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2013

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Full-Text Articles in Physics

National Physics Association Honors Spalding, Kim Hill Dec 2013

National Physics Association Honors Spalding, Kim Hill

News and Events

No abstract provided.


An Integrated Multidisciplinary Nanoscience Concentration Certificate Program For Stem Education, Karen S. Martirosyan, Mikhail M. Bouniaev, Malik Rakhmanov, Ahmed Touhami, Nazmul Islam, Davood Askari, Tarek Trad, Dmitri Litvinov, Sergey E. Lyshevski Dec 2013

An Integrated Multidisciplinary Nanoscience Concentration Certificate Program For Stem Education, Karen S. Martirosyan, Mikhail M. Bouniaev, Malik Rakhmanov, Ahmed Touhami, Nazmul Islam, Davood Askari, Tarek Trad, Dmitri Litvinov, Sergey E. Lyshevski

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Integration of nanoscience and nanotechnology curricula into the College of Science, Mathematics, and Technology (CSMT) at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) is reported. The rationale for the established multidisciplinary Nanoscience Concentration Certificate Program (NCCP) is to: (i) develop nanotechnology-relevant courses within a comprehensive Science, Engineering and Technology curriculum, and, to offer students an opportunity to graduate with a certificate in nanoscience and nanotechnology; (ii) to contribute to students' success in achieving student outcomes across all college's majors, and, improve the breath, depth and quality of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates' education; (iii) through NCCP, recruit certificate- …


Using Open Datasets And Simulations In Laboratories, Jim Crumley Oct 2013

Using Open Datasets And Simulations In Laboratories, Jim Crumley

Physics Faculty Publications

While advances in instrumentation physics have made many areas more accessible to undergraduate physics laboratories, other areas are still beyond reach. Open data sets and simulations can open up some other frontiers of physics, such as Space Physics and Astronomy. In this talk, I will give an overview of some resources for open data and simulations, and then describe my experiences using these tools in both introductory and advanced labs in our curriculum.


Spalding To Receive National Physics Award, Kim Hill Oct 2013

Spalding To Receive National Physics Award, Kim Hill

News and Events

No abstract provided.


Factors That Affect The Physical Science Career Interest Of Female Students: Testing Five Common Hypotheses, Zahra Hazari, Geoff Potvin, Robynne M. Lock, Florin Lung, Gerhard Sonnert, Philip M. Sadler Oct 2013

Factors That Affect The Physical Science Career Interest Of Female Students: Testing Five Common Hypotheses, Zahra Hazari, Geoff Potvin, Robynne M. Lock, Florin Lung, Gerhard Sonnert, Philip M. Sadler

Department of Teaching and Learning

There are many hypotheses regarding factors that may encourage female students to pursue careers in the physical sciences. Using multivariate matching methods on national data drawn from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project (n=7505), we test the following five commonly held beliefs regarding what factors might impact females’ physical science career interest: (i) having a single-sex physics class, (ii) having a female physics teacher, (iii) having female scientist guest speakers in physics class, (iv) discussing the work of female scientists in physics class, and (v) discussing the underrepresentation of women in physics class. The effect of these …


Why Rozenzweig-Style Midrashic Approach Makes Rational Sense: A Logical (Spinoza-Like) Explanation Of A Seemingly Non-Logical Approach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich Sep 2013

Why Rozenzweig-Style Midrashic Approach Makes Rational Sense: A Logical (Spinoza-Like) Explanation Of A Seemingly Non-Logical Approach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A 20 century German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig promoted a new approach to knowledge, an approach in which in addition to logical reasoning, coming up with stories with imagined additional details is also important. This approach is known as midrashic since it is similar to the use of similar stories -- known as midrashes -- in Judaism. While stories can make the material interesting, traditionally, such stories are not viewed as a serious part of scientific discovery. In this paper, we show that this seemingly non-logical approach can actually be explained in logical terms and thus, makes perfect rational sense.


