Full Abstracts

 January 14, 2009

Eugenia Etkina, Rutgers University

"Can students develop scientific habits of mind in an introductory physics course?"

In my presentation, I will describe a controlled study "Transfer of scientific abilities."  The study was conducted in a 180-student introductory physics course taught via Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE). The goal of the study was to find whether designing their own experiement in labs affects students' approaches to experimental problem solving in the new areas of physics and biology, and their learning of physics concepts.  We investigated how students developed scientific abilities in a large enrollment course, and whether they could apply these abilities to solve an experimental problem in an area of physics that they had not studied and in biology.  We also compared the experimental and significant differences between the experimental and the control group.  The project was supported by NSF grant DRL 0241078.

January 21, 2009

Dyan McBride, Kansas State University
"Physics Education Research: An Overview and Examples from Current Research"
I’ll be talking a little bit about the basics of Physics Education Research (PER), including what we study and how the results are used. As an example, I’ll talk about my recent work which examines how students understand wavefront aberrometry (a relatively new method for diagnosing vision defects). I’ll discuss what’s been found about student understanding in this new context, and how it can be generalized to other student learning studies.
 

January 28, 2009

James Clemens, Miami University

"Quantum teleportation and superradiance"
Quantum teleportation is one of the information processing tasks that exploits the strong correlations allowed by quantum mechanics to outperform the best classical information processing protocols. I will explain how one can, in principle, transfer an unknown quantum state of a qubit with perfect fidelity without physically transferring the qubit.  The best classical protocol does this with a fidelity of 2/3. I will describe how one can make a conditional Bell state discriminator which is necessary to carry out quantum teleportation by detecting the super- or sub-radiant emission of a single photon and discuss the performance of the teleportation protocol accounting for the imperfect efficiency of photodetectors.

February 18, 2009

Robert Beichner, North Carolina State University

"The SCALE-UP Project: Student-centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs"

How do you keep a classroom of 100 undergraduates actively learning? Can students practice communication and teamwork skills in a large class? How do you boost the performance of underrepresented groups? The SCALE-UP Project has addressed these concerns. The room design and pedagogy have been adopted at more than 50 leading institutions across the country. Physics, chemistry, math, astronomy, biology, engineering, earth sciences, business, and even literature classes are currently being taught this way.

Hundreds of hours of classroom video and audio recordings, transcripts of numerous interviews and focus groups, data from conceptual learning assessments (using widely-recognized instruments in a pretest/posttest protocol), and collected portfolios of student work are part of our rigorous assessment effort. Our findings (based on data from over 16,000 students collected over five years) can be summarized as the following:

-Female failure rate is 1/5 of previous levels, even though more is demanded of students.
-Minority failure rate is 1/4 that seen in traditionally taught courses.
-At-risk students are more successful in later courses.
-Top students gain the most, although students at all levels benefit.
-Conceptual learning and problem solving are significantly improved, with same content coverage.

In this talk I will briefly discuss the classroom environment and the research leading to its design, describe some of the activities students conduct during class, and review the findings of studies of learning in various SCALE-UP settings.

March 4, 2009

Jo Hopp, University of Wisconsin - Stout

  "The Eyes Have It: Control Systems, Neural Integration and Motor Learning"

Primates use fast accurate eye movements, called saccades, to scan their visual environment and focus on objects of interest.  Saccadic accuracy remains until late in life despite aging or neurological damage.  This suggests that a mechanism exists in the brain to monitor this accuracy and make adjustments when necessary (saccade adaptation).  This talk will introduce the saccadic system, its neural control, and why it is ideal for studying motor learning.  Motor learning is of interest to both the medical community and applied technology such as artificial intelligence.  Further, this talk will discuss studies examining where in the saccadic system adaptation takes place and what neurological structures may be involved.

April 1, 2009

Gerry Smith, Positronics Research, LLC

 "Positronium lifetimes in quasi-ferromagnetic silica at 4K"

We report on lifetime measurements of positronium in silica aerogel exposed to unprecedented levels of ionizing radiation at 4K.  Recent experiments show that under these conditions, silica displays magnetic hysteresis and is quasi-ferromagnetic.  Positronium is formed between positrons and weakly bound electrons.  Unusually large lifetimes suggest the existence of an outer well of the potential created by the quasi-magnetic field and the motional electric field.  Lifetimes are consistent with barrier tunneling from the outer well into the coulomb well.  Densities are within estimated limits.  Even longer-lived atoms are not detected due to instrumentation limits and possibly pickoff annihilation.  We explain long lifetimes and intensity from other experiments using samples exposed to large radiation doses in magnetic fields in terms of outer well states.

April 15, 2009

Brett DePaola, Kansas State University

"Controlling Coherent Processes by Phase-Shaping Ultrashort Laser Pulses"
The coherent properties of lasers have long been exploited to control processes such as excitation. Examples of such excitation schemes include pi-pulses, adiabatic rapid passage, and stimulated Raman adiabatic rapid passage (STIRAP), to name a few. More recently, narrow bandwidth, quasi-cw lasers have been used to induce a form of collisional association between ultracold atoms. Known as photoassociation, this processe has recently been shown to lead to production of ultracold, both translationally and rovibrationally, heteronuclear diatomic molecules. These processes have all been possible due to the exquisite control that is now technically possible over the frequency and, in some cases, phase of the lasers involved. In contrast, the broad bandwidth inherent in ultrashort/ultrafast lasers gives one relatively little control in the frequency domain – certainly when compared to narrow bandwidth cw lasers. Nevertheless, ultrafast laser technology has dramatically advanced in its own right, with phase and amplitude control between a pulse’s spectral components through the use of pulse shapers of various types. In this work we discuss the control of some basic processes normally in the domain of narrow bandwidth laser, namely coherent excitation and photoassociation, using shaped ultrafast laser pulses. However, rather than completely abandoning narrow bandwidth lasers, we instead combine them with the ultrafast technology to achieve even greater control than would be possible with only one or the other.

April 22, 2009

Michael Bait, Granville High School

"What are the best things about teaching high school physics?"
Maybe it’s the pay, fame, and power.  Perhaps it’s the schedule.  Could it be the retirement plan?  It must be the stability of doing the same thing year-after-year-after-year… no it’s the constant challenge associated with developing new courses, demos, labs, and lectures.  Let’s see… did I leave anything out?  Oh yes… maybe it’s the students.