December 2023 Newsletter

From the GPER Chair

By: Jennifer Blue (2023 GPER Chair)

Dear GPER members,

This year, the Group on Physics Education Research (GPER) has continued to work on integrating into the larger APS community. Thanks to a membership drive, we now have more than 700 members, representing 1% of APS. All of our interactions with APS staff and our APS Council Representative, Laurie McNeil, have been excellent.

In January, Ben Zwickl and I attended the APS Leadership Meeting in Washington, DC, which allowed us to meet with APS staff and with members of the executive committees of other units. It was heartening to see how much we had in common!

Our executive committee continues to work with Physical Review Physics Education Research (PRPER), helping to support their ability to reduce or waive fees for those who most need that.  We also co-sponsored an online journal club with PRPER, which many people attended and enjoyed.

We also worked hard to clarify the process of nominating a colleague to be an APS Fellow through GPER and held an informational webinar on that subject.

In April, thanks largely to the efforts of Past Chair Mila Kryjevskaia, we had a record-setting presence at the April Meeting. GPER-sponsored sessions included 55 talks! It was lovely to see so many of you in Minneapolis, at our sessions and at our business meeting. We look forward to seeing many of you in Sacramento, April 3-6, 2024 (before the eclipse!). This year, we will be sponsoring mini-symposia in addition to our regular invited and contributed sessions. Abstract submission is live now and continues until January 5.

I want to thank our outgoing GPER executive committee members. Alice Olmstead has been a thoughtful Member-at-Large, making wise contributions to each conversation. And Mila Kryjevskaia has been excellent in the chair line, as a mentor to me and a guide to the whole committee.

Have an excellent winter break, and I hope to see many of you in Sacramento in April.

Jennifer Blue

GPER Executive Committee Chair

Welcome to new GPER officers Loverude, Sadaghiani, and Pina!

By: Mila Kryjevskaia, GPER Past Chair and Nominating Committee Chair

We are excited to announce that Michael Loverude, Homeyra Sadaghiani, and Andi Pina will join the GPER Executive Committee in January 2024.

Dr. Michael Loverude will serve a 4-year term in the chair line. Michael has been a part of the physics faculty at California State University Fullerton (CSUF) since 1999. He has worked on several collaborative projects with a primary focus on research, curriculum development, and teacher preparation. He is a strong advocate for interdisciplinary work and has served as the director of CSUF's Catalyst Center for STEM education research, where he collaborates with colleagues from chemistry, mathematics, biology, and education. Lately, his primary focus has been on student use of mathematics in upper-division physics courses.

Dr. Homeyra Sadaghiani will serve a 2-year term as a member-at-large. Homeyra is a Professor at the Department of Physics & Astronomy at California State Polytechnic University. Her work is focused on science teacher preparation, curriculum development, and faculty professional development. Her primary research interests include the teaching and learning of quantum phenomena and student interpretation of mathematical formalism into physical meanings.

Andi Pina will serve a 2-year term as a graduate student member-at-large. Currently, Andi is a physics PhD candidate and member of the Physics Education Research Laboratory at the University of Maine. Their graduate research focuses on students' mathematical sensemaking in the transition from discrete to continuous systems in a Spin First quantum mechanics course. They have advocated for graduate students at their home institution and will continue to do so for the broader community of PER students.

This year, 22% of eligible GPER members cast their vote in the election.

We thank all of you who participated. We also express our gratitude to the GPER members who agreed to run for GPER positions this fall. The vibrancy of our community is largely dependent on the dedication and commitment of those who are willing to serve it. We urge more members to consider serving in the future when opportunities arise. If you are interested in running for the GPER Executive Committee in the fall 2024, we welcome self-nominations. For more information, please contact Jennifer Blue at bluejm@miamioh.edu.

GPER at the 2024 APS April Meeting

By: Jackie Chini, GPER Chair-Elect

Welcome new GPER members! Please help us continue to grow.

By: Ben Zwickl, GPER Secretary/Treasurer

The presence of GPER within APS continues to grow in number as does our visibility within APS conferences. Together, we are advancing PER as a sub-discipline of physics and promoting and disseminating PER within the wider physics community. In 2023, GPER saw an increase of 17 members (2.3%) to a new high of 733 GPER members. To maintain our growth and impact:

• Encourage your students to join GPER and PERCoGS, especially if they present at the April Meeting
• Continue to renew your GPER membership.

Please see more information about benefits of GPER membership here.

Announcing GPER’s 2023 Fellow: Dr. John Thompson

By: Natasha Holmes and Jackie Chini, GPER Vice Chair and Chair-Elect

Each year, the American Physical Society awards Fellowship to no more than 0.5% of non-student members. The Topical Group on Physics Education Research (GPER) is proud to announce our 2023 APS Fellow, John Thompson of the University of Maine, “for performing seminal research on student use of mathematics in physics and the learning and teaching of thermal physics, for leading interdisciplinary collaborations and conferences, and for leadership in the physics education research community.“

The committee was chaired by Jackie Chini and vice-chaired by Natasha Holmes. Many thanks to the fellowship committee members, Andrew Heckler, Danny Caballero, and Eric Kuo.