The Standard New Astronomy Cryostat For Sofia: A Design For Cryogen-Free Infrared Astronomy, Carey F. Scott, Jeffrey Van Cleve, Eric Burgh, Earl T. Daley, Ali Kashani, Zaheer Ali Aug 2013

The Standard New Astronomy Cryostat For Sofia: A Design For Cryogen-Free Infrared Astronomy, Carey F. Scott, Jeffrey Van Cleve, Eric Burgh, Earl T. Daley, Ali Kashani, Zaheer Ali

STAR Program Research Presentations

Astronomy at infrared wavelengths requires optical instruments that operate at low temperatures, which is typically done using liquid cryogens such as nitrogen and helium. These cryogens are costly and limit the operational time of the science instrument. The Standard New Astronomy Cryostat for SOFIA (SNACS) will provide a design for a helium cryocooler-cooled cryostat that meets the stringent airworthiness requirements of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and can be used by future instrument builders to reduce the cost and risk of their instrument design and development. The SNACS dewar will provide approximately 3.4 x 10-1 cubic meters …


Initial Interest, Goals, And Changes In Class Scores In Introductory Physics For Life Sciences, Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch, Panchompoo Wisittanawat , '13, K. Ann Renninger Jul 2013

Initial Interest, Goals, And Changes In Class Scores In Introductory Physics For Life Sciences, Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch, Panchompoo Wisittanawat , '13, K. Ann Renninger

Educational Studies Faculty Works

To examine the effect of extensive life science applications on student attitudes to learning physics, we analyzed CLASS data from life science students in introductory physics. We compare the same students' responses from the first semester, taught with a standard syllabus, to the second semester, taught with extensive life science applications (IPLS). Although first semester responses become less favorable (pre to post), IPLS responses show an increase in favorable and a decrease in unfavorable responses. This is noteworthy because improvement is rarely observed without direct attention to attitudes/beliefs, and suggests IPLS courses are one possible approach to improving attitudes. Finally, …


An Ethnographic Study: Becoming A Physics Expert In A Biophysics Research Group, Idaykis Rodriguez Jul 2013

An Ethnographic Study: Becoming A Physics Expert In A Biophysics Research Group, Idaykis Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Expertise in physics has been traditionally studied in cognitive science, where physics expertise is understood through the difference between novice and expert problem solving skills. The cognitive perspective of physics experts only create a partial model of physics expertise and does not take into account the development of physics experts in the natural context of research. This dissertation takes a social and cultural perspective of learning through apprenticeship to model the development of physics expertise of physics graduate students in a research group. I use a qualitative methodological approach of an ethnographic case study to observe and video record the …


Using Physlets In Hs Physical Science, Mackay Salley, Matt Menard Apr 2013

Using Physlets In Hs Physical Science, Mackay Salley, Matt Menard

Arthur Vining Davis High Impact Fellows Projects

The project proposed involves using physlets as a means of getting students engaged and delivering ideas and concepts in a novel manner. Physlets are Java applets that are designed to address a specific Physics concept. There are many similar applets for other fields such as chemlets which address Chemistry topics. There are many resources regarding physlets and we have chosen to focus on one repository, Physlet Physics by Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni. With the funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Jr. Grant, we can purchase a reference text and a copy of a CD with approximately three hundred physlets …


Mapcores 2012-2013 Assessment Report, Kristen Nairn, Pamela L. Bacon, Jim Crumley, Lynn Ziegler Apr 2013

Mapcores 2012-2013 Assessment Report, Kristen Nairn, Pamela L. Bacon, Jim Crumley, Lynn Ziegler

MapCores Faculty Publications

This is a report showing the assessment results for the MapCores (MAthematics, Physics, COmputer science REsearch Scholars) program at the College of Saint Benedict. Started in 2009, MapCores is a cohort-based program designed to increase women's interest and achievement in mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering. The report was submitted for the National Science Foundation grant number 0965705.


