Steven Frederick Wolf

Group work is often a critical component of how we ask students to interact while learning in active and interactive environments. A common-sense extension of this feature is the inclusion of group assessments. Moreover, one of the key scientific practices is the development of collaborative working relationships. As instructors, we should be cognizant of our classes’ development in the social crucible of our classroom, along with their development of cognitive and/or problem solving skills. We analyze group exam network data from a two-class introductory physics sequence. In each class, on each of four exams, students took an individual version of the exam and then reworked the exam with classmates. Students recorded their collaborators, and these reports are used to build directed networks. We compare global network measures and node centrality distributions between exams in each semester and contrast these trends between semesters. The networks are partitioned using positional analysis, which blocks nodes by similarities in linking behavior, and by edge betweenness community detection, which groups densely connected nodes. By calculating the block structure for each exam and mapping over time, it is possible to see a stabilizing social structure in the two-class sequence. Comparing global and node-level measures suggests that the period from the first to second exam disrupts network structure, even when the blocks are relatively stable.

A significant challenge physics faculty face teaching introductory labs is engaging students in authentic science practices. Another has been highlighted given the current global pandemic—how to engage students in our laboratory courses while maintaining appropriate social distancing and hygiene standards. We have chosen to answer these challenges by transforming our labs…twice. We discuss the rationale behind the first transformation to a practice-focused curriculum. In March 2020 we needed to transform our labs again, this time to accommodate online learning. This paper discusses two chief questions: “What are we doing to engage students in science practices?” and “How did we make all of this work online?”

This study reports the development, validation, and implementation of a practical exam to assess science practices in an introductory physics laboratory. The exam asks students to design and conduct an investigation, perform data analysis, and write an argument. The exam was validated with advanced physics undergraduate students and undergraduate students in introductory physics lecture courses. Face validity has been established by administering the practical in 65 laboratory sections over the course of three semesters. We found that the greatest source of variability in this exam was due to instructor grading issues and discuss the implications of this result for our ongoing assessment efforts.

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.

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. During a gale on Nov. 7, 1940, the bridge exhibited remarkable oscillations before collapsing spectacularly (Figs. 1–5). Physicists over the years have spent a great deal of time and energy studying this event. By using open-source analysis tools and digitized footage of the disaster, physics students in both high school and college can continue in this tradition. Students can watch footage of “Galloping Gertie,” ask scientific questions about the bridge's collapse, analyze data, and draw conclusions from that analysis. Students should be encouraged to pursue their own investigations, but the question that drove our inquiry was this: When physics classes watch modern video showing the oscillations and the free fall of the bridge fragments, are these scenes sped up, slowed down, or at the correct speed compared to what was observed by the eyewitnesses on Nov. 7, 1940?