FEd-Sponsored Sessions at the 2015 March and April Meetings

Randy Knight, California Polytechnic State University

One of the primary tasks of the Forum on Education is to sponsor education sessions at the March and April meetings of APS. The details are still being working out, but the sessions for the 2015 meetings are shaping up nicely. If you plan on attending one of these meetings, please look for us and attend.

March Meeting
The March Meeting will be held March 2-6 in San Antonio, Texas. This will be the second year in which the FEd hosts the award session for the winner of the Jonathan Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction. The winner will speak first, then four other invited speakers will address various aspects of the topic “Re-imagining the Advanced Lab.”

If you’ve ever applied for or had NSF funding for an education project, you probably know Duncan McBride. Duncan has recently retired from NSF after a lengthy career. We will honor him with a session “NSF-Funded Physics Education: Celebrating Accomplishments and Looking Forward.”

Would your department like to increase the number of physics majors? Get the inside story from several departments that have succeeded in the session “Growing the Physics Major.” They’ll tell you how they did it and pass along suggestions that other departments can use.

We will be part of two co-sponsored sessions. FEd and the Forum on the History of Physics will co-sponsor the session “Inspirational Teaching of Physics” where several speakers tell us how they use anything from history to technology to current events to inspire their students. And FEd and the Division of Biological Physics will co-sponsor a session “Reform Efforts in the Introductory Physics for Life Science Course.”

Finally, we’ll be co-sponsoring with the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics a contributed session on Physics Innovation and Entrepreneurship. If you’ve done anything interesting with the entrepreneurial side of physics, please submit an abstract.

April Meeting
We will sponsor five invited sessions at the April Meeting, April 11-14 in Baltimore. Foremost will the award session for the winners of the 2014 Excellence in Education Award.

With the meeting’s proximity to the movers and shakers in Washington, DC, we’ll have a session on “What’s Happening in STEM Education.” And because April is the divisional meeting of the Division of Astrophysics, we’ll run a session on “Astronomy Education.”

Two of the April sessions are always co-sponsored by AAPT. For 2015, we’ll be hearing about “Research-Based Teaching of Quantum Mechanics” and “AP Physics 1 and 2: Some Things Old and Some Things New.”

Look for detailed information about these sessions in the Winter FEd Newsletter.

Randy Knight is Professor Emeritus at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, CA. He is Chair-Elect of the Forum on Education and FEd Program Committee Chair for the 2015 meetings.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.