Marc Reif AP Summer Institute Schedule 2024

I will be presenting the following APSIs:

AP PHYSICS 1 IN-PERSON @ Woodward Academy

Monday, 3 June to Thursday, 6 June

Woodward Academy (Google Maps link to workshop location)
College Park, GA (Atlanta area)

AP PHYSICS C COMBINED (Mechanics/E&M) ONLINE
Tuesday, 18 June to Friday 21 June

Hosted by Walton High School

AP PHYSICS C MECHANICS ONLINE

Monday, 24 June to Thursday 27 June

AP PHYSICS 1 FOR NEW TEACHERS IN-PERSON

Tuesday, 9 July to Friday, 12 July at Rice University

Houston, Texas (Google Maps Link to Workshop Location)

AP PHYSICS C COMBINED IN-PERSON
Tuesday, July 16 to Friday, July 19

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Google Maps Link to Workshop Location)

AP Physics 2 ONLINE hosted by Texas Christian University

Monday, 22 July to Thursday, 25 July

New SBG Rubric from New Science Practices for AP Physics 1/2

I took the new Science Practices from the College Board’s Draft Course and Exam Description for AP Physics 1 and 2, and turned them in to a draft of a rubric for assessing work in a Standards-Based Grading environment. The changes to AP Physics take place for the 2024-2025 school year. In the 2023-2024 school year, there are no changes to the AP Physics CEDs. I am just trying to get ahead!

This Draft CED has since been taken off of the CB website, so I can’t link to it. But look for emails and announcements with the final new CED, or at least a revised new CED to be released in the fall of 2024 for the 2025 first Exam date.

Previously I used content-based learning standards and created a rubric for each assignment, using a set scale, like “Mastery-Proficient-Developing-Beginning-No Evidence” or “Meets Standard-Approaches Standard-Doesn’t Meet Standard.” This meant that I was often using a mental checklist of what met the standard, since I didn’t always have time to write up a Google Doc with specific criteria for every assignment. I can see where this rubric might make things easier. The standards could be the same for every unit. The standards would be repeated every unit, and become familiar to the students, so the AP Skills will become familiar. I just need to tell the students when they will be assessed on each skill.

The new Rubric is below. The idea is to tell students the codes they would be working on during each assignment, and each assessment. I need to look to see what other teachers have done in a similar vein. Most of what I have seen is learning standards that is solely content-based. Maybe this won’t work? Please share your thoughts. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure I can use this for assessing lab skills.

Marc Reif’s Summer 2023 AP Summer Institute Schedule

In-Person: Woodward Academy, AP Physics 1, June 5-8, Atlanta, Georgia

In-Person: Midwest APSI, AP Physics C Mechanics; Electricity & Magnetism, June 11-15, Olathe, Kansas

Online: AP Physics C Mechanics, Event 1 June 20-23 (Hosted by Walton High School, Marietta, Georgia)

Online: AP Physics C Mechanics; Electricity & Magnetism, Event 2 June 26-29 (Hosted by Walton High School, Marietta, Georgia)

Online: AP Physics 2, Week 2 July 11-14 (Hosted by William and Mary School of Education, Williamsburg, Virginia)

Online: AP Physics 1 for New Teachers, Week 2 July 17-21 (Hosted by Rice University, Houston, Texas)

Online: AP Physics 2, July 24-27 (Hosted by Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas)

Storylines for Mechanics

In modeling instruction, practitioners talk about the “storyline” that we present. This morning I woke up and decided to attempt “stories” for AP1/CM (using the sequence from the AP1 Course and Exam Description). I tried to write them “student-friendly” without a lot of jargon, but of course some creeped in. Let me know what you think.

Unit 1: Kinematics

When we look carefully at the positions of objects moving in one dimension at equally-spaced moments in time, patterns emerge (two models: constant velocity and constant acceleration). We describe the patterns with different representations: words, graphs, equations (derived from the graphs), and other diagrams (motion maps or dot diagrams).