Browse all APS Fellows and their full citations here (filter by the nominating unit of GPER to see only GPER Fellows). The GPER Executive Committee and GPER APS Fellowship committee have also created a set of guidelines to support nominators in preparing successful fellowship nominations. The next round of nominations will be due in June 2024 – please consider nominating your colleagues!

GPER Mini-Grants Program Updates

By: Alice Olmstead and Eric Kuo, GPER Members-at-Large

GPER members have the opportunity to apply for GPER mini-grants, which provide modest financial support. There are three strands:

• Strand 1: Conference Support strand ($3000 budget, typical award = $1000). This strand supports the proposer’s commitments to a conference to share physics education research findings with the physics community (e.g., travel, registration costs, workshop costs, poster printing, etc.). All conferences will be considered; however, the APS April conference will be prioritized. Conference support grants are capped at $1000 in this strand. Preference will be given to GPER members who have limited conference resources, e.g., students without grant funding, faculty at two-year colleges and/or minority-serving institutions, adjunct faculty, etc.

• Strand 2: Emergency Support strand ($1000 budget, maximum award = $500). This strand is to “support individual members who are facing unanticipated financial challenges.” Our guidelines for what qualifies as an emergency are based on the APS National Mentoring Community (NMC) Bringing Emergency Aid to Mentees (BEAM) Fund guidelines.

• Strand 3: Conference Organizer strand ($1000 budget). This strand’s purpose is “to support successful organization of PER-focused conferences, and the development of early-career PER researchers at such conferences.” The intent is to help conference and session organizers defray the costs with these endeavors.

This year we made some changes to the Mini-Grants program to better serve the GPER membership. Building on revisions started in the prior year, we’ve continued to revise the review process for the three strands to make it more equitable, more accountable to the membership, and more transparent and objective. 

We received 8 applications for Conference Support, 1 application for Conference Organizer Support, and 3 applications for Emergency Support. The Mini-Grants Committee has reviewed and ranked all conference-related applications. Three awards of $1000 each will be made for the next calendar year. We also distributed $900 in emergency support (one for $400 and another for $500) to 2 GPER members whose requests qualified as emergencies based on the definition in our solicitation.

The Mini-Grants Committee was chaired by Alice Olmstead (Texas State University, senior GPER Member-at-Large). Committee members are Eric Kuo (University of Illinois, junior GPER Member-at-Large), Brianne Gutmann (San Jose State University), and Shams El-Adawy (MIT).

Applications for the Conference Support and Conference Organizer strands are due each year on November 15 at 11:59 PM PT. Applications for the Emergency Support strand are due the 15th of each month at 11:59 PM PT. More information on the mini-grants is available here.

GPER Budget

By: Ben Zwickl, GPER Secretary/Treasurer

This update is based on the most recent available budget report from APS on 10/31/2023. GPER income is primarily from membership dues, which continued to increase to $3735 in 2023. Additional revenue from APS investments was $340 and a small share of revenue from the APS April meeting has not been reported yet.

We awarded about $3,400 in Travel Grants, an additional $900 for two mini-grants for emergency support (not reflected in the expenses YTD) and $700 to Physical Review Physics Education Research, which helps defray page charges for those in need. We have funds reserved for 2024 for travel grants, conference organizer grants, and personal grants. In summary:

• Income YTD: $4,046
• Expenses YTD: $4,059
• Current assets: $15,262

Physical Review Physics Education Research (PRPER) Update

Update from PRPER Review Committee

By Eugenia Etkina, PERLOC representative on GPER

In the Spring of 2023, the APS Committee on Scientific Publications (CSP) commissioned a review of Physical Review Physics Education Research (PRPER). The CSP appointed the following members to the review committee:

• Edmund Bertschinger - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Eugenia Etkina - Rutgers University, USA
• Katemari Rosa - Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
• Stamatis Vokos - California Polytechnic State University, USA

The charge of the committee was to produce an evaluation report with recommendations on how to improve the journal. Such committees are a regular practice of the APS. The previous review was conducted in 2005.

At the end of Summer 2023, the committee sent out a survey for the community regarding their use of the journal and their recommendations for improvement. Over 350 people responded to the survey. In addition, the committee interviewed the Editor of the journal, all associate editors, journal staff, and several readers/reviewers of the journal. These quantitative and qualitative data are currently being analyzed and synthesized to produce a report. The review committee would like to thank all of the PER community members who donated their time responding to the survey and participating in the interviews and we are working to complete this project in early Spring of 2024.