Undergraduate Curriculum, Uncertainties, and Muons
This month's issue of Physics Today asks questions about the undergraduate physics curriculum. McNeil and Heron give a superb summary of their APS/APTT Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs report. It's an insightful, important report, and certainly worth reading. Meanwhile, editor Charles Day tries to frame the question by looking at the UK and US systems.
Rushton et al have a fascinating paper in Physical Review: PER that looks at the demographics of US physics teachers over the past 30 years. They look at the fraction of physics teachers with a physics degree, gender and racial balance, and experience.
Also in PR:PER, a Croatian team has published results from a study on university students' ability to reason about uncertainties, with and without graphical representations of the data. In addition, they did some eye-tracking analysis with a subset of the participants. The conclusion: graphs are helpful, perhaps because they reduce cognitive load.
An article on Fox News got me reading some of the work from Rochelle Gutierrez, a math education researcher associated with the "sociopolitical turn" in that field. Her new book chapter is what sparked the fury, and is worth a read.
In the EU, much of the funding for science education research comes from EU grants. Given the emerging paradigm of Responsible Research and Innovation, it looks like EU education researchers are going to need to adopt this new framework. Heras and Ruis-Mallén have a relevant article in IJSE.
Toni Feder has a very good article in Physics Today about the subtle reasons for gendered pay discrepancies for university physics faculty. It's well worth a read. Incidentally, my research supervisor Chandralekha Singh, does a useful workshop for women in physics at the summer AAPT meetings to tackle many of the issues Feder discusses.
In physics news this week, there's the fascinating discovery of a new chamber in Khufu's pyramid by a group that used muon detectors to measure how cosmic rays scattered off the inside of the pyramid. The Physics World article also discusses similar studies that have been done in other pyramids.
I've been enjoying reading Marianna Ruggiero's new blog. It's always a treasure when caring, deliberate educators make the time to share their processes and insights with the rest of us.
Finally, this video of an astronaut "stuck" in the Kibo module of the ISS back in 2008 made the rounds this week (it would spark some great conversations with high school students). Vsauce has a new video about gravity. Matt Blackman has this great idea for dealing with friction and the normal force. Nathan Belcher has an awesome apparatus for torque practica.
Rushton et al have a fascinating paper in Physical Review: PER that looks at the demographics of US physics teachers over the past 30 years. They look at the fraction of physics teachers with a physics degree, gender and racial balance, and experience.
Also in PR:PER, a Croatian team has published results from a study on university students' ability to reason about uncertainties, with and without graphical representations of the data. In addition, they did some eye-tracking analysis with a subset of the participants. The conclusion: graphs are helpful, perhaps because they reduce cognitive load.
An article on Fox News got me reading some of the work from Rochelle Gutierrez, a math education researcher associated with the "sociopolitical turn" in that field. Her new book chapter is what sparked the fury, and is worth a read.
In the EU, much of the funding for science education research comes from EU grants. Given the emerging paradigm of Responsible Research and Innovation, it looks like EU education researchers are going to need to adopt this new framework. Heras and Ruis-Mallén have a relevant article in IJSE.
Toni Feder has a very good article in Physics Today about the subtle reasons for gendered pay discrepancies for university physics faculty. It's well worth a read. Incidentally, my research supervisor Chandralekha Singh, does a useful workshop for women in physics at the summer AAPT meetings to tackle many of the issues Feder discusses.
In physics news this week, there's the fascinating discovery of a new chamber in Khufu's pyramid by a group that used muon detectors to measure how cosmic rays scattered off the inside of the pyramid. The Physics World article also discusses similar studies that have been done in other pyramids.
I've been enjoying reading Marianna Ruggiero's new blog. It's always a treasure when caring, deliberate educators make the time to share their processes and insights with the rest of us.
Finally, this video of an astronaut "stuck" in the Kibo module of the ISS back in 2008 made the rounds this week (it would spark some great conversations with high school students). Vsauce has a new video about gravity. Matt Blackman has this great idea for dealing with friction and the normal force. Nathan Belcher has an awesome apparatus for torque practica.