arXiv subjects

James T. Laverty

Publications and source records attributed to James T. Laverty.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

The Effect of Value-Focused Discussions on Scientists' Ethical Decision Making

Many scientists view science as value-free, despite the fact that both epistemic and non-epistemic values structure scientific inquiry. Current ethics training usually focuses on transmitting knowledge about high-level ethical concepts or rules and is widely regarded as ineffective. We argue that ethics training will be more effective at improving ethical decision making if it focuses on connecting values to science. We pull from philosophy and psychology to define ethical decision making using the Four Component Model. This model states that in order to make an ethical decision someone must consider four components: moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, moral motivation, and moral implementation. We formed a moderated fellowship of fourteen science faculty from different disciplines who met for ten sessions over the course of a year, where they discussed the values embedded in different scientific norms. We then conducted interviews before and after the year-long fellowship that involved guided reflection of scenarios where there was some kind of ethical misconduct where the scientific practice required value judgements (e.g using unpublished data in their own work). We looked at how the fellowship affected the scientists' ability to recognize ethical dimensions regarding the scenarios. We found that this fellowship improved moral sensitivity, but their moral reasoning does not improve. We outlined our approach on how to look at scientists' ethical decision making and made recommendations on how to improve our approach. This work can inform future ethical training to align better with what scientists value and introduce useful concepts from philosophy and psychology to education research in physics.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2024

Student and AI responses to physics problems examined through the lenses of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning

Several reports in education have called for transforming physics learning environments by promoting sensemaking of real-world scenarios in light of curricular ideas. Recent advancements in Generative-Artificial Intelligence has garnered increasing traction in educators' community by virtue of its potential in transforming STEM learning. In this exploratory study, we adopt a mixed-methods approach in comparatively examining student- and AI-generated responses to two different formats of a physics problem through the cognitive lenses of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning. The student data is derived from think-aloud interviews of introductory students and the AI data comes from ChatGPT's solutions collected using Zero shot approach. The results highlight AI responses to evidence most features of the two processes through well-structured solutions and student responses to effectively leverage representations in their solutions through iterative refinement of arguments. In other words, while AI responses reflect how physics is talked about, the student responses reflect how physics is practiced. Implications of these results in light of development and deployment of AI systems in physics pedagogy are discussed.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2023

Theoretical exploration of task features that facilitate student sensemaking in physics

Assessment tasks provide opportunities for students to make sense of novel contexts in light of their existing ideas. Consequently, investigations in physics education research have extensively developed and analyzed assessments that support students sensemaking of their surrounding world. In the current work, we complement contemporary efforts by theoretically exploring assessment task features that increase the likelihood of students sensemaking in physics. We identify the task features by first noting the salient characteristics of the sensemaking process as described in the science education literature. We then leverage existing theoretical ideas from cognitive psychology, education, and philosophy of science in unpacking the task features which elicit the characteristics of sensemaking. Furthermore, we leverage Conjecture Mapping -- a framework from design-based research -- to articulate how the proposed task features elicit the desired outcome of sensemaking. We argue that to promote sensemaking, tasks should cue students to unpack the underlying mechanism of a real-world phenomenon by coordinating multiple representations and by physically interpreting mathematical expressions. Major contributions of this work include: adopting an agent-based approach to explore task features; operationalizing conjecture mapping in the context of task design in physics; leveraging cross-disciplinary theoretical ideas to promote sensemaking in physics; and introducing a methodology extendable to unpack task features which can elicit other valued epistemic practices such as modeling and argumentation.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2023

Sensemaking and Scientific Modeling: Intertwined processes analyzed in the context of physics problem solving

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the physical world. In the current work, we provide an explicit, framework-based analysis of the intertwining between modeling and sensemaking by analyzing think-aloud interviews of two students solving a physics problem. While one student completes the task, the other abandons their approach. The case studies reveal that particular aspects of modeling and sensemaking processes co-occur. For instance, the priming on the `given' information from the problem statement constituted the students' engagement with their mental models, and their attempts to resolve inconsistencies in understanding involved the use of external representations. We find that barriers experienced in modeling can inhibit students' sustained sensemaking. These results suggest ways for future research to support students' sensemaking in physics by promoting modeling practices.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2021

Influences on Faculty Uptake from a Faculty Learning Community

Professional development is a tool that faculty members use to develop knowledge and skills that help them become better teachers. We investigate what influences affect the ways in which faculty take up ideas from professional development programs. By employing the framework of Pedagogical Reasoning and Action, we investigate how faculty take up ideas from a particular Faculty Learning Community (the STEM Teaching & Learning Fellowship) and the factors that influence their instructional and material design choices. We examined influences affecting faculty in three different cases. From these cases, we constructed themes, and examined those themes across all cases using a cross-case analysis. In this multiple case study we find that assessment and instructional alignment, participation in instructional practices, and the culture of the department all influence the extent in which faculty bring new teaching ideas and practices into the classroom. These findings can be leveraged by developers to design and improve programs, as well as inform researchers on future avenues of research.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2021

Assessing Scientific Practices in Physics Paper-based Assessments

Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students' abilities to blend conceptually important concepts with practices scientists engage in. To design assessment tasks that can measure these abilities, we leveraged Evidence-Centered Design and the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol with the focal scientific practice of "Using Mathematics." We conducted video recorded one-on-one think-aloud interviews to explore how students interpreted these tasks. In this paper, we articulate our design process and the analysis of students' responses using the ACER (Activation-Construction-Execution-Reflection) framework. Our assessment tasks elicited students' abilities to blend concepts with mathematics and written solutions elicited evidence of their abilities to blend them most of the time. This work extends our understanding on incorporating scientific practices into paper-based assessments at the introductory level.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Student Epistemological Framing on Paper-Based Assessments

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e. their epistemologies. Using data from students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud interviews, we explore how assessment features impact (or did not impact) student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video recordings and transcripts to infer the epistemological framings and resources students use while completing introductory-level physics problems. Students' framings tended to be fairly stable, but when shifts did occur - they were triggered by a shift in resource, which can be activated by assessment feature. This work extends existing work on epistemological framing into the realm of assessment and allows us to consider the effects of assessments on our students' understanding of physics teaching and learning.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Positioning in groups: The roles of expertise and being in charge

Inchargeness is associated with one's authority in driving the activity in collaboration. We study how inchargeness changes within a collaborative group when its members have differing expertise. We present a case study of a group of three students working in an upper division undergraduate physics laboratory. One of them has less on-task expertise than her peers due to missing a day, which reduces her relative inchargeness across two storylines: "catching up" and "moving forward".