Unit 2: Dynamics

Now we turn from observing the two patterns/models to trying to explain their origins. We observe that objects interact with each other in several different ways. We model the effect of the interactions on an object as forces and observe that an object will maintain constant velocity with no net force exerted on it. When a constant net force is exerted, we observe constant acceleration motion. Since we have new ideas, new representations are needed (free-body diagrams, new mathematical representations, Newton’s Laws, the concept of systems). 

Unit 3: Circular Motion and Gravitation

We extend the ideas from Dynamics (that interactions between objects may cause changes to the motion of an object or objects) to a third pattern, an object that moves in a circular path. We begin with an object moving at constant speed in a circular path due to a contact interaction(s), and then extend to objects that remain in a circular path solely due to a non-contact interaction (gravitation).

Unit 4: Energy

In Unit 2 we noticed that systems can change internally due to interactions within, or they can change due to external interactions. In this unit we go back to that idea and develop tools for comparing the initial state (“before”) to the final state (“after”) of an object or system. First we develop new quantities by examining how changes in the initial conditions of the system result in changes to the final state of a system. This leads to a very important principle: some quantities that can be calculated will remain the same total amount in the initial state as the final state, no matter how much change occurs within the system. Whenever this principle appears to be violated, we find that if we look carefully enough, we can see that it is actually correct. We keep our focus (relatively) narrow: the lens that we use in this unit is what happens when forces are exerted through a displacement. We examine many different systems, thinking qualitatively and quantitatively about their internal interactions and their interactions with external objects. More new representations result (new quantities, mathematical representations/equations, graphical representations (bar charts), and perhaps others).

Unit 5: Momentum

We begin by examining the quantity of motion that an object possesses. That quantity can be transferred to another object, and always maintains the same total amount, no matter what happens in the interaction. Again, we uncover an important principle about a different physical quantity that always remains the same and develop new representations. In Unit 4 we were concerned with the effect of interactions over a distance or displacement. In this unit we extend the observations about “quantity of motion” to examine changes to the initial and final state of a system or object with respect to the amount of time an interaction occurs. 

Unit 6: Simple Harmonic Motion

We go back to observing motion, and note that some systems that have a particular back-and-forth quality to their motion (called simple harmonic motion) all share a unique aspect: a net force that is directed towards an equilibrium position and is proportional to the displacement of an object from the equilibrium position. We apply familiar techniques to the systems as well as develop new representations/models.

Unit 7: Rotation

We apply all the previous representations and models from linear (1-d) motion to objects/systems that change their angular position with respect to a coordinate axis. 

Changes to AP Physics 1/2 Postponed!

John Pinizzotto, one of the two Directors of AP Physics at the College Board, sponsored a reception at the AP Reading in June. He did a Q and A session during the reception. He said that he and Amy Johnson, the other AP Physics Director, have asked that the revision/realignment of the AP Physics courses (1/2, CM/CE) be pushed back a year, from 2023-2024 (first exam in 2024) to the 2024-2025 (first exam in 2025) school year. This change, he said, is to be sure that all of the materials that they can make available (AP Classroom, etc.) are completed and edited in time. This will be officially announced in the fall, assuming the higher-ups at College Board approve the change. John seemed very certain that the date will be pushed back, and offered no hedge words.

If I hear more from CB I will revise this.

Update!! On 3 May 2023, Amy Johnson, AP Physics Co-Director at College Board, posted this on the AP Physics Community: “A formal announcement of timelines for the revised AP Physics courses is expected Summer 2023. Revised courses will be launched no sooner than Fall 2024.  A workshop outlining the revisions will be available at the AAPT meeting in Sacramento, and at the AP Annual Conference in Seattle, both in July 2023. 

AP Summer institutes for the new courses will be available the summer before the redesigned courses launch.”

