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physics.ed-ph

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preprint2016arXiv

Revisiting the round bottom flask rainbow experiment

A popular demonstration experiment in optics uses a round-bottom flask filled with water to project a circular rainbow on a screen with a hole through which the flask is illuminated. We show how the vessel's wall shifts the second-order and first-order bows towards each other and consequentially narrows down Alexander's dark band. We address the challenge this introduces in producing Alexander's dark band, and explain the importance of a sufficient distance of the flask to the screen. The wall-effect also introduces a splitting of the bows which can easily be misinterpreted.

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preprint2016arXiv

Helicity and nuclear $β$ decay correlations

We present simple derivations of nuclear $β$-decay correlations with an emphasis on the special role of helicity. This provides a good opportunity to teach students about helicity and chirality in particle physics through exercises using simple aspects of quantum mechanics. In addition, this paper serves as an introduction to nuclear $β$-decay correlations from both a theoretical and experimental vantage. This article can be used to introduce students to ongoing experiments searching for hints of new physics in the low-energy precision frontier.

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preprint2016arXiv

Coherence and information in a fiber interferometer

We present an experiment based on a fibered Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The aim is to familiarize students with fibered optics and interferometry, and to improve their understanding of optical amplification. The laboratory project has two parts: in a first part, the students modulate the optical path of the interferometer to study the spectra of light sources via Fourier Transform Spectroscopy. In a second part, an optical amplifier is placed in one or both arms of the interferometer. The set-up uses monomode, polarization-maintaining fibers that propagate light of 1.5 $μ$m wavelength. In this article, we describe the set-up and the analysis of the measurements, and we present results from student reports. All components are part of standard optical catalogues. Even though the experiment is based on fibered optics, it is robust to manipulation (it is however relatively expensive $\sim £15\,000$): We describe our efforts to protect the components from damage. This experiment is now offered as a 2-week project for third-year Physics students. The experiment may likewise be of value in early graduate level laboratory courses.

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preprint2016arXiv

Ken Wilson - A Tribute: Some recollections and a few thoughts on education

I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilson's graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972 to 1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and Cornell during this period; and acknowledge my debt to Ken, and to John Wilkins and Michael Fisher, who I was privileged to have as my main mentors at Cornell. I end with some thoughts on the challenges of reforming education, a subject that was one of Ken's major preoccupations in the second half of his professional life.

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preprint2016arXiv

Women in physics in Cyprus: A first report

This paper reviews the status of women in science, physics in particular, in Cyprus. We describe the development of physics in the country, focusing on the contributions and participation of women. We present statistical data for the last several years, reviewing the percentage of women who are pursuing physics as a subject of study or as a profession. We report the gender ratios at different career stages and find that while women are well represented in undergraduate studies, female physicists are underrepresented in senior positions. We discuss factors that might affect the career evolution of women in physics in Cyprus.

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preprint2016arXiv

Diving into buoyancy: exploring the Archimedes principle through engineering

In our daily lives, we observe objects sinking, floating, or rising when immersed in a fluid. The Archimedes principle, which explains an object's behavior when immersed in a fluid, is important in fluid mechanics; however, it is a relatively complex concept for middle school students to grasp, as they often harbor misconceptions. To initiate conceptual change among students regarding the misconception "heavy objects sink and light objects float," I created a project during which students build a stable submarine that uses fluid transfers to move up, down, and forward while carrying a load. Students must take into account several variables, from the design of the submarine to the choice of materials. Additionally, students write a report that includes a user manual, challenges they encountered and how they overcame those challenges, and a detailed text that links theory to their submarine.

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preprint2016arXiv

Modelling toolkit for simulation of magnetic levitation devices

A stand-alone App has been developed, focused on obtaining information about relevant engineering properties of magnetic levitation systems. Our modelling toolkit provides real time simulations of 2D magneto-mechanical quantities for Superconductor/Permanent Magnet structures. The source code is open and may be customized for a variety of configurations. Ultimately, it relies on the variational statement of the critical state model for the superconducting component and has been verified against experimental data for YBaCuO/NdFeB assemblies. On a quantitative basis, the values of the arising forces, induced superconducting currents, as well as a plot of the magnetic field lines are displayed upon selection of an arbitrary trajectory of the magnet in the vicinity of the superconductor. The stability issues related to the cooling process, as well as the maximum attainable forces for a given material and geometry are immediately observed. Mainly, the purpose of this work was to provide a comprehensible data processing tool that may be of help for analyzing the counter-intuitive, but highly relevant, hysteresis effects that occur when the magnet wags around the superconductor. It may be

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preprint2016arXiv

Are inequities in self-efficacy a systemic feature of physics education?

