The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE

The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series on Mondays at 13-14 every other week (odd week numbers).

Previous

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Tor Ole Bigton Odden: 

Over the last year and a half, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have gone from niche research projects in the field of Natural Language Processing to tools that have upended whole sectors like education, software development, social science, and more.

This rapid development is partially due to the fact that these tools have, through gradual updates, developed capabilities that could not have been predicted in November 2022, like the ability to reason spatially, mathematically, and visually. Many users reasonably wonder how, and more importantly why, they work.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Henning Vinjusveen Myhrehagen: 

As of 2023, Norway has implemented a new science curriculum which explicitly includes programming as a part of education in science and mathematics. However, the curriculum documents do not provide clear-cut guidelines on how and to what extent programming should be used for science learning, and it is also unclear how far teachers have come with their implementation of programming in education.

To understand the effects of the new curriculum, we have surveyed Norwegian upper secondary science teachers to find out what affordances they see with the use of programming, and what challenges they are experiencing. 

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Jana Legerská: 

Quantum physics is becoming increasingly important as the background knowledge for the emerging quantum technologies. In the recent years, the role of quantum physics in the high school curriculum has been emphasized, too. However, the curricular documents cannot bring a complete picture of incorporating quantum physics into the school reality.

In this talk, I will present a pilot study on describing the current state of teaching quantum physics at the high schools in the Czech Republic.

I will explore what topics are typically covered in what time constraints, what are teachers' main goals in their quantum physics teaching, and how teachers feel about introducing students to quantum physics.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Geir Kjetil Sandve: 

Large language models (LLMs) are now able to intelligently complement a human programmer (tools like git copilot) or even to write programming code from scratch based on a natural language description of what the code should do (tools like ChatGPT).

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

 Lisa Goodhew: 

This talk examines a set of video-recorded classroom discussions in which students spontaneously engage in sensemaking, and hypothesizes ways that instruction can encourage and support generative, spontaneous reasoning processes.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Elise Lockwood: 

Computational thinking and activity are becoming an increasingly important aspect of what it means to conduct scientific and mathematical work. In light of this, there is a need for mathematics education studies that examine the ways in which students engage with computational tools as they reason about scientific and mathematical concepts.

In this talk, I provide an example of how such computational activity can support the desirable mathematical practice of generalizing. I provide data from an interview with a student who engaged in generalizing activity while using Python to solve combinatorial problems.

I connect his work to the literature on generalization and suggest that there are promising avenues to pursue in leveraging computing for such mathematical practices. I conclude by framing this work within ongoing efforts to better understand the nature of computational thinking and activity for undergraduate students. 

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Vidar Skogvoll: 

The Learning Assistant (LA) program is KURT’s program for providing group teachers at the UiO MatNat Faculty with basic pedagogy and group management skills to lead effective seminars - implementing active learning, fostering discussion and encouraging attendance.

The LA-model was developed at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002, has been subject to several research efforts demonstrating its impact and was implemented by Tor Ole Odden at UiO in 2018. In the fall of 2023, I took over the project and have completed my first iteration of the program with complete attendance from all 17 group teachers and received positive feedback.

In this talk, I will lay out the program as it was implemented this fall, share the feedback I have received, discuss reflections that I have made, and ask for your insight on areas of improvement.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Børge Irgens: 

When moving away from lectures, ensuring students come to class prepared to do other activities can be challenging.

In this talk, I present a case from the third-semester course FYS-1001 Mechanics at the University of Tromsø, where I have implemented a technique called the Readiness Assurance Process using individual and collaborative two-stage tests to encourage students' pre-class preparation. Utilizing data on time spent on pre-class preparation and individual and group test scores, I assess the effectiveness of this teaching strategy in ensuring student readiness.

Additionally, by analyzing recordings of group discussions, I aim to explore the learning potential of the collaborative exam stage.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Michelle Zandieh: 

Over the past 10 years our team has developed the Inquiry-Oriented Linear Algebra (IOLA) curriculum, designed for a first course in linear algebra typically taken by students in the USA majoring in a wide variety of STEM fields. An offshoot of this team has worked with undergraduates to develop two digital games, Vector Unknown (VU) and Vector Unknown: Echelon Seas (VUES).  

After a brief overview of the projects, this talk will look at examples of tasks and student thinking that allow us to reflect together about curriculum design choices. These choices range from (a) what experientially real setting to use for a task in IOLA, to (b) whether to use a paper and pencil task versus a digital game, to (c) the affordances and constraints of seemingly small changes made in game mechanics.   

Time and place: , Ø434

Andreas Haraldsrud: “Make a simulation of a falling object.” “The following program should calculate the probability of getting yellow, wrinkled peas - fill in the blanks.” “Use chemical language to describe what is happening in this loop.”

Programming can be taught in various ways and depends on context. Andreas will present different methods for teaching programming in chemistry, physics, biology, geoscience and mathematics.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Anders Malthe-Sørenssen: Center for Interdiciplinary Education (INT-ED) brings together students from The Faculty of Humanities, The  Faculty of Social Sciences and The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at UIO to develop students interdiciplinary competence. The centers goal is to include students in development of new interdiciplinary processes.

Anders vil give a presentation of the new Center for Excellence in Education. 

Time and place: , Center for Computing in Science Education (The kitchen area)

The toolbox of algebraic manipulations that students traditionally learn to use in second-year calculus is not a good match for many applications in other disciplines, such as physics.  Mastery of electromagnetism, for example, requires a geometric understanding of vector fields and their derivatives.

Furthermore, most mathematical modeling requires a robust understanding of the relationship between discrete data and its idealization as smooth mathematical objects.  These applications require students to have rich concept images of differentiation and integration that go well beyond what is typically taught in second-year calculus.

