Reflecting on the Physics Education Research Conference: What makes Compass unique?

Compass was pretty well-represented at the recent Physics Education Research Conference (PERC); Angie, Anna, Gina, Joel, and I all made our way to Philadelphia to share ideas with a national network of physics educators. (Check out our presentations here and here, and our paper here.) A lot of really smart, thoughtful people are paying close attention to how students learn, and there are tons of great ideas out there for improving the way we teach physics.
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Compass goes to AAPT winter meeting!

Angie and I just got back from presenting a talk and poster at the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Jacksonville, Florida.  We presented the handsome poster you see below and a talk entitled “Teaching Physics Though Modeling the Physics Research Community” with the following abstract:

In this talk, we will discuss The Compass Project, a program we created at the University of California, Berkeley, five years ago to support physics students from all backgrounds.  Drawing on physics education research, we had two major goals in creating a two-week summer program for incoming freshman:  building community and helping students develop productive beliefs about what physics is and how to learn it.  This presentation will focus on a newly developed semester-long course that follows the summer program.  One focus of both the summer program and the course is developing the students capacity to see the world through physics models; students also hone their ability to communicate and collaborate productively with their peers.  We will discuss some of the successes and challenges of introducing college freshman to our model of a physics research community.

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