Variation Of Instructor-Student Interactions In An Introductory Interactive Physics Course, Emily West, Cassandra Paul, David Webb, Wendell Potter Mar 2013

Variation Of Instructor-Student Interactions In An Introductory Interactive Physics Course, Emily West, Cassandra Paul, David Webb, Wendell Potter

Faculty Publications

The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion or laboratory instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the interactive-engagement (IE) elements of the course. Because so many different instructors participate in disseminating the IE course elements, we find it essential to the instructors’ professional development to observe and document the student-instructor interactions within the classroom. Out of this effort, we have developed a computerized real-time instructor observation tool (RIOT) to take data of student-instructor interactions. We use the RIOT to observe 29 different instructors for …


The Effects Of Personality Type On Engineering Student Performance And Attitudes, Richard M. Felder, Gary Felder, E. Jacquelin Dietz Jan 2013

The Effects Of Personality Type On Engineering Student Performance And Attitudes, Richard M. Felder, Gary Felder, E. Jacquelin Dietz

Physics: Faculty Publications

The Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) was administered to a group of 116 students taking the introductory chemical engineering course at North Carolina State University. That course and four subsequent chemical engineering courses were taught in a manner that emphasized active and cooperative learning and inductive presentation of course material. Type differences in various academic performance measures and attitudes were noted as the students progressed through the curriculum. The observations were generally consistent with the predictions of type theory, and the experimental instructional approach appeared to improve the performance of MBTI types (extraverts, sensors, and feelers) found in previous studies to …


Everyday Particle Physics, Andrea Pocar Jan 2013

Everyday Particle Physics, Andrea Pocar

Science and Engineering Saturday Seminars

No abstract provided.


Students Talk About Energy In Project- Based Inquiry Science, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann Jan 2013

Students Talk About Energy In Project- Based Inquiry Science, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann

Faculty Publications

We examine the types of emergent language eighth grade students in rural Maine middle schools use when they discuss energy in their first experiences with Project-Based Inquiry Science: Energy, a research-based curriculum that uses a specific language for talking about energy. By comparative analysis of the language used by the curriculum materials to students’ language, we find that students’ talk is at times more aligned with a Stores and Transfer model of energy than the Forms model supported by the curriculum.


Productive Resources In Students’ Ideas About Energy: An Alternative Analysis Of Watts’ Original Interview Transcripts, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann Jan 2013

Productive Resources In Students’ Ideas About Energy: An Alternative Analysis Of Watts’ Original Interview Transcripts, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann

Faculty Publications

For over 30 years, researchers have investigated students’ ideas about energy with the intent of reforming instructional practice. In this pursuit, Watts contributed an influential study with his 1983 paper “Some alternative views of energy” [Phys. Educ. 18, 213 (1983)]. Watts’ “alternative frameworks” continue to be used for categorizing students’ non-normative ideas about energy. Using a resources framework, we propose an alternate analysis of student responses from Watts’ interviews. In our analysis, we show how students’ activated resources about energy are disciplinarily productive. We suggest that fostering seeds of scientific understandings in students’ ideas about energy may play an important …


Extending Positive Class Results Across Multiple Instructors And Multiple Classes Of Modeling Instruction, Eric Brewe, Adrienne L. Traxler, Jorge De La Garza, Laird H. Kramer Jan 2013

Extending Positive Class Results Across Multiple Instructors And Multiple Classes Of Modeling Instruction, Eric Brewe, Adrienne L. Traxler, Jorge De La Garza, Laird H. Kramer

Physics Faculty Publications

We report on a multiyear study of student attitudes measured with the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey in calculus-based introductory physics taught with the Modeling Instruction curriculum. We find that five of six instructors and eight of nine sections using Modeling Instruction showed significantly improved attitudes from pre- to postcourse. Cohen’s d effect sizes range from 0.08 to 0.95 for individual instructors. The average effect was d = 0.45, with a 95% confidence interval of (0.26–0.64). These results build on previously published results showing positive shifts in attitudes from Modeling Instruction classes. We interpret these data in light …