There is consistent and growing evidence that physics instruction disproportionately harms female students' self-efficacy, their beliefs about their ability to learn and do physics. This harm is problematic because self-efficacy supports student learning and persistence. Nissen and Shemwell (PhysRevPER, 12, 2016) investigated this harm using an in-the-moment measure of student's self-efficacy states, which are dynamic judgments of one's ability to succeed in the activity at hand. Their results indicated that female students experienced much lower self-efficacy states in physics than male students did, and that this gender difference did not occur in other STEM courses. A limitation of their study was that it only investigated a single college physics course. In order to further inform the generalizability of this phenomenon I analyzed a large data set of 35,464 experiences from 4,816 students at 33 secondary schools collected between 1993 and 1997 that was designed to be representative of high school students' experiences. Results confirmed that there was a large gender difference in self-efficacy states in high school physics courses and not in any other courses. T

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preprint2016arXiv

Secrets of Successful Science Projects

Over the past several years, the authors have served as teachers, qualified scientists, mentors, and/or parents on dozens of science projects. These projects ranged from elementary school projects that can be completed in a weekend to high school and college freshmen projects that take a semester or year to complete and yield published scholarly papers and/or compete at the highest national and international levels. This article describes what we have observed to be important to success.

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preprint2016arXiv

Lab notebooks as scientific communication: investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research

In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific documentation and how researchers come to learn these practices in experimental physics. Using interviews with practicing researchers, namely physics graduate students, we explore the different experiences researchers had in learning how to effectively use a notebook for scientific documentation. We find that very few of those interviewed thought that their undergraduate lab classes successfully taught them the benefit of maintaining a lab notebook. Most described training in lab notebook use as either ineffective or outright missing from their undergraduate lab course experience. Furthermore, a large majority of those interviewed explained that they did not receive any formal training in maintaining a lab notebook during their graduate school experience and received little to no feedback from their advisors on these records. Many of the interviewees describe learning the purpose of, and how to maintain, these kinds of lab records only after having a

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preprint2016arXiv

Using smartphone pressure sensors to measure vertical velocities of elevators, stairways, and drones

We measure the vertical velocities of elevators, pedestrians climbing stairs, and drones (flying unmanned aerial vehicles), by means of smartphone pressure sensors. The barometric pressure obtained with the smartphone is related to the altitude of the device via the hydrostatic approximation. From the altitude values, vertical velocities are derived. The approximation considered is valid in the first hundred meters of the inner layers of the atmosphere. In addition to pressure, acceleration values were also recorded using the built-in accelerometer. Numerical integration was performed, obtaining both vertical velocity and altitude. We show that data obtained using the pressure sensor is significantly less noisy than that obtained using the accelerometer. Error accumulation is also evident in the numerical integration of the acceleration values. In the proposed experiments, the pressure sensor also outperforms GPS, because this sensor does not receive satellite signals indoors and, in general, the operating frequency is considerably lower than that of the pressure sensor. In the cases in which it is possible, comparison with reference values taken from the architectural plans of bui

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preprint2016arXiv

Learning Concepts First: A Course Structure with Improved Educational Outcomes in the Short, Medium, and Long Terms (Especially for Minority Groups Underrepresented in Physics)

An active learning physics course (treatment) was re-organized in an attempt to increase students' problem solving abilities. This re-organized course covered all of the relevant concepts in the first 6 weeks with the final 4 weeks spent in practice at solving complicated problems (those requiring students to use higher order cognitive abilities). A second active learning course (control) was taught in the same quarter by the same instructor using the same curricular materials but covering material in the standard (chapter-by-chapter) order. After accounting for incoming student characteristics, students from the treatment course scored significantly better than the control for two outcome measures: i) the final exam and ii) their immediately subsequent physics course. More importantly, students from minority groups who are underrepresented in physics had final exam scores as well as class grades that were indistinguishable from the rest of their class if and only if they were in the treatment class. Finally, many of the students in this cohort took a Concepts First course in their third quarter of introductory physics. The students who took at least one Concepts First course a

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preprint2016arXiv

The golden age of Calcutta physics: Difficulties in reconstructing the history

Classes started in the newly established Physics Department of Calcutta University Science College in 1916. Raman, Bose and Saha were three young members of the small physics faculty consisting of barely half a dozen faculty members. Within about one decade, three extraordinary discoveries came from these young men---Saha ionization equation in 1920, Bose statistics in 1924, Raman effect in 1928. However, fortunes of Calcutta University quickly got intertwined with India's freedom struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi exactly at the same time and the physics group got tragically disrupted. Indian physics never succeeded in reaching that height again. This paper discusses the difficulties in reconstructing a critical history of this Calcutta school of physics during the very short epoch of unmatched brilliance.

