GPER Mini-Grant Awards
Suzanne White Brahmia, GPER Member-at-Large and 2019 Grants Co-Chair
The GPER Committee is pleased to announce the four proposals that were awarded mini-grant funding for the 2020 funding cycle. Successful proposals showed significant potential in at least one of the following areas:
advancing and diffusing knowledge concerning the learning and teaching of physics;
increasing the profile of PER in APS;
increasing membership in GPER.
Requests for mini-grants are considered on annual basis and are normally due the first Friday of October. The full solicitation includes descriptions of the four strands of the competition: travel grants to individuals to attend APS conferences, grants to APS conference session organizers, grants to non-APS conference organizers supporting travel, and infrastructure. For travel grants, supporting junior or isolated members of the community is prioritized.
The Executive Committee thanks the (anonymous) committee of GPER members who evaluated the proposals and made recommendations to the Executive Committee for approval.
This year’s cycle of mini-grants all went to supporting travel funding for the April APS meeting. Summaries of the talks are provided below.
Title: Evaluating instructional labs' use of deliberate practice to teach critical thinking skills
Proposer: Natasha Holmes
Amount Awarded: $500
Summary: We have developed a theoretically-driven scheme to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional lab curricula for teaching critical thinking skills. The scheme draws on three principles: (1) critical thinking is context-dependent, (2) critical thinking involves exercising agency to make decisions to evaluate data and methods, and (3) deliberate practice can be used to effectively teach critical thinking skills. We use this scheme to evaluate the materials for three sets of electricity and magnetism labs. Our analysis shows that lab curricula aiming to develop critical thinking skills (1) were tailored to the contexts, (2) supported student decision-making and agency, but (3) did not align with methods of deliberate practice. Labs that aimed to reinforce concepts (and not teach critical thinking) did not support student decision-making. The results provide suggestions for improvements to curricular design and the new scheme serves as a tool to evaluate lab instructions.
Title: Examining Physics Students Interpretation and Application of an Ethical Framework During a Unit on the Development of the Atomic Bomb
Proposer: Egla Ochoa-Madrid
Amount Awarded: $500
Summary: The societal implications of technology developed through physics are not always clear. Physicists need to use ethical reasoning skills to maneuver through morally ambiguous situations. For this reason, curricula for physics students should also be geared towards developing these skills. My research focuses on the effects of ethical discussions in the physics classroom. I will present an examination of how students interpret and apply an ethical framework to discussions about the development of the atomic bomb and current STEM research. Using both student written work and video-recordings of in-class discussions, I analyze how the subject matter and interpersonal dynamics may influence student interactions. I will present preliminary evidence that students avoid discussing the negative implications of the ethical framework, but also demonstrate a range of productive approaches to applying the framework which contribute to strong ethical arguments.
Title: Critical thinking in experimental physics: Features of physics lab curricula that promote higher-order thinking
Proposers: Cole Walsh
Amount Awarded: $500
Summary: There have been recent calls to shift the focus of introductory physics labs towards developing students’ experimentation and critical thinking skills. Making these changes successfully at a large scale will require that we understand what features of lab curricula are most important for developing these skills. We have developed an assessment, the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC), that aims to measure these skills and has been administered to 9995 students enrolled in 113 courses across 44 schools. I am studying the relationship between students’ development of critical thinking skills, as measured by the PLIC, and features of their lab instruction, such as the amount of decision-making agency and epistemic agency available. We also examined courses that have administered the PLIC multiple times with changes to their curricula to better understand how particular changes affect the development of critical thinking skills for different populations of students.
Title: Questionable research practices in introductory physics labs
Proposers: Martin Stein
Amount Awarded: $500
Summary: Some practices in particle physics research are in stark contrast to what students practice in introductory physics labs. One contrast is that students in introductory physics labs are often asked to confirm theories they learn in lecture while researchers strive to find “new physics” in experimental data. To highlight an unintended consequence of this practice, we evaluated students' lab notes from an early activity in an intro lab course. We found that about 30% of student groups (out of 107 groups at three institutions) recorded questionable research practices in their lab notes such as subjective interpretations of results or manipulating equipment and data. The large majority of these practices were associated with confirmatory goals, which we suspect stem from students' prior exposure to labs that ask them to confirm known theory. We propose ways for physics labs to better engage students in authentic scientific practice and the search for “new physics” in their data.