Pros and Cons of AP Classroom

Pros

• Everything* in there has been checked for alignment with the course Learning Objectives (LOs) and Science Practices (SPs).
• Everything* in there has been checked for accuracy.
• Lots of Question Bank Items, including released actual questions and new questions recently written
• There is an official solution/scoring guideline for all question items.
• Flexibility in usage, due now or later, available in a window of time or always, paper or online (for Question Bank items)
• Lots of Formative Assessment – i.e. Topic Questions and Personal Progress Checks (PPCs) (see this blog post for definitions), PPCs give you data about student preparedness
• Search by LO, SP, Unit, question type, stimulus type (graph, diagram, etc.), security, exam alignment, etc.
• AP Daily Videos can teach your students (or YOU!) essential skills – especially seems useful when you or students are struggling with a derivation in AP Physics
• Automated grading of Multiple Choice (MCQs)
• Scoring Guideline and online scoring of Free Response (FRQs) works pretty well
• Students can grade their own FRQs using the same rubric teachers use
• Can send students feedback notes (encouragement!) when grading
• AP Daily Videos provide scaffolding for struggling students, supports inclusion of ALL students in your classroom

Cons

• the asterisk (*) above means some mistakes were made in alignment and in accuracy, and the College Board has been excruciatingly slow in correcting them (it’s been three years, and no changes), one notable one that comes up over and over again is the Unit 1 MCQ PPC for C Electricity, it has a question that goes beyond the boundaries, AND has an incorrect solution
• Printing Question Bank Items often involves a lot of formatting issues and there is no way to change formatting
• Navigation in the site is sometimes confusing, although that usually improves with the frequent updates 
• Personal Progress Checks and all Videos can only be assigned online through AP Classroom
• Personal Progress Check MCQ sets can’t be broken into shorter chunks and many (most?) are too long for my students
• Some PPC items seem too convoluted in their setup to be aligned with the AP Exam (they may still be useful)
• Students must log in to see feedback and scoring, doesn’t appear to be a notification system for them  (at least I think not)
• Videos track “watched” completion, but who knows if they actually watched the video
• AP Classroom has, at times, been excruciatingly slow (updates may have improved this issue)
• The Lockdown browser had a lot of problems at first and would crash, causing students to lose their work. This has been fixed to automatically submit their work when it crashes. I have not used it much since the fixes and can’t attest to the improvement. 

Best Practices in AP Classroom

This will need to be added to, as I collect more

• Make all AP Daily Videos available at the start of the year, watch a few in class at the beginning of the year to show them how great they are, stop them at various points to discuss/answer questions. Make sure students are reminded/encouraged to watch them throughout the year. 
• Make PPCs available, sometimes do them in class, so you can answer questions/talk about the tricky questions with everybody at the same time. This also encourages completion. Con is it takes a lot of class time.
• Use AP Daily to teach YOURSELF tricky things and then show that tricky derivation to students yourself, in class.
• Use PPCs for yourself BEFORE teaching a unit, to get an idea of the content, rigor level, and types of things the CB could ask (but bear in mind alignment and accuracy is not perfect for all PPCs).
• Use AP Faculty Lectures (the longer videos) for review. Some fellow teachers have shared questions to go with those. 
• Assign students Topic Questions in class for a warm up/bell ringer or Exit Ticket.
• Use the Question bank to construct a quiz, test, or homework assignment (best to give students AP level work throughout the year, while scaffolding/supporting as much as possible)
• Give a Mock Exam online using the Practice Exams (but be aware of restrictions)

A plug for Schrodinger’s Class

Quantum Mechanics is endlessly fascinating and confusing. Famously, its implications even troubled Einstein, who helped create it! Last spring I attended a really fascinating (and at times confusing) fully online workshop called Schrodinger’s Class, from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. There were lectures by a very talented instructor and breakout room discussion sessions with teachers from all over the world. The content was basic Quantum Mechanics, but with some unusual examples, particularly around explanations of quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

They sent me a small set of demonstration materials (some cool lasers, diffraction gratings, and a few other odds and ends). All of the materials used in the class were shared in a form intended for use in the high school class. The workshop and resources were free. They are running the online version twice this year. Hey, it was so good I may attend a second time! Again here is a tinyurl, just in case: https://tinyurl.com/6f9az3ke