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

What are we assessing? An analysis of the most common concept inventories in physics

Assessing student learning is a cornerstone of educational practice. Standardized assessments have played a significant role in the development of instruction, curricula, and educational spaces in college physics. However, the use of these assessments to evaluate student learning is only productive if they continue to align with our learning goals. Recently, there have been calls to elevate the process of science ("scientific practices") to the same level of importance and emphasis as the concepts of physics ("core ideas" and "crosscutting concepts"). We use the recently developed 3D-LAP to investigate how well the most commonly used standardized assessments in introductory physics (i.e. concept inventories) align with this modern understanding of physics education's learning goals. We find that many of the questions on concept inventories do elicit evidence of student understanding of core ideas, but do not have the potential to elicit evidence of scientific practices or crosscutting concepts. Furthermore, we find that the individual scientific practices and crosscutting concepts that are assessed using these tools are limited to a select few. We discuss the implications that these findings have on designing and testing curricula and instruction both in the past and for the future.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2016

Characterizing College Science Assessments: The Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol

Many calls to improve science education in college and university settings have focused on improving instructor pedagogy. Meanwhile, science education at the K-12 level is undergoing significant changes as a result of the emphasis on scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. This framework of "three-dimensional learning" is based on the literature about how people learn science and how we can help students put their knowledge to use. Recently, similar changes are underway in higher education by incorporating three-dimensional learning into college science courses. As these transformations move forward, it will become important to assess three-dimensional learning both to align assessments with the learning environment, and to assess the extent of the transformations. In this paper we introduce the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP), which is designed to characterize and support the development of assessment tasks in biology, chemistry, and physics that align with transformation efforts. We describe the development process used by our interdisciplinary team, discuss the validity and reliability of the protocol, and provide evidence that the protocol can distinguish between assessments that have the potential to elicit evidence of three-dimensional learning and those that do not.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

Developing the Next Generation of Physics Assessments

Science education at all levels is currently undergoing dramatic changes to its curricula and developing assessments for these new curricula is paramount. We have used the basis of many of these new changes (scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas) to develop sets of criteria that can be used to guide assessment development for this new curriculum. We present a case study that uses the criteria we have developed to revise a traditional physics assessment item into an assessment item that is much more aligned with the goals of current transformation efforts. Assessment items developed using this criteria can be used to assess student learning of both the concepts and process of science.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2014

Engaging Physics Faculty in Course Transformation

Research has shown that it is challenging to change departmental culture to support the adoption of transformed teaching practices. Michigan State University is working to transform its introductory physics courses by engaging faculty in discussions about the scientific practices and core ideas of the discipline, and to use those discussions to drive change to both assessments and classroom instruction. Here we discuss our model of change, its implementation in the Physics and Astronomy department, the challenges encountered along the way and how we've mitigated those challenges, and tools to measure the impact of this change.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2011

\ga\ga and g g decay rates for equal mass heavy quarkonia

We present a calculation of the two-photon and two-gluon widths for the equal mass quarkonium states $^1S_0$, $^3P_0$ and $^3P_2$ of the charmonium and upsilon systems. The approach taken is based on using the full relativistic $q\bar{q}\to\ga\ga$ amplitude together with a wave function derived from the instantaneous Bethe-Salpeter equation. Momentum space radial wave functions obtained from an earlier fit of the charmonium and upsilon spectra are used to evaluate the necessary integrals.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2010

Radiative Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in a Little Higgs Model

We present a new Little Higgs model, motivated by the deconstruction of a five-dimensional gauge-Higgs model. The approximate global symmetry is $SO(5)_0\times SO(5)_1$, breaking to $SO(5)$, with a gauged subgroup of $[SU(2)_{0L}\times U(1)_{0R}]\times O(4)_1$, breaking to $SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y$. Radiative corrections produce an additional small vacuum misalignment, breaking the electroweak symmetry down to $U(1)_{EM}$. Novel features of this model are: the only un-eaten pseudo-Goldstone boson in the effective theory is the Higgs boson; the model contains a custodial symmetry, which ensures that $\hat{T}=0$ at tree-level; and the potential for the Higgs boson is generated entirely through one-loop radiative corrections. A small negative mass-squared in the Higgs potential is obtained by a cancellation between the contribution of two heavy partners of the top quark, which is readily achieved over much of the parameter space. We can then obtain both a vacuum expectation value of $v=246$ GeV and a light Higgs boson mass, which is strongly correlated with the masses of the two heavy top quark partners. For a scale of the global symmetry breaking of $f=1$ TeV and using a single cutoff for the fermion loops, the Higgs boson mass satisfies 120 GeV $\lesssim M_H\lesssim150$ GeV over much of the range of parameter space. For $f$ raised to 10 TeV, these values increase by about 40 GeV. Effects at the ultraviolet cutoff scale may also raise the predicted values of the Higgs boson mass, but the model still favors $M_H\lesssim 200$ GeV.

hep-ph↗