This talk describes efforts at Oregon State University to help students master the use of geometric reasoning in such physical and geometric contexts, in both mathematics and physics courses.  Several examples will be presented where language differences between disciplines lead to student difficulties, as will some of the methods and tools that we have developed to address them.

Time and place: , Center for Computing in Science Education (The kitchen area)

I will show you who are the members of the Physics Education research group of the University of Bologna. Moreover, I will tell you about the projects in which we are involved now and all the past significnt projects that have helped to strengthen the direction and current identity of the group. Also I will indicate what are the main publications that have been made in these years.

All this will be done through the eyes and the narrative of a PhD student part of UNIBO research group. I have not certainly the presumption to know exactly (after two years) how to orient myself in all the rich and multi-dimensional research activities of my group.  But I will try to make you perceive the great commitment, thoughts and enthusiasm that I see every day in the challenging but wonderful research activity in Bologna.

Time and place: , Center for Computing in Science Education (The kitchen area)

Fermi problems (also known as Fermi estimation problems or estimation problems) are a classic type of exercise that have been used in physics education for decades.

At UiO we have begun using them in our first-semester physics course as a gentle start to “thinking like a physicist." But Fermi problems can also be a rich site for building modeling skills across the STEM disciplines, and when combined with a little statistics and computation can quickly turn into simple Monte Carlo problems.
 

This ODD seminar will be partly a Fermi problem workshop and partly a demonstration of the new class of computational Fermi problems we are developing for our physics and STEM courses.
 

Also, there will be cake!

We have restructured the first year of the physics bachelor program, introducing a new course combining numerical methods with introductory mechanics in the first semester. I will describe briefly the background for this and then discuss some of the experiences that we have had running the course almost twice by now. I will focus on the types of numerical problems the students have worked on and describe what they have mastered and what they have found challenging.

Anders Lauvland: Physics identity has risen as a much studied construct in recent years, and recognizing oneself as a “physics person” appears to be indicative of persistence in physics. In this work, we integrate a “physics person” construct into expectancy-value theory as a mediator for motivation.
 

For this analysis we have surveyed N=328 first-year students in introductory mechanics at five research intensive institutions in Norway. And use structural equation modelling to analyze the data.

Omid Mirmotahari: For feedback processes to be enhanced, students need both appreciation on how feedback can operate effectively and strategies to use feedback within the curriculum. Several studies that examined feedback exchanged during student peer-review process have shown some challenges regarding students’ confidence in their own knowledge to perform assessment.

It has also been found that, due to students’ negative perception of their own level of competence, they have limited confidence in their fellow students assessing their assignment. Lack of clarity about assessment criteria and standards are a source of anxiety for many first-year university students.

Maria Vetleseter Bøe: We need students to engage in the learning activities that work. However, many students resist active learning activities and believe they learn more from traditional lectures.

We have studied how students’ motivation interacts with different learning activities, using focus group data from Norwegian physics students.

The findings suggest that students develop forms of motivation that promote learning in active learning situations when they feel competent, either through mastery, perceived learning, or comparison with peers, and that relatedness to a community of learners often helps enable development of such motivation.

Ben Zwickl from Rochester Institute of Technology is back an even week:

This is an in-progress project, and I’m looking forward to an interactive discussion with lots of questions and feedback!

Our team has conducted 16 interviews with scientists from chemistry, physics, biology, and mathematics. Each interview delves into important tasks that incorporate computation as part of doing research and/or teaching.

Henning V. Myhrehagen, Karl Henrik Fredly, and Hannah Christine Sabo are working on separate research projects in Tor Ole Odden’s research group at CCSE. Their projects address computation/programming in different parts of physics education. Here are the abstracts of the three lightning talks they will give:

To many, chatbots represent a challenge to academic integrity. However, what if instead of having teachers assess AI-written texts, we’ll have AI assess students? The talk will be an exploration and discussion on how existing and coming technologies opens a door to personalized learning.

Time and place: , CCSE seminar room

Niklas Karlsen: How do we prepare pre-service teachers to teach the use of programming in a subject-specific context? Should they first learn programming independently of subjects? How do they navigate the challenges related to the learning and teaching of programming? How can programming be integrated into subjects?

This ODD seminar is a continuation of the previous discussion on computational literacy. For those of you who did not read out previous abstract:

Within the past decade, computation has become increasingly prevalent in school standards and curriculum across the world. One framework, computational thinking, has arisen as the dominent framework in educational settings.

Physics education at university level aims to equip students with the necessary skills to take diverse careers paths successfully and adapt to demands of a 21st century society rapidly and effectively. We consider that this can only be achieved by incorporating research-based education innovations that have equity, diversity and inclusion at their heart. In this talk I will present a design of interactive lectures that contribute to a more equitable, diverse and inclusive classroom environment. This goes hand in hand with the design of alternative assessments such as collaborative exams. 

Collaborative exams not only can measure the previously gained learning, but also can be an optimal opportunity to produce new learning while reducing exam anxiety. We developed an inclusive approach for collaborative exams  adjusting the design to the individual learning requirements of the students. In addition, we encouraged students to become active participants in the exam format by incorporating student-generated content.

In BIOS1100 we noticed that many of the errors students make are abstraction errors (not working at the correct abstraction level or translating incorrectly between levels of abstraction), and there seems to be some evidence of this in the research literature as well.

One way to approach this as an instructor (experts often unconsciously work on several levels of abstraction simultaneously) is to be explicit about which abstraction level we’re working at and when we make a switch – not only to further students’ understanding of the subject matter, but also to teach abstraction as a concept.