Marc Reif 2022 APSI Summer Presentation Schedule

AP Physics C Mechanics, Online Week 1 June 21-24, 2022 (Hosted by Walton High School)

AP Physics C Mechanics, Online Week 2 June 27-June 30, 2022 (Hosted by Walton High School)

AP Physics 2, In-person, July 11-15, 2022, at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas

AP Physics 1 for New Teachers Online, July 18-22, 2022 (Hosted by Rice University)

AP Physics 1, In-person, July 26-29, 2022, at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas

AP Classroom (selected) Vocabulary

Some basics for those new to the College Board’s Question and Resource Database for AP students and teachers. Possibly easier than reading through the College Board’s FAQs. Please notify me of any errors or omissions.

Publicly Available

These have been released to the public. They may (possibly) be found posted on the College Board’s AP Central website. You may use these questions in print or online. You do not need to use the lockdown browser. 

Teacher Use Only 

Questions that are included in the AP Classroom database but are not otherwise available. 

Topic Question

Formative questions that are intended for you to use without a grade for accuracy. You may assign a completion grade. The light bulb symbol indicatesa topic question.

There are supposed to be at least three for each topic. Many are marked “Teacher Use Only” , a few are “Publicly Available.” You may use these questions in print or online. You do not need to use the lockdown browser. 

Official Practice Exam Questions

Questions marked by the green question mark are secure.

Most (all?) of these came from the International Practice Exams (IPE*). These are “real” AP exams that non-US students took for the purpose of earning college credit. The Secure questions are restricted. For in-person use, students should only use the questions and the solutions in the presence of the teacher. The students may not take pictures or copies of the questions or the solutions out of the classroom. Collect work on paper and scratch paper after use. For online use, these could be assigned with the College Board’s Lockdown Browser. Students should not be taking screenshots or in other ways saving images of the problems or answers.  (*=The IPE is a different exam from the Operational Exam that most US students take every year. The Operational Exam is the source of the released Free Response questions every year.)

Fall 2021 – College Board no longer requires the Lockdown Browser! See below:

Personal Progress Check

Blocks of MCQs or FRQs for formative assessment. These have been written for all units. You may use them in print (FRQs only, MCQs don’t print) or online without the lockdown browser, but you are not allowed to separate them, they must be used whole. These are also Formative questions that are intended for you to use without a grade for accuracy.

AP Daily

Instructional videos by expert AP teachers on every(?) topic and skill in the course. Each is relatively brief, typically less than eight minutes long. You can assign them and see how much your students have viewed. Also useful for teachers to see how other AP teachers present a topic. 

Faculty Lecture

Longer videos (~40 minutes) by college professors, giving an overview of an entire unit. Accessible under the “Course-level Resource” tab. Check this out: The second one for APC Mechanics was given by Brian Greene, string theorist who wrote “The Elegant Universe” and starred in the TV miniseries of the same name.  

General Note about use of College Board materials. (not vocabulary)

The College Board does not allow you to post their materials on an open website or electronically mass distribute them. It is okay for you to use them with your own students on paper or electronically (preferably behind a password-protected Learning Management System). If you want to distribute publicly available materials more widely than your own classroom, you may share with people the link to where they are found on the College Board’s own website. 

From 2-stage to Second Chance Exams

Most of my students in AP Physics 1 struggle with unit tests for a good part of the year. There are lots of reasons for this, including a lack of previous experience with physics, the difficulty of the material, and the difficulty of the tests. I do attempt to make each unit test model a mini version of the AP Exam. When a student does poorly on one of these exams, they often panic. Many are students who are used to making As in everything. They have usually done very well on tests. They don’t really have a recovery strategy when they bomb a test.  This year is no different, and perhaps a bit worse due to virtual/hybrid instruction and a reduced class time. I have a lot of students struggling with tests. 

