Energy, Electric Potential, and Grad School Admissions
There's a good piece in The Economist about the search for physics beyond the standard model. The article's tone is a tad pessimistic, but the experiments it describes are fascinating.
I love to read teachers' reflections on their work. Fortunately, the Knowles Teacher Initiative (formerly KSTF) publishes a superb online journal, Kaleidoscope, to feature exactly this. If you have some time, take a look.
Students often struggle to with the concept of electric potential. Marta Stoeckel has an article in this month's The Physics Teacher that describes an activity designed to help establish this model. I've done this one with my students, and can attest to its usefulness.
PR:PER has a superb analysis of physics graduate school admissions by Potvin, Chari, and Hodapp. There are plenty of important points, and I hope that members of admissions committees find the time to read it. Some take-aways include the continued reliance on GRE scores as a "cut-off" and the value placed on letters of recommendation. If you're in a position of writing reference letters, regardless of your experience, I'd encourage you to regularly pursue training and seek out criticism from your peers.
There's an interesting and thoughtful framework for group-work, by Pawlak, Irving, and Caballero, also in PR:PER. They identify four modes of collaboration: debate, informing, co-construction, and building understanding. I think this could be a useful tool for analyzing group-work, for example, to see whether a particular activity provokes productive collaboration.
In elementary and secondary school, a primary focus is on developing students' understanding of the energy concept. Last month, I tweeted about paywalled research that showed students should not be learning about (a) energy forms, and only then (b) transformations and conservation. Instead, the energy concept should be taught more holistically, beginning in elementary school, and frequently revisited. A new paper by Herrmann-Abell and DeBoer in JRST makes a compelling case that this view is correct. There are important implications for NGSS implementation in the USA, and this is also something to keep in mind when we train future elementary and middle school teachers.
Nina Dudnik responded to politics this week with an important and challenging piece about building science institutions in developing countries.
Brian Frank has an insightful blog post following on from the Holmes & Wieman paper about labs last week.
Seen on the web this week:
Kelly O'Shea is working on a new card-sort.
Andrew Hutcheson has a challenging practicum.
This gif of a team driving in a pile made the rounds.
Matt Blackman has balls on different tracks and made this follow-up.
Nathan Belcher is doing static electricity using tape (one of my favourites).
Danielle Rowland made a pulsar.
Ellie Schwab shared this gif showing the moons of Jupiter.
Megan Hayes-Golding has an acceleration practicum and also a good introduction to acceleration.
Dan Burns' students do an angular motion enactment and drop dripping cups.
Frank Noschese's students do a tug-of-war.
Keilah Davis has some important thoughts from the CUWiP.
And lastly, Carolyn Sealfon with the most important message of all, from Richard Hechter's talk at the AAPT Winter Meeting.
I love to read teachers' reflections on their work. Fortunately, the Knowles Teacher Initiative (formerly KSTF) publishes a superb online journal, Kaleidoscope, to feature exactly this. If you have some time, take a look.
Students often struggle to with the concept of electric potential. Marta Stoeckel has an article in this month's The Physics Teacher that describes an activity designed to help establish this model. I've done this one with my students, and can attest to its usefulness.
PR:PER has a superb analysis of physics graduate school admissions by Potvin, Chari, and Hodapp. There are plenty of important points, and I hope that members of admissions committees find the time to read it. Some take-aways include the continued reliance on GRE scores as a "cut-off" and the value placed on letters of recommendation. If you're in a position of writing reference letters, regardless of your experience, I'd encourage you to regularly pursue training and seek out criticism from your peers.
There's an interesting and thoughtful framework for group-work, by Pawlak, Irving, and Caballero, also in PR:PER. They identify four modes of collaboration: debate, informing, co-construction, and building understanding. I think this could be a useful tool for analyzing group-work, for example, to see whether a particular activity provokes productive collaboration.
In elementary and secondary school, a primary focus is on developing students' understanding of the energy concept. Last month, I tweeted about paywalled research that showed students should not be learning about (a) energy forms, and only then (b) transformations and conservation. Instead, the energy concept should be taught more holistically, beginning in elementary school, and frequently revisited. A new paper by Herrmann-Abell and DeBoer in JRST makes a compelling case that this view is correct. There are important implications for NGSS implementation in the USA, and this is also something to keep in mind when we train future elementary and middle school teachers.
Nina Dudnik responded to politics this week with an important and challenging piece about building science institutions in developing countries.
Brian Frank has an insightful blog post following on from the Holmes & Wieman paper about labs last week.
Seen on the web this week:
Kelly O'Shea is working on a new card-sort.
Andrew Hutcheson has a challenging practicum.
This gif of a team driving in a pile made the rounds.
Matt Blackman has balls on different tracks and made this follow-up.
Nathan Belcher is doing static electricity using tape (one of my favourites).
Danielle Rowland made a pulsar.
Ellie Schwab shared this gif showing the moons of Jupiter.
Megan Hayes-Golding has an acceleration practicum and also a good introduction to acceleration.
Dan Burns' students do an angular motion enactment and drop dripping cups.
Frank Noschese's students do a tug-of-war.
Keilah Davis has some important thoughts from the CUWiP.
And lastly, Carolyn Sealfon with the most important message of all, from Richard Hechter's talk at the AAPT Winter Meeting.