Today’s episode is a collection of student podcasts from a Science Communication course at Western Washington University. This is the second in a two-part series. Course professors were Mars Planetary Geophysicist Dr. Melissa Rice & Spark Science host, Astrophysicist Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff.
The show features students Andrew Hood, Jonathan Cornet, Huy Nguyen and AJ Calder. Subjects range from science education, an exposé on a local Bellingham business owner/scientist, and one student’s journey to become a thin films researcher.
Image/Logo courtesy of Wendy Aguilar
Click Here for Transcript
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
?Here we go
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around
Dr. DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science. This is Regina Barber DeGraaff. This episode of Spark Science will be the second of 2 podcast compilations. These amazing student-made podcasts were created as a final project for a science communication course Dr. Melissa Rice and I taught this last spring. Subjects ranged from science education, an expose? on a local Bellingham business owner and scientist, and one student’s journey to become a Thin Films researcher.
Teaching this course for the first time with Mars scientist Dr. Melissa Rice was a complete blast and I hope you enjoy listening to the students’ hard work and enthusiasm.
[? Music playing ?.]
[? Music playing ?.]
AJ: Hi, my name is AJ Calder, and I’d like to welcome my guest, Huy Nguyen, who is a senior in the physics department at Western Washington University.
Huy: Hello!
AJ: We’re gonna be talking about your journey to become a Thin Films researcher. So what did you do kind of in your undergrad years, or how did you get to Western?
Huy: Yeah, so originally I came from South Seattle Community College. I did Running Start and then I did a couple more years there. So I just kinda got a general education there. And I actually didn’t put much effort into my education at all. And I would say I was much of a slacker.
AJ: It’s hard to really buckle down if you don’t know your direction.
Huy: Yeah. I actually took a year between community college and Western. So getting back to the groove of actually studying and being involved in school work has been really tough. And that kind of took its toll, especially the first physics courses that I took.
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: I really noticed I wasn’t on the same level as everybody else. I had to kind of review all the material. And then I came to Western and I fell in love with physics. A lot of the passion for physics originates essentially from how physics can explain everyday phenomena in a rigorous setting. It’s really shaped the way I view the world. I look at leaves falling and I look at drag and all of that stuff. And it’s brought a little bit of beauty to my life. Being able to explain and understand how things work has always been a great passion of mine.
AJ: Nice. Kind of a bit of a peek behind the curtain.
Huy: Oh. Definitely.
AJ: So, your current position is: you’re a researcher working under Dr. Ledger, right?
Huy: Right.
AJ: How would you describe your current position on your research team?
Huy: As of right now, I’m transitioning to passing this project off onto a couple sophomores. And I think it’s a good experience for me in terms of being able to teach people these very useful skills, as well as kind of be in a leadership position and directing my own research. And I really like the idea of being directly in control of what you want to do. And I think that’s the most valuable part of research for me is like gaining some kind of outer knowledge, or knowledge that you wouldn’t necessarily gain in coursework.
AJ: So let’s kinda, I guess take a step back and figure out what plasmonic enhancement of organic photovoltaics kind of like entails. You know, that’s a bit of a mouth-full. I guess we could start with “plasmonic enhancement.” What are you enhancing? And what are plasmonics?
Huy: Yeah. So, that’s kinda like a jumble of words. Yeah. I would agree. What the goal is is to improve the efficiency of these photovoltaic devices, or solar cells. And what we’re enhancing is the photocurrent that’s being generated.
AJ: Oh. Nice.
Huy: So the plasmonic part has to do with the method of enhancement. We’re using something called a plasmonic wave guide. And that’s fancy mumbo-jumbo for . . . it’s just . . . it’s a thin-film structure. So it’s 3 layers and these are very very thin films. They’re like 30 nanometers.
AJ: Oh. Wow. That is tiny!
Huy: So, yeah, when I mean thin; it’s really thin. And what we can do with these structures . . . so it’s a thin film of gold, titanium dioxide and gold. And what that does is allows us to essentially convert the energy stored in light in a different way. So when light hits this wave guide, it excites something called a “surface plasmon polariton,” so the nerdiest word you ever heard.
AJ: [Laughing.]
Huy: It’s an osculation in the charge density at the surface.
AJ: Okay.
Huy: So, it’s one way that we can use light in a different way and capture the energy.
AJ: Okay. Nice. So that ends up, like, causing a current to flow?
Huy: It’s a little bit like we’re gonna use it as a back contact to these photovoltaic cells. So we’re adding it to an existing device architecture.
AJ: Oh. Okay.
Huy: So it’s not like a standalone kind of thing.
AJ: Nice. So it’s an add-on to make them a little more effective.
Huy: Yeah. Definitely.
AJ: Nice. That’s really cool.
Huy: Yeah.
AJ: And so how do organic photovoltaics or solar cells, how do they differ from normal solar cells?
Huy: If you kind of like look around on the rooftops, you see like these giant black panels. And those are mostly made of silicon.
AJ: Mhmm.
Huy: What’s organic about these photovoltaics are the active layer, or where all the magic happens, where all of this energy is being converted is made of an organic polymer, a conjugated polymer.
AJ: Okay.
Huy: And the polymer that I’m working with is called MDMOPPV. So it’s an acronym. Don’t ask me what it stands for! What’s really cool about this they’re solution-processable. So we can mix this polymer up and then we deposit onto any substrate that we want. For now, we’re using glass substrates. It’s an indium/tin oxide substrate, which is like a conductive oxide. But if you were to place it on something really flexible, this opens up the possibility for like flexible solar panels, which is really cool.
AJ: Oh wow. Nice. That’s cool. So how did you get started doing your research under Dr. Ledger?
Huy: Yeah. So I think my research path has been a little unorthodox. I’ve done research with a variety of professors, or not a variety of professors, but like, many professors. And while I knew I was interested in physics, I kind of