Students develop skills throughout their undergraduate physics classes that become useful for their future career practices. These skills or competencies can be categorized between universally applicable (Hernández-Pina & Monroy, 2015) or content-based skills (H. Passow & J. Passow, 2017). Students in the algebra based introductory physics course were interviewed about their perceptions of skills and competencies they might need in their future career. Thematic analysis of these interviews showed that students mainly mentioned skills into two main categories; universally applicable skills like time management and communication skills and content-based skills like knowledge of course concepts. Motivated to make their introductory physics experience more useful for a diverse set of majors, we are consciencely designing the classroom experiences to develop these skills for their future.  That is, these building blocks and tools will be effective for their future career success. By identifying and incorporating the skills and competencies into the daily physics curriculum, we can attend to students’ career aspirations and shape their recognition of the physics experience as useful. 

Fuensanta Hernández-Pina, Fuensanta Monroy, Psicología Educativa, Volume 21, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 11-16, ISSN 1135-755X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pse.2015.02.001 

Passow, H.J. and Passow, C.H. (2017); A Systematic Review. J. Eng. Educ., 106: 475-526.

Research studies show that metacognition interventions positively impact academic performance. In our talk, we investigate the effects of a metacognitive optional assignment administered before class on student engagement and persistence in our introductory physics courses, in particular our introduction to electricity and magnetism course. The metacognitive activity, labeled “Second Chance”, provides the opportunity for students to reflect on what went right and wrong in their understanding of the physics concept in the pre-class work. We explored the relationship between student responses in this self-reflection activity with engagement metrics such as class attendance, answers to concept questions in class and assignment completion. In this talk, we share some of our preliminary results about emergent patterns. By further exploring the impact of this activity, we hope to gain deeper insights into how metacognition interventions can impact engagement and persistence in introductory physics courses.

Introductory physics students majoring in the life sciences report to being afraid of physics and having high levels of anxiety coming into their physics courses. Anxiety arises when students recognize that their cognitive abilities are overwhelmed by academic demands, thus their performance is altered (Macauley, K., Plummer, L., Bemis, C., Brock, G., Larson, C., & Spangler, J. (2018)). This can have detrimental effects on their success in physics courses and their persistence. This study analyzes interviews of 11 introductory physics students that have taken algebra-based physics. We analyzed their experiences and perceptions of physics to better understand their needs for their future careers. Focusing on moments they shared to experiencing anxiety in physics, we used a growth mindset framework to interpret their experiences and how some students mitigate their own anxiety. These findings suggest how growth mindset becomes an essential component to mitigate anxiety and help students succeed in physics. We extrapolated strategies, stories, and skills students developed throughout their physics courses within growth-mindset to guide curricular development and activities for future implementation. These strategies and skills in growth mindset in physics will become a major part of our Algebra-based introductory curriculum and instructor strategies.    

Macauley, K., Plummer, L., Bemis, C., Brock, G., Larson, C., & Spangler, J. (2018). Health Professions Education, 4(3), 176–185.

Students in Algebra-Based physics are generally anxious about physics and often delay their physics experience in college to the last few semesters. This project is motivated to improve these students’ experience in their introductory physics course to have positive attitudes toward physics and less anxiety.  At Florida International University (FIU), the Algebra-based physics course is composed predominantly of Pre-Health track (Pre-med, Pre-dental, Pre-PA, and Pre-vet.) majors with most of those students also pursuing a degree in STEM and showing themselves to be anxious about physics.  Using Expectancy-value theory, we gauge students' experiences with physics and measure their motivations to persist in physics courses as the function of their expectations, task value, and relative cost to complete physics tasks.  We collected quantitative measures of their perceptions of physics, expectancy value, identity, and interest in physics in a pre/post survey study design. We analyzed data from an active learning Algebra-based physics course for three semesters between 2021-2023. This study will present how students’ perceptions and utility value of physics shift throughout the course and impact their future career intentions. The shifts in perceptions will influence our projects’ curricular development of strategies and activities addressing Pre-Health student’s needs for future careers and reduce physics related anxiety. 

The CIC-MIT Hackathó is a collaboration between Tech Projects, a Project Based Learning (PBL) course at CIC High School in Barcelona, Spain, and MIT Edgerton Center. In Tech Projects, students develop and complete an idea/project. Seeing the potential of student-initiated projects, we offered this experience to other local schools, beginning in 2019.

Hackathó is an intensive 3-day event. High school participants work in teams to propose, construct, and complete a project. All teams learn and practice the phases of engineering design. High School teams are mentored by local Tech Projects graduates and MIT Edgerton Center mentors.

Over the years, interest grows. The local department of education and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya contribute by giving space and helping train local mentors. A new course created within the industrial engineering degree trains future mentors with pedagogical tools and resources.

Hackathon challenges youth to develop an engineering project in 3 days. From the conception of the idea to the construction of the definitive engineering, each team proposes trials and tests different prototypes. Is great challenge for young people and their teachers. Everyone – students, teachers, and mentors -- discovers learning while having fun. Even working under pressure!