Hunter G. Close

Students today face a reality of ever-increasing chaos. A sense of personal direction can be difficult to attain, especially in the murk of pursuing a degree as rigorous and attention-demanding as physics. Our project aims to frame the pursuit of a physics degree as a hero's journey (Campbell, 1949) in order to design discussion points for undergraduates to consider their experiences from an archetypal view. Our intent is to connect students with timeless and emergent mythological forms that are images of a universal psychology. In this paper, we coordinate stages of the hero's journey with various subjective experiences from undergraduate STEM students, as reported in "Talking About Leaving", (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997), with supplements from the theory of optimal experience "flow", (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Our ultimate goal is to help students understand their experience studying physics in ways that promote productive, responsible, proud, and mentally healthy engagement within their academic and social lives.

Many factors enter into the decision to teach high school physics: scholarships and salary, working conditions and hours, professional preparation and support, job satisfaction, etc. Another element is how teaching might contribute to one's sense of meaning and purpose in life. To investigate the dynamic interplay between the path of teaching and the human spirit, I developed the "Journeys" interview protocol, which adapts archetypal forms from the hero's journey (Campbell, 1949) to the journey of earning a degree in physics and pursuing teacher certification; I used this protocol as a basis for discussion with four future physics teachers who are Noyce Scholars at Texas State University. This paper describes the development and content of the protocol and some of the initial results from interviews.

Exams are intended to give faculty information about what students know, and where they need more support. But traditional analyses that get shipped with the exam results received from the university scoring office focus on the exam items, not students' ideas. Moreover, one of our goals for students is building their cognitive network of physics concepts. With sets of contextually related questions, we can analyze students' cognitive network as applied to a particular context. We report on the effectiveness of existing tools in identifying patterns in student responses on both individual and group exams.

Energy is a crosscutting concept in science and features prominently in national science education documents. In the Next Generation Science Standards, the primary conceptual learning goal is for learners to conserve energy as they track the transfers and transformations of energy within, into, or out of the system of interest in complex physical processes. As part of tracking energy transfers among objects, learners should (i) distinguish energy from matter, including recognizing that energy flow does not uniformly align with the movement of matter, and should (ii) identify specific mechanisms by which energy is transferred among objects, such as mechanical work and thermal conduction. As part of tracking energy transformations within objects, learners should (iii) associate specific forms with specific models and indicators (e.g., kinetic energy with speed and/or coordinated motion of molecules, thermal energy with random molecular motion and/or temperature) and (iv) identify specific mechanisms by which energy is converted from one form to another, such as incandescence and metabolism. Eventually, we may hope for learners to be able to optimize systems to maximize some energy transfers and transformations and minimize others, subject to constraints based in both imputed mechanism (e.g., objects must have motion energy in order for gravitational energy to change) and the second law of thermodynamics (e.g., heating is irreversible). We hypothesize that a subsequent goal of energy learning—innovating to meet socially relevant needs—depends crucially on the extent to which these goals have been met.

Complex-valued functions are commonly used to solve differential equations for one-dimensional motion of a harmonic oscillator with linear damping, a sinusoidal driving force, or both. However, the usual approach treats complex functions as an algebraic shortcut, neglecting geometrical representations of those functions and discarding imaginary parts. This article emphasizes the benefit of using diagrams in the complex plane for such systems, in order to build intuition about harmonic motion and promote spatial reasoning and the use of varied representations. Examples include the analysis of exact time sequences of various kinematic events in damped harmonic motion, sense-making about the phase difference between a driving force and the resulting motion, and understanding the discrepancy between the resonant frequency and the natural undamped frequency for forced, damped harmonic motion. The approach is suitable for supporting instruction in undergraduate upper-division classical mechanics.