The College Board is a non-profit organization that connects students to college readiness programs, like the SAT® and Advanced Placement® Program, and AP® Physics instructors to a community of resources and other AP® teachers. Signing up for an account with the College Board comes with a number of benefits for Physics instructors.
In 1960, Seymour Sarason and his colleagues first articulated the issue of test anxiety among elementary school students, highlighting that “…[w]e live in a test-conscious, test-giving, culture in which the lives of people are in part determined by their test performance”.
We’re excited to kick off a new series in which we will highlight a variety of interesting topics related to Physics and Engineering. If you’re like us, you love science, and if you’re teaching Physics you’re probably curious about the world around you. We hope you enjoy the first in our Explore Science series - What it Takes to Make a Building Earthquake-Proof.
Most students cheat. In fact, the numbers are alarming.
SEEING ISN'T ALWAYS BELIEVING
Getting to know the Expert TA Team - Each post in our Expert TA Spotlight series will highlight the personal and professional accomplishments of a member of the Expert TA community. First up is Director of Content, Dr. Chris Duston.
There are many great science podcasts, and lots of intriguing episodes out there to explore. In this post we do not intend to offer a comprehensive review of them all, but rather a recommendation of a few of our favorites. From the ethereal narratives of Radiolab, to the cutting edge research of the Physics World, we can’t get enough science, and these six podcasts are topping our list right now. Let us know what you’re listening to in the comment section below.
Congratulations to the University of Central Oklahoma on being recognized as one of the top 10 schools in the nation for their dedication to student engagement.
You have seen an occasional post from us where we have offered advice about instructional resources for physics; well we have decided to make this make this a regular theme. We are launching a new series designed to keep instructors informed about introductory physics teaching tools. Examples of upcoming posts include a breakdown of the best in-class demonstrations, reviews about helpful software for your class, information regarding what best practices other instructors have implemented, and much more.
For this introductory post, we have invited Dr. Bruce Mason, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Oklahoma, to launch the series. He is the director of the ComPADRE network of educational resource collections and the editor of the physics collection on MERLOT, a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional organization promoting the scholarly use of multimedia educational resources. Here Dr. Mason offers an overview of numerous resources available for physics educators, from those that help with curriculum design and creation, to others focused on best practices and teaching methodologies, including ways for instructors to connect and become part of the larger physics education community.
Look for more from Expert TA’s instructor resource series in the near future.
A Primer on Instructor Resources for Teaching Physics
Guest Author: Bruce Mason, Ph.D., Associate Professor, The University of Oklahoma
“Physicists, physics educators, and physics education researchers are a very generous group. Our community is focused on helping our students, creating new approaches to learning and teaching, and sharing these results broadly.”
This is how I started a recent introduction to physics teaching resources for the American Physical Society Forum on Education Newsletter. The following newsletter articles give a flavor of this generosity and desire to share, with introductions to PhET, Open Source Physics, Interactive Video Vignettes, and the PICUP project. There are other researchers and developers from around the world who make available question databases, video libraries, simulations, worksheets, labs, and/or apps for physics educators for little or no cost. I’m sure everyone has their favorites.
But how do we find the great things out there that we don’t yet know about? Well Google, of course, but there are other efforts within the physics education community that are designed to provide more help in both discovering and using these resources. PhysPort is a project led by Sam McKagan and Adrian Madsen that is pulling together the best of physics education research and making it understandable and useful for all of us. The PhysPort site provides recommendations on how to improve your teaching or find great materials, connected to the many research-based teaching methods also listed on the site. As you try these new approaches to teaching in your classes, PhysPort also provides the research-validated assessment and data analysis tools to check how this is helping your students.
PhysPort, as well as Open Source Physics and PICUP, are built on the digital library foundation of ComPADRE. This library hosts projects that both develop and deliver content and links to some of the best teaching materials from around the world. All of this is available for you to search through or browse. To improve the organization, the ComPADRE library is divided into collections, such as introductory undergraduate physics, K-12 physics and physical science, or quantum physics. All these materials are selected and vetted by the ComPADRE editors to make your job of finding “the good stuff” easier. If you are interested in the research details behind the development, PER Central is the place to go.
Of course, PhysPort and ComPADRE are just two of the many things that the American Association of Physics Teacher (AAPT) is doing to “improve physics through teaching”. If you are wishing to improve your physics teaching skills, the conferences, journals, and workshops hosted by the AAPT are all great opportunities. More importantly, the AAPT is a friendly and supportive community that will make your life easier.
Twice a year the AAPT, APS, and American Astronomical Society host a workshop for 50-80 new college and university faculty. The number-one take away message from this three-day event is that if you want to improve your teaching, “You don’t have to do it all yourself."
In a previous post, we discussed the reasons why bundled textbooks are a bad deal for students. These package solutions can seem like a great option because they often include supplemental material to assist in course preparation and pre-built assignments. The truth is, however, there are many downsides to the bundle, including the availability of textbook solutions online and the ever-increasing financial burden on students. For this post, we will discuss one way instructors are able to continue capitalizing on the advantages of online homework, while disconnecting from the bundle and ultimately saving their students money.
Textbook mapping, a feature available in the Expert TA system, allows instructors to view the problems in Expert TA’s independent library arranged in the specific chapter and section order of the textbook of their choice. By default, the problems in our system follow a similar structure to many of the most common introductory physics textbooks. There are, however, many instances where certain topics are covered in different chapters and sections from one book to the next. With textbook mapping in Expert TA, instructors have the ease of a bundled homework solution when selecting problems, but the flexibility of an independent library that also protects the integrity of problem solutions.
We’ve put together a breakdown of the most common textbook mappings across all users of Expert TA to give others an idea of how this feature is actually being utilized in the system.
See if your textbook is available:
