Dear PEG member,
we are pleased to bring you a new edition of our newsletter.
It's been a while since our last newsletter and we have many updates and some exciting job opportunities to share!
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2018 AIP Congress report
The 2019 AIP Congress in Perth was a great success!
We have received 21 abstracts (compared to 14 in 2016 Congress) for Physics Education stream, and we managed to allocate 15 talks over two days. We had one plenary talk and two keynotes delivered by the presenters from overseas. All the PEG streams were power-packed. We also had an excellent panel discussion on Teaching Tips, which is becoming a regular component of our meetings.
Out panelists: Elizabeth Angstmann (UNSW), Joe hope (ANU),
Manju Sharma (USYD), Jamie Quinton (Flinders).
We had an invited talk from the AIP Education Medal winner 2018, which is our outgoing Chair Dr Maria Parappilly! "We need to make physics more accessible, creative, real, inclusive and exciting" - was Maria's message at her talk at the AIP Congress on innovation in physics education. Congratulations Maria!
For the first time at the Congress, we have introduced a High Tea. The keynote "How to strengthen physics by making it inclusive" was delivered by Prof. Chandralekha Singh, APS fellow and Director of the Physics Education Research Centre at the University of Pittsburgh. The High Tea was sponsored by IoP Publishing, and we had their representative, Mr. Ian Trotter, present an overview of what they do and he encouraged our members to join the editorial board of their Physics Education journal. We are looking forward to continuing this partnership.
We were also joined by leading school teachers from Perth and across Australia, and there were a couple of workshops organised specifically for teachers. This AIP meeting provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to discuss the nexus between high school physics teaching and university physics courses, particularly regarding enrolment numbers, diversity, retention, completion and student satisfaction.
The PEG AGM took place on 11th of December at 12:30 pm-1:10 pm during the AIP Congress. The meeting started with the PEG chair presenting a report on the group’s activities during the last two years. Election of new PEG Committee at the AIP Congress: 18 members were present at the meeting. Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway (who was immediate-past Deputy Chair) and Dr Elizabeth Angstmann (UNSW) were confirmed as Chair and Deputy Chair (supported by Margaret Wagner and Manjula Sharma). There were no other nominations from the call sent in the PEG Newsletter on the 19th November 2018.
The outgoing PEG Chair Dr Maria Parappilly will remain on the PEG Committee as immediate-past Chair, and we thank her warmly for all of the work done in the past two years! We would also like to thank John Daicopoulos, who was our Officer for Special Projects in the last two years.
We have also created a new role in the PEG Committee for “Young Physics Educator”. Petr Lebedev, who is completing his PhD in physics education, has been nominated by the PEG Chair and has been confirmed as the new Committee member at the meeting.
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AIP Physics Education Group Discipline Day 2019
This year's ACSME meeting is celebrating 15th anniversary and is being held in Sydney, October 2-3 2019. For more information, click here.
The discipline day is being held on October 4th, 9am-12noon. The day will focus on online teaching and learning. We will have two presentations, followed by an open discussion with participants, and one short workshop.
Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway will talk about how designing and running a massive open online course (MOOC) can be used to move into blended and online teaching practices and engage learners to become partners. Points of discussion: what impediments instructors encounter and what reservations they might have to engage with online teaching.
Elizabeth Angstmann will talk about the Graduate certificate in physics for science teachers at UNSW, an online degree she introduced last year. For this degree, the lecture material is all online, including short videos with questions. It is set up to be very interactive with predict-observe-explain activities throughout. The assessments consist of reports on experiments conducted at participants’schools, online quizzes and then a final exam which participants can sit at UNSW or at their school under invigilation. Points of discussion: how other institutes calculate workloads for online teaching and what steps people take to avoid contract cheating in the online environment.
In the last part of the session, Petr Lebedev will run a crash-course in an effective video making.
To register just for the Discipline day (free of charge), click here.
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AIP Summer meeting, Dec 3-6, Melbourne
Abstract submissions are now open for the 2nd Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) Summer Meeting, to be held from the 3rd – 6th December 2019 at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
The AIP Summer Meeting was established in 2017 as a new biennial meeting of the physics community in Australia, focussing on recent trends and developments in Australian physics research. The conference will showcase the work done by emerging early career researchers in physics while providing the opportunity to network with experts and friends in the community, all during early summertime in beautiful central Melbourne.
See the flyer with meeting details here.
