Advising guidelines put together at the University of Arkansas as the undergraduate program grew and developed. Presented at the 2012 SPIN-UP conference in Austin and the PhysTEC leadership meeting at the AAPT summer meeting in Edmonton.

This web page is a collection of 15 cost-free tools designed to help K-12 teachers use technology in all phases of instruction and assessment. The tools offer time-saving ways to monitor student research and writing, evaluate student performance, and create online lessons, classroom calendars, customized rubrics, tests/quizzes, exportable note-taking organizers for students, and more. 4 Teachers is funded by the ALTEC project, founded to support integration of technology in the K-12 classroom.

This web page contains customizable student checklists for written reports, multimedia projects, oral presentations, and science projects. The checklists are organized for three grade bands: K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. The purpose of the checklists is to help students stay on track during a longer-term investigation, and promote their skills in responsibility and self-evaluating. 4 Teachers is funded by the ALTEC project, founded to support integration of technology in the K-12 classroom. ***PLEASE NOTE: Some of the pages within this resource are sponsored by commercial vendors. The Physics Front neither endorses nor recommends products for commercial sale.

When a pair of scientists first introduced cold nuclear fusion in 1989 as a source of almost limitless energy, the scientific community quickly discredited the experiments. In some venues, these experiments are case studies in faulty scientific investigation. But now a respected scientist at SRI International is doing extensive research on the same process -- with promising results. This 12-minute investigative report by CBS 60 Minutes explores the renewed interest in cold fusion and its implications for society. This resource is available for free online viewing. A four-page text synopsis is also provided. It could be especially useful as a springboard for a lesson on the importance of objectivity in scientific experimentation.

The APS Forum on Education (FEd) Summer 2006 Newsletter's Teacher Preparation Section articles included:The Learning Assistant Model for Teacher Education in Science and Technology by Valerie Otero,Undergraduate Learning Assistants at the University of Arkansas by Gay Stewart, andCreating and Sustaining a Teaching and Learning Professional Community at Seattle Pacific University by Lane Seeley and Stamatis Vokos.

This resource is a collection of introductory physics homework assignments developed as an alternative to traditional textbook exercises. These assignments were designed for use with the Activity-Based Physics instructional method (ABP). Students use observational skills and mathematical modeling, combined with basic physics, to solve problems related to a single situation, such as riding a bicycle or tailgating while driving. Each assignment integrates a variety of concepts and requires students to establish cause and effect relationships. Assignments are available in the following subject categories: mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and waves.

This article describes the "Physics by Inquiry" course that is designed to address student misconceptions. Then explains how the course was taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for teachers, and how it was taught at Ohio State University for elementary-education majors. The author concludes that the course is exportable to many different environments and for many different types of students.

The APS Forum on Education Summer 2011 Newsletter contains a variety of articles covering important matters in education. Key articles include: A State-by-State Science and Engineering Readiness Index (SERI): Grading States on Their K-12 Preparation of Future Scientists and Engineers, Physics Careers Resources, and OSP Tools and the ComPADRE OSP COLLECTION.

This presentation describes the analysis of the results of conceptual pre/post student assessment instruments. Questions of correlations between learning and initial understanding and normalizing the reported gain are covered.

This web site provides an organized collection of questions designed for use with a classroom response system. The question library can be searched by grade levels, physics topics, and user-entered search terms.

It is well documented that traditional introductory physics courses often fail to teach our students the basics. Indeed, these same courses often teach students things we don't want. Beyond the usual focus on pure content, there are extensive sets of attitudes and beliefs about science that we teach our students. Some of these messages are beneficial (e.g., that science is a coherent representation of the world) while others are detrimental (e.g., the notion that women cannot be strong physicists). While decades of physics education research have reformed classroom practices to improve conceptual mastery, these same practices often fail to improve student attitudes and beliefs about learning physics. This workshop presentation introduces the development and structure of a new instrument designed to probe students' beliefs about science and learning science, the Colorado Learning About Science Survey (CLASS). In addition to exploring the various dimensions of student beliefs that this instrument probes, it examines correlations between student beliefs and class performance, students' understanding of expert beliefs, and gender differences. It also covers issues of class environments and practices that support productive beliefs.

