After two years of remote learning, labs, and testing, we are finally able to bring students back to campus, albeit for a limited time while I kept all the remote testing in place. In a sense, I decided to “parallel-test” students - keep the online, timed, brief, low-stake tests against the in-person, longer, higher-stake, traditional show-work tests of the pre-pandemic years. The preliminary...
Traditional undergraduate laboratory courses are typically designed to reinforce and verify lecture content and use highly structured experiments to achieve this goal. In recent years, there have been numerous national calls to examine and enhance the student experience in these lab courses. AAPT and APS have recommended that undergraduate lab curricula should develop students’ critical...
Between 2019-2022, I ran a particle physics research course within UMD's First-year Innovation and Research Experience (FIRE) general education undergraduate program. During this time, I designed and utilized many in-class activities that incorporated active and collaborative learning components. I will share my experiences of a couple of these activities, with the hope of brainstorming for...
You might be surprised (and perhaps a little dismayed) to learn how few of your students have actually built things with their own hands. Physics teachers have a unique opportunity to allow students to build their own lab devices. In doing this, I have found that students usually take ownership of their learning and better understand how things work. In this workshop, I will describe...