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preprint2016arXiv

Surveying the Attitudes of Physicists Concerning Foundational Issues of Quantum Mechanics

Even though quantum mechanics has existed for almost 100 years, questions concerning the foundation and interpretation of the theory still remain. These issues have gathered more attention in recent years, but does this mean that physicists are more aware of foundational issues concerning quantum mechanics? A survey was sent out to 1234 physicists affiliated to 8 different universities. 149 responded to the questions, which both concerned foundational issues related to quantum mechanics, specifically, as well as questions concerning interpretations of physical theories in general. The answers to the survey revealed that foundational concepts in quantum mechanics are still a topic that only a minority of physicists are familiar with, although a clear majority of physicists find that interpretations of physical theories are important. The various questions, as well as how the respondents answered, are presented. The survey intends to give an overview of what the opinion of the physics community, in general, is concerning issues related to quantum mechanics.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Using Descriptive Analytics for the Improvement of National University Entrance Exam: A case study in the Context of Kankor in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, High school graduates, to continue higher education, need to pass the National University Entrance Exam (Kankor). Kankor is very important and requires further research as it is used as the only means to identify the participant's competence and skills which leads to a qualified higher education and manpower, employment opportunities, allocation of human capital in appropriate fields of study, and leading to a more specialized labor force in the long run. Having a better picture of Kankor in Afghanistan is essential before employing educational data mining techniques and other social and pedagogical approaches to support the students and the educational institutions. Hence, the author carried out a research on Kankor, in which he assessed and analyzed Kankor from different angles. This research paper provides positive contribution to the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), particularly, the Kankor committee, and other educational institutions - introducing the importance of data as an asset and a proper structure of recording and producing data effective for research studies, paving the way for in-depth descriptive and predictive analytics which improves the si

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preprint2015arXiv

The Role of Dimensional Analysis in Teaching Physics

Dimensional analysis is a simple qualitative method for determining essential connections between physical quantities. It is applicable to a multitude of physics problems, many of which canbe introduced early on in a university physics curriculum. Despite the relative simplicity of theapproach, it is rarely included in physics curricula. Here, we apply dimensional analysis to find the radiated power from an electric dipole. Employing dimensional analysis, we demonstrate a straightforward way to derive the latter without the need for complex mathematical treatments.

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preprint2016arXiv

Assessing the interactivity and prescriptiveness of faculty professional development workshops: The Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT)

Professional development workshops are one of the primary mechanisms used to help faculty improve their teaching, and draw in many STEM instructors every year. Although workshops serve a critical role in changing instructional practices within our community, we rarely assess workshops through careful consideration of how they engage faculty. Initial evidence suggests that workshop leaders often overlook central tenets of education research that are well-established in classroom contexts, such as the role of interactivity in enabling student learning. As such, there is a need to develop more robust, evidence-based models of how best to support faculty learning in professional development contexts, and to activity support workshop leaders in relating their design decisions to familiar ideas form other educational contexts. In response to these needs, we have developed an observation tool, the Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT), to document the form and focus of faculty's engagement during workshops. In this paper, we describe the motivation and methodological considerations behind the development of the R-PDOT, justify our decisions to highlight particul

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preprint2016arXiv

The Escaramujo Project: instrumentation courses during a road trip across the Americas

The Escaramujo Project was a series of eight hands-on laboratory courses on High Energy Physics and Astroparticle Instrumentation, in Latinamerican Institutions. The Physicist Federico Izraelevitch traveled on a van with his wife and dogs from Chicago to Buenos Aires teaching the courses. The sessions took place at Institutions in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia at an advanced undergraduate and graduate level. During these workshops, each group built a modern cosmic ray detector based on plastic scintillator and silicon photomultipliers, designed specifically for this project. After the courses, a functional detector remained at each institution to be used by the faculty to facilitate the training of future students and to support and enable local research activities. The five-days workshops covered topics such as elementary particle and cosmic ray Physics, radiation detection and instrumentation, low-level light sensing with solid state devices, front-end analog electronics and object-oriented data analysis (C++ and ROOT). Throughout this initiative, about a hundred of talented and highly motivated young students were reached. With the detector a

