice based on high prevalence of those activities in interviewees own projects. Fabrication-oriented activities were identified as conditional features of experimentation based on differences between projects, which interviewees attributed to variations in project resources. Interpersonal activities were also viewed as conditional features of experimentation, dependent upon ones status as novice or expert. Our findings suggest that students views about experimental physics are shaped by firsthand experiences of their own projects and secondhand experiences of those of others.
A large body of research shows that using interactive engagement pedagogy in the introductory physics classroom consistently results in significant student learning gains; however, with a few exceptions, those learning gains tend not to be accompanied by more expertlike attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics. In fact, in both traditionally taught and active learning classroom environments, students often become more novicelike in their attitudes and beliefs following a semester of instruction. Further, prior to instruction, men typically score higher than women on conceptual inventories, such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), and more expertlike on attitudinal surveys, such as the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), and those gender gaps generally persist following instruction. In this paper, we analyze three years of pre-post matched data for physics majors at Virginia Tech on the FCI and the CLASS. The courses were taught using a blended pedagogical model of peer instruction, group problem solving, and direct instruction, along with an explicit focus on the importance of conceptual understanding and a growth mindset. We found that the FCI gender gap decreased, and both men and women showed positive, expertlike shifts on the CLASS. Perhaps most surprisingly, we found a meaningful correlation between a students post- CLASS score and normalized FCI gain for women, but not for men.
This paper describes low-cost techniques used to collect video data in two different tutorial classrooms - one in which the recording equipment is permanently installed and one in which it is temporary. The author explains what to do before, during, and after class in these two situations, providing general strategies and technical advice for researchers interested in videotaping tutorials or similar classrooms.
Optical cloaking consists in hiding from sight an object by properly deviating the light that comes from it. An optical cloaking device (OCD) is an artifact that hides the object and, at the same time, its presence is not (or should not be) noticeable for the observer, who will have the impression of being looking through it. At the level of paraxial geometrical optics, suitable for undergraduate courses, simple OCDs can be built by combining a series of lenses. With this motivation, here we present an analysis of a simple projective OCD arrangement. First, a simple theoretical account in terms of the transfer matrix method is provided, and then the outcomes from a series of teaching experiments carried out with this device, easy to conduct in the classroom, are discussed. In particular, the performance of such an OCD is investigated by determining the effect of the hidden object, role here played by the opaque zone of an iris-type diaphragm, on the projected image of an illuminated transparent slide (test object). That is, cloaking is analyzed in terms of the optimal position and opening diameter of a diaphragm that still warrants an almost unaffected projected image. Because the lenses are not high-quality ones, the OCD is not aberration-free, which is advantageously considered to determine acceptable cloaking conditions (i.e., the tolerance of the device).
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