When:
Monday, May 10, 2021
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM CT
Where: Online
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Samantha Westlake
Group: Physics Learning and Teaching Seminar (PLaTS)
Category: Academic
Abstract: In the last forty years, Physics Education Research (PER) has provided significant insights into what students learn in university courses (and the extent to which they fail to learn) and how we can improve student understanding. Careful studies on a variety of physics topics have documented the fine structure of student ideas while research-validated curricula have helped deepen conceptual understanding and hone quantitative problem solving, promoting deeper learning for a greater fraction of students in both introductory and upper division physics courses in classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and relativity. And yet, considerable challenges that threaten the systemic health of the whole physics enterprise remain. In the last 25 years, despite an increase in both the number and fraction of high school students who take one physics course, the gap in physics-taking rates between White and Black students has not budged. Similarly, although we have almost reached gender parity in high school physics, only about 20% of physics bachelor’s awardees are women and fewer than 20% of physics faculty are women. This talk will illustrate how PER methods and national efforts by our professional societies can be brought to bear to expand who takes physics in both secondary and university settings, who feels connected with the values and the habits of mind of the discipline, and what physics success looks like.
Speaker: Stamatis Vokos, California Polytechnic State University
If you know someone who would be interested in attending this talk, please contact Samantha Westlake (samantha.westlake@northwestern.edu) to access the Zoom link.