General Physics Colloquium, Professor Rachel Henderson, Michigan State University

Title:  Building Tools to Assess Changes in Physics Education:  Inclusively Supporting Student Learning and Retention

Host:  Natasha Holmes

Abstract:  As educators, we would like to prepare our students for 21st century physics careers. Overall, to ensure all students will become successful scientists, physics departments need to be able to provide evidence to make sure that we are reaching these goals. The field of Physics Education Research has made major contributions to various educational practices and materials to reform instruction in order to recruit and retain more students. However, while many research-based instructional strategies in physics have continued to advance, reform in undergraduate physics assessment tools has had limited space in these conversations. In this talk, I will motivate the need for the next generation of physics assessment tools and present a few projects that my physics education research lab at Michigan State University has been working on. In particular, I will discuss our efforts to build a more diverse set of tools to use within our classrooms in order to better understand our students’ learning as well as how we can best support them throughout their time in higher education.