Submitted by: Carl Frederickson, carlf@uca.edu on 08/30/2024
Dr. Andrew Mason (Physics, Astronomy, and Engineering) chaired the organizing committee for the 2024 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) held immediately after the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) summer meeting in Boston, MA during July. The theme for the PERC this year was “Bridging the Institutional Gap: PER at Primarily Undergraduate Four-Year Institution, Two-Year College, and K-12 Levels,” where PER is Physics Education Research. The PERC consisted of a number of plenary speakers focused on highlighting the work of PER faculty at primarily teaching institutions. Attendance at the PERC was roughly 280 attendees, a 20% increase from the previous year’s PERC, and was well received. The conference website can be found here: https://www.per-central.org/conferences/2024/.
Dr. Mason and Dr. Raymond Zich of Illinois State University together organized and presided over a PERC roundtable discussion session “Whither PER? Past, Present, and Concerns about the Future.” Dr. Zich is currently serving as co-chair of the PER Leadership and Organizing Council (PERLOC) within AAPT, such that there was a joint interest between the PERC organizing committee and PERLOC. The inspiration for this session was connected to Dr. Mason’s chosen conference theme, namely how the field has evolved in its first few decades, whether its defining characteristics are broadly continuing to be observed, and what future concerns ought to be identified and dealt with properly. After a brief introduction of these concerns, attendees were encouraged to identify and discuss concerns within the field in small breakout groups, then reconvene at the end of the session to identify several key concerns going forward. This session had roughly 40 attendees and was well received.
In addition to organizing this year’s PERC, Dr. Mason was involved with a number of presentations. During the AAPT meeting, Dr. Mason presented a poster titled “Investigating a Problem-Solving Theoretical Framework in Upper-division Electromagnetism Tutorials: Data from Focus Groups, Self-Assessments, and End-of-Semester Surveys.” This poster discussed the qualitative and quantitative methodology in testing preliminary tutorial sets with, and examining feedback from, upper-division first-semester students at BYU. During the PERC, he presented a poster titled “Building a Better Mousetrap: A Preliminary Study of Upper-Division Tutorials Explicitly Built on a Problem-Solving Framework.” This poster focused more on the results of the experiment and ensuing discussions; this poster was coupled with a submitted conference proceedings paper of a similar title, which has been accepted for publication. Dr. Mason was first author on the above posters and proceedings paper. He is also a co-author of a related contributed talk given by James Hecht, titled “Designing and Testing Upper-division Electromagnetism Tutorials.”