Disseminating Instructional Physics Labs - ALPhA's Immersion Workshops for Faculty Development

American Association Of Physics Teachers, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

An important but overlooked component of improving student hands-on learning is expanding the skills of the faculty and staff who teach laboratory courses. This project will help faculty to learn new physics experiments and techniques that they will then teach to their own students. Specifically, this project will support a series of 12-14 workshops each year for two years hosted at universities across the United States, and will bring together expert mentors with a small group of faculty participants. The faculty typically will spend 2-3 days learning the details of a single experiment so that they know it well enough to teach it effectively themselves. Each year at least 25 different experiments will be offered, spanning a wide range of topics throughout the Physics curriculum. The Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA) is partnering with the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) to offer these workshops, called Laboratory Immersions on a scope that will improve physics education at a significant fraction of the departments in the U.S. The target audience is the small but crucial pool of faculty and staff who teach laboratory physics courses beyond the first year (BFY) of introductory physics. Instructors teaching these courses are often required to guide students through experiments that are outside the faculty member's own area of expertise. Participants in the Immersions will explore, similar to a student's experience, all aspects of a single advanced undergraduate physics laboratory experiment. Because this group of faculty tend to interact with a large fraction of the physics majors at their institution, even if each participant teaches a handful of students each year, this program is expected to impact a substantial fraction of the undergraduate physics majors in the nation. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources and the Division of Physics in the Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences.