University physics students’ ideas of thermal radiation expressed in open laboratory activities using infrared cameras

Background: University physics students were engaged in open-ended thermodynamics laboratory activities with a focus on understanding a chosen phenomenon or the principle of laboratory apparatus, such as thermal radiation and a heat pump. Students had access to handheld infrared (IR) cameras for their investigations.

Purpose: The purpose of the research was to explore students’ interactions with reformed thermodynamics laboratory activities. It was guided by the research question: How do university physics students make use of IR cameras in open-ended investigation of thermal radiation as a phenomenon?

Sample: The study was conducted with a class of first-year university physics students in Sweden. The interaction with the activities of four of the students was selected for analysis. The four students are males.

Design and methods: We used a qualitative, interpretive approach to the study of students’ interaction. The primary means of data collection was video recording of students’ work with the laboratory activities and their subsequent presentations. The analysis focused on how IR cameras helped students notice phenomena relating to thermal radiation, with comparison to previous research on students’ conceptions of thermal radiation.

Results: When using the IR camera, students attended to the reflection of thermal radiation on shiny surfaces, such as polished metals, windows or a whiteboard and emissive properties of surfaces of different types. In this way, they went beyond using the technology as a temperature probe. Students were able to discuss merits and shortcomings of IR cameras in comparison with digital thermometers.

Conclusions: With the help of IR cameras, university physics students attend to thermal phenomena that would otherwise easily go unnoticed.     

Spillover effects in environmental behaviors,across time and context: a review and research agenda

When implementing environmental education and interventions to promote one pro-environmental behavior, it is seldom asked if and how non-target pro-environmental behaviors are affected. The spillover effect proposes that engaging in one behavior affects the probability of engagement or disengaging in a second behavior. Therefore, the positive spillover effect predicts that interventions targeting one specific behavioral have the capacity to promote non-targeted and/or future pro-environmental behaviors. However, the negative spillover effect predicts that engaging in a first pro-environmental behavior will prevent or decrease a second pro-environmental behavior. Since the theoretical and empirical basis for positive and negative spillover effects are not sufficiently understood, the present paper (1) suggests a distinction between behavioral, temporal, and contextual spillovers (2) reviews the existing spillover research literature across a variety of environmental domains, (3) presents potential moderators governing the direction of spillover effects, and finally (4) discuss techniques to promote pro-environmental spillovers.     

What do we know and where do we go? Formative assessment in developing student teachers’ professional learning of teaching science

In the context of teacher education, it could well be suggested that assessment activities that build on formative interactions between student teachers and teacher educators might offer new windows into better understanding teaching and learning. This paper presents findings from a study into a primary science teacher education initiative that seeks to build the foundations on which 24 primary science student teachers, through the use of formative assessment of their science teaching and learning, can begin developing their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). In the project, formative assessment consists of activities used by teacher educators to stimulate interactions, self- and peer-assessment in order to provide insights into how student teachers develop their PCK during a semester. Content Representations (CoRes), were used as a tool to unpack the student teachers’ approach to teaching a science topic and the reasons for that approach. The results indicate that the use of CoRes, together with subsequent self-assessment and formative interactions with teacher educators and peers, do have the potential for PCK development for student teachers. The results further highlight the need for developing reliable and valid tools for capturing and assessing student teachers’ PCK in pre-service teacher education.     

Role of exteroceptive background context in taste-aversion conditioning and extinction

In two experiments, saccharin (CS) and lithium chloride (US) were paired in a context consisting of specific visual, auditory, tactual, and olfactory cues. The saccharin aversion was then extinguished in a context free from conditioning-context cues. Later, saccharin preference tests were given in the presence and absence of these cues. The results indicated that the background cues of the conditioning trial controlled the amount of saccharin drunk on extinction trials, and, furthermore, that extinction of the taste aversion was context specific; i.e., groups given extinction trials in a different (from conditioning) context retained their saccharin aversion in the conditioning context only. The results indicate an important role played by the exteroceptive context in taste-aversion conditioning.     

Different ways in which students handle chance encounters in the explorative setting of a dice game

The purpose of this study is to investigate the ways in which Swedish seventh grade students (12 and 13 years old) handle chance encounters. Four groups of students working in pairs participated in the study. In the group discussions, which were tape-recorded and fully transcribed, the students were encouraged to explore strategies for winning a specifically designed dice game based on the sum of two dice. The dice game included four different set-ups of dice designed to bring to the fore different aspects of probability modelling and to offer the student the opportunity to encounter small differences in the mathematical structure of the sample space and of the probability distribution between the four different set-ups. The study describes strategies that the students use when confronted with these different set-ups, what their activities imply in terms of resources in handling random phenomena and what the dice game offers in terms of opportunities for learning probability. In order to explain such meaning-making processes the students’ activities are viewed from a perspective that takes into consideration how the students’ understanding varies with their interpretations of the situation they are confronted with, i.e., how they contextualize the different set-ups of the dice game. The results show how the students, during the course of the game, reorganize their interpretations of the mathematical content confronting them, and how a variation of guiding principles becomes the object of exploration. Approaches of extremes and a number model are described as a means for the students to identify and assign probabilities for the total of two dice.     

Why Inquiry? Primary Teachers’ Objectives in Choosing Inquiry- and Context-Based Instructional Strategies to Stimulate Students’ Science Learning

Studies have shown that there is a need for pedagogical content knowledge among science teachers. This study investigates two primary teachers and their objectives in choosing inquiry- and context-based instructional strategies as well as the relation between the choice of instructional strategies and the teachers’ knowledge about of students’ understanding and intended learning outcomes. Content representations created by the teachers and students’ experiences of the enacted teaching served as foundations for the teachers’ reflections during interviews. Data from the interviews were analyzed in terms of the intended, enacted, and experienced purposes of the teaching and, finally, as the relation between intended, enacted, and experienced purposes. Students’ experiences of the teaching were captured through a questionnaire, which was analyzed inductively, using content analysis. The results show that the teachers’ intended teaching objectives were that students would learn about water. During the enacted teaching, it seemed as if the inquiry process was in focus and this was also how many of the students experienced the objectives of the activities. There was a gap between the intended and experienced objectives. Hardly any relation was found between the teachers’ choice of instructional strategies and their knowledge about students’ understanding, with the exception that the teacher who also added drama wanted to support her students’ understanding of the states of water.     

“Shut up and calculate”: the available discursive positions in quantum physics courses

Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum physics courses at two Swedish universities, we instead ask what it means to become a physicist, and whether certain ways of becoming a physicist and doing physics is privileged in this process. Asking the question of what discursive positions are made accessible to students, we use observations of lectures and problem solving sessions together with interviews with students to characterize the discourse in the courses. Many students seem to have high expectations for the quantum physics course and generally express that they appreciate the course more than other courses. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the ways of being a “good quantum physics student” are limited by the dominating focus on calculating quantum physics in the courses. We argue that this could have negative consequences both for the education of future physicists and the discipline of physics itself, in that it may reproduce an instrumental “shut up and calculate”-culture of physics, as well as an elitist physics education. Additionally, many students who take the courses are not future physicists, and the limitation of discursive positions may also affect these students significantly.