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preprint2010arXiv

Understanding students' difficulties in terms of coupled epistemological and affective dynamics

An established body of literature shows that a student's affect can be linked to her epistemological stance [1]. In this literature, the epistemology is generally taken as a belief or stance toward a discipline, and the affective stance applies broadly to a discipline or classroom culture. A second, emerging line of research, however, shows that a student in a given discipline can shift between multiple locally coherent epistemological stances [2]. To begin uniting these two bodies of literature, toward the long-term goal of incorporating affect into fine-grained models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of "Judy", an undergraduate engineering major. We argue that a fine-grained aspect of Judy's affect, her annoyance at a particular kind of homework problem, stabilizes a context-dependent epistemological stance she displays, about an unbridgeable gulf she perceives to exist between real and ideal circuits.

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preprint2010arXiv

The Marginalized Identities of Sense-makers: Reframing Engineering Student Retention

This paper empirically argues for a closer examination of what we wish to retain when we speak of "retention" in engineering [1]. We present and interpret data from clinical interviews and classroom video of "Michael," a student who feels marginalized by an engineering program that undervalues him because of his stance toward knowledge [2],[3]. Michael is a sophomore Electrical Engineering and Mathematics major in a Basic Circuits course. In his own words, he's a "fringe" student because of his robust tendency to try making sense of the concepts being taught rather than memorizing formulae. He also feels alienated because he views learning in terms of argument and intuition, not algorithm and rote acceptance. Furthermore, for Michael the practice of sense-making defines him; it's an integral aspect of his identity [4]. Thus, Michael's self-reported sense of alienation resonates strongly with existing identity-based accounts of students leaving the field [5],[6]. We contend the field of engineering suffers if individuals like Michael don't pursue it. Through this case study of Michael, we urge the retention discussion to consider not just the

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preprint2016arXiv

The Masterclass of particle physics and scientific careers from the point of view of male and female students

With this study we tried to investigate if male and female students have a different perception of scientific careers. At the end, we would like to be able to provide hints on how to intervene to correct the path that seems to naturally bring male students towards STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) and reject female students from them.

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preprint2016arXiv

"What is The SI?" A Proposal for an Educational Adjunct to the SI Redefinition

We discuss how the likely 2018 redefinition of the SI system of units might affect the ability of students to understand the link between the units and the new system. The likely redefinition will no longer define a set of base units, but rather a set of constants of nature, such as the speed of light c and a particular hyperfine splitting in Cs $Δν(^{133}$Cs)$_{hfs}$. We point out that this list of constants need not be the only way to introduce students to the subject, either in class or in textbooks. We suggest an alternative way to introduce high school and undergraduate students to the redefined SI, by suggesting a list of experiments for some units; this list would be completely compatible with the redefined SI, and would have all of the same scientific and technological advantages. We demonstrate by questionnaire results that this alternative is more appealing to students. We hope to spur a discussion amongst teachers regarding this important topic for high school and undergraduate physics courses.

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preprint2013arXiv

The Effect of Student Learning Styles on the Learning Gains Achieved When Interactive Simulations Are Coupled with Real-Time Formative Assessment via Pen-Enabled Mobile Technology

This paper describes results from a project in an undergraduate engineering physics course that coupled classroom use of interactive computer simulations with the collection of real-time formative assessment using pen-enabled mobile technology. Interactive simulations (free or textbook-based) are widely used across the undergraduate science and engineering curriculia to help actively engaged students increase their understanding of abstract concepts or phenomena which are not directly or easily observable. However, there are indications in the literature that we do not yet know the pedagogical best practices associated with their use to maximize learning. This project couples student use of interactive simulations with the gathering of real-time formative assessment via pen-enabled mobile technology (in this case, Tablet PCs). The research question addressed in this paper is: are learning gains achieved with this coupled model greater for certain types of learners in undergraduate STEM classrooms? To answer this, we correlate learning gains with various learning styles, as identified using the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) developed by Felder and Soloman. These insights will be us

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preprint2016arXiv

Method to study student engagement uniformity in a classroom

We present a method to study engagement level uniformity in a class of students. We validate our method by comparing two semesters taught using different methods in a physics and mathematics course. The first semester used conventional methods while the second semester used graphic spreadsheets-based laboratories and homework before the introduction of formal methods. We found that engagement of the students that were below the median at the beginning of the semester improved by an order of magnitude (by our metric) while the engagement level of students initially above the median did not change.

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