This 33-question research-based multiple-choice survey is designed to evaluate students' attitudes and approaches towards physics problem solving. The survey is based on investigations of responses from introductory physics students, graduate students, and faculty members. It expands upon the Attitudes towards Problem Solving survey (Marx and Cummings, 2007) to also consider approaches to problem solving and different levels of problem solving expertise. Statistical results have shown the survey to be reliable and valid. A summary of the construction and analysis of the survey is available in A. J. Mason and C. Singh, "Surveying graduate students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving", PRST-PER, 6 (2), 020124 (2010). This survey is free for use by instructors in their classroom. The expert-like responses to the survey are enclosed.

The Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA), developed by Chabay and Sherwood, assesses student understanding of basic electricity and magnetism concepts. It is written for college-level calculus-based introductory physics courses. The files are password protected; users who wish to access the assessment will need to contact the authors. A Spanish translation of BEMA is available under Supplemental Documents. The reliability and discriminatory power of this assessment tool have been tested. The results are available at: Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research: Volume 2, Issue 1, Page 7, http://prst-per.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v2/i1/e010105

This presentation at the 2006 PTEC conference emphasizes the need for teachers to understand content-specific pedagogical needs of there students. Topics include physics-specific issues such as pre-conceptions, knowledge construction, and student assessment. The teacher preparation program at Rutgers University is described.

This document contains a set of K-12 educational standards for physics. This work is an extension of Advanced Placement standards to a full K-12 progression of physics concepts. There are five main standards each with a set of objectives, foundation knowledge statements, conceptual learning targets, and learning outcomes. The document also includes instructional guides for each of the standards and objectives to help teachers interpret and address the learning outcomes. These guides include common student difficulties and the content boundaries for each grade band, as well as example activities, questions, and problems.

The Colorado Upper Division Electrostatics (CUE) Asssessment is designed to test student understanding of core learning goals in junior-level E&M.; It consists of a 17-item open-ended test with optional 9-item pretest. The test has good inter-rater reliability and has been validated using multiple measures. The test provided here is version 22 of the CUE which was attached as Appendix B to the article: Stephanie V. Chasteen, Rachel E. Pepper, Marcos D. Caballero, Steven J. Pollock, and Katherine K. Perkins, Colorado Upper-Division Electrostatics diagnostic: A conceptual assessment for the junior level, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 8 (2), 020108 (2012), doi:10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020108. To receive a copy of the most recent version of the test to use in your course, contact Steven Pollock at steven.pollock@colorado.edu.

As part of an effort to systematically improve our junior-level E&M I course, we have developed a tool to assess student conceptual learning of electrostatics at the upper division. Together with a group of physics faculty, we established a list of learning goals for the course that, with results from student observations and interviews, served as a guide in creating the Colorado Upper-Division Electrostatics (CUE) assessment. The result is a 17-question open-ended post-test diagnostic (with an optional 7-question pretest) and an accompanying grading rubric. We present measures of the validation and reliability of the instrument and grading rubric, plus results from 535 students in both standard and interactive-engagement courses across seven institutions as a baseline for the instrument. Overall, we find that the CUE is a valid and reliable measure, and the data herein are intended to be of use to researchers and faculty interested in using the CUE to measure student learning.

This collection contains simulations and tutorials for a large variety of topics, including Newtonian mechanics, E & M, optics, quantum effects, and more. Each simulation has an audio clip explaining its purpose, along with student notes on the phenomenon and self-test questions.

This interactive activity helps learners visualize the role of electrons in the formation of ionic and covalent chemical bonds. Students explore different types of chemical bonds by first viewing a single hydrogen atom in an electric field model. Next, students use sliders to change the electronegativity between two atoms -- a model to help them understand why some atoms are attracted. Finally, students experiment in making their own models: non-polar covalent, polar covalent, and ionic bonds. This item is part of the Concord Consortium, a nonprofit research and development organization dedicated to transforming education through technology.

This paper, presented at the 2002 Physics Education Research Conference, describes the process of creating diagnostic assessments to assist teachers in formatively assessing their students. The process begins with the learning targets and ends with the creation of web-delivered sets of questions designed to diagnose students' facets of thinking. Early analysis from our first year of implementation indicates students are reading and thinking about the questions in their assignment. The researchers found that that, for certain topics, students' facets of thinking are highly context dependent.