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Key dates
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Abstract submission deadline
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18 September 2019
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Notification of acceptance
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4 October 2019
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Early-bird registration deadline
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18 October 2019
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Registrations close
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6 November 2019
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Prof. Manjula Sharma's keynote at the 2019 GIREP/ICPE Conference
Prof. Sharma presented a plenary at the recent GIREP/ICPE July Conference in Budapest titled “Experimentation in physics education: Should we bother?”. She drew on the ASELL project which many in the physics education community have been participating in for several decades. In particular, to measure student experiences of experimentation, she drew on two surveys; ASLE focusing on individual experiments and ALPE on laboratory programs. The ASLE has been administered to 2691 students and the ALPE to 9790 students, in physics and four other disciplines [1, 2]. After checking for assumptions, Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to extract 2 factors: motivators which appears in both ASLE and ALPE and a separate second factor for each instrument. The analysis suggests the items in the motivators factors align with student satisfaction with their experiences. Those in the second factor appear to be more subtle, if not done well, these give rise to student dissatisfaction, but once at a certain level do not contribute to further satisfaction. The key message for teachers is to invest in items on the motivators to continue improving student experiences while those in the other factors will not influence student experiences after a certain level.
Manju would like thank everyone who has contributed and hopes that the findings can assist colleagues in improving their student learning outcomes and experiences.
[1] Barrie, S. C., Bucat, R. B., Buntine, M. A., Burke da Silva, K., Sharma M. D., and Yeung A. A. (2015) Development, Evaluation and Use of a Student Experience Survey in Undergraduate Science Laboratories: The Advancing Science by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory Student Laboratory Learning Experience Survey, International Journal of Science Education, 37 (11) 1795-1814.
[2] A. Yeung, S. Cornish., S. Kable and M., D. Sharma, (2015) What can instructors focus on when improving undergraduate science experiments? Supporting a cross-disciplinary approach Int. J. of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education, 27(3) 25-40.
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The UNSW Teacher program
The visiting teaching fellow program was introduced to UNSW in 2017. A current high school physics teacher is seconded to UNSW for one year before returning to their school. The visiting teaching fellow program aims to increase communication and links between schools and universities. The visiting teaching fellow teaches in the first year physics laboratory, some first year problem solving workshops and takes some lectures in our fundamentals of physics course. They also help us develop our outreach program to ensure it delivers what teachers and schools need.
The school of physics benefits from learning more about how high school classes are taught and the knowledge basis of our incoming students. Teachers and schools benefit from seeing where some of their students end up and learning about the way we teach students at university.
A/Prof. Elizabeth Angstamann and teaching fellow Jessica Budden.
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Professional Development for SA teachers
Associate Professor Elizabeth Angstman will be delivering a professional development workshop for teachers in SA on Friday, September 6th.
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Physics Education Research in Australia
Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway and David Mills have written a short overview of physics education research (PER) in Australia for the July-August edition of Australian Physics:
"Physics education research has grown within an Australian community which has at its heart a passion for helping students learn better. In this article we describe the discipline and attempt to capture some of the key moments that contributed to the development of this research field in Australia. The article deals almost entirely with tertiary physics education. While many have been on journeys exploring a wide landscape, space permits only a few individuals and landmarks to be mentioned."
PEG group is developing a website where we can share PER education research and teaching resources, so stay tuned!
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Level B (education-focused) position at UNSW
Applications are invited for a 5-year convertible tenure-track Lecturer in the School of Physics at UNSW Sydney. The appointment will be an Education-focussed role at academic level B in any area of physics including astrophysics. A detailed description of the position and instructions on how to apply can be obtained from the UNSW job website:
https://external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/497626/lecturer-physics
The closing date for receipt of all applications is September 21, 2019.
Please bring this job advertisement to the attention of suitable candidates.
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Level C (education-focused) position at Monash University
The School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University invites applications for the position of Senior Lecturer (Education-Focused).
Candidates will be expected to have an outstanding record of teaching and scholarship/research and be capable of providing leadership in innovative pedagogy. Applicants with a background in any area of physics or astronomy/astrophysics are encouraged to apply. We are interested in creative educators, who are able to make an impact on our physics/astrophysics teaching programs. To be considered you will have a PhD in physics or astronomy/astrophysics, demonstrable ability to perform independent scholarship/research, and a strong commitment to innovative teaching and learning – particularly related to active learning.
A detailed description of the position and instructions on how to apply can be found here:
Please bring this job advertisement to the attention of suitable candidates.
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Other news
The International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education (formerly CAL-laborate International) has just published its first issue for 2019 at https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/CAL. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.
2019 editions of ICPE (The International Conference on Physics Education) newsletter, led by Prof. Manjula Sharma as an editor, can be found here: January 2019 , April/May 2019
A new edition of GIREP (The International Research Group on Physics Teaching) newsletter can be found here
https://girep.org/newsletters/newsletters.html
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PEG business: state representatives
We need to elect our PEG state representatives, so we are seeking for nominations via email, which will be confirmed at the PEG lunch meeting during AIP Summer meeting in December (zoom attendance possible).
If you’d like to submit a nomination for any of these positions, please write a short role statement (the current position and a short paragraph with an overview of a 2-year plan) and send it via email to the current Chair Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway by November 24th.
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Contact us
Do you have any ideas or news you would like to share in our newsletter? Contact us!
Chair: Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway (Monash)
Deputy Chair: Elizabeth Angstmann (UNSW)
Young Physics Educator: Petr Lebedev (U Sydney)
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