To help out those students who bomb a test, I came up with “Second Chance Exams,” inspired by my previous experimentation during face-to-face instruction with “2-Stage Exams.” I learned about 2-stage exams from this article by Carl Weiman (Nobel Prize winner in Physics (and founder of the PhET Sims site) and others:

“Physics Exams that Promote Collaborative Learning”

The article was published in The Physics Teacher. If you teach physics and you haven’t joined the American Association of Physics Teachers, go ahead and join today. 

Here is my own summary of how I implemented the original approach. First you write your unit test, the “Stage 1 Exam.”. Mine are usually 10 multiple choice questions and then one or a couple of free-response questions. The source of the questions is usually old AP Physics B questions modified to be more like AP Physics 1 (make them more conceptual than calculation). I also use questions I wrote myself from scratch, and a few questions modified from other sources to be AP1-like material. The grades are scaled so that they approximate the distribution of points that corresponds to an AP Exam score. Even with the scaling, some students make a panic-inducing score.

I construct a “Stage 2 Exam” by taking some of the most-missed questions from the original test and rewriting them. If they were already conceptual questions, I change them into slightly different questions. If they were mathematical questions, I typically modify them to be more conceptual. In both cases, I focus on the mistakes in understanding that students typically make on the Stage 1 questions. 

Students take Stage 1, individually, in a typical manner (paper and pencil in my classroom, in a normal year). Then, immediately after they all finish (45 minutes to an hour into a 90 minute block), I pass out Stage 2, and students work together in their lab groups to complete that assignment as a group activity. Because of time limitations, I usually actually did Stage 2 at the next class period, although that is not the approach recommended in the original article above. 

This 2-stage approach works well for building student understanding, and improves grades. The Exam score is 75% Stage 1 (individual score), 25% Stage 2 (group score).  

In the current year, teaching Hybrid model, I came up with a different approach. Class time is greatly reduced. Many of my AP students are hybrid or full virtual and small-group collaboration is more difficult. I write and score the Stage 1 version of the exam in the same way, but I have been administering it online, using Canvas. For the second stage, I did something similar to what I describe above. I wrote a largely conceptual second stage as a Google Doc. I distributed it to the students who made a score of less than 80% on the first exam via Google Classroom. Students have to answer all of the questions to my satisfaction on the Google Doc to earn a replacement score of 80% on the Stage 1 test. Once they submit their work, I comment on what they wrote and return it to them. I only enter a grade if they complete the whole assignment to my satisfaction. Otherwise the Stage 1 Test Score remains the same. Students are allowed to work with a partner(s), look things up, or ask me questions. I do have lots of conferences (face-to-face and via Zoom) with students who submitted Stage 2, but still are stuck on some of the questions. Of course, some students ignore the whole process and just let their test scores remain low. Despite that, the system does seem to be working. It relieves a lot of the panic. I can focus students on their errors of understanding. They are encouraged to reach out directly to me when they don’t understand a second (or even a third) time. And the Stage 2 tests are relatively easy to grade. 

Here is part of a “Stage 1” Free Response question (modified from an old AP Physics B exam question):

And here is the “Stage 2” version: (I just noticed I did go ahead and ask the same question twice, probably because I saw so many calculation errors on what was supposed to be a review question)`

Here is an original Stage 1 question that was conceptual

And below is a Stage 2 version of the same question:

Here is a summary of my online version changes from Weiman Model:

Reif 2nd Chance version	Original Weiman 2-Stage
Optional, by invitation (test score <80%)	Whole-class activity
Asynchronous	During class, immediately after exam
Students worked individually or with partner	Small group activity
Successful completion raised grade to 80%	Exam score combination of 75% Stage 1 Score and 25% Stage 2 Score

My 2020 Online version is really a kind of modified test corrections. It seems to me to have advantages over test corrections:

1. The questions are new, so students can’t just ask somebody who got it right the first time. 

2. I can focus the questions on what the students didn’t understand, based on what they wrote on the first test.

3. The Stage 2 Tests are much easier and quicker to grade than test corrections. Everybody is answering the same questions. Everybody’s assignment is the same length. I can write an assignment of the length I want to grade, rather than grading everything that the student needed to correct. 

Let me know what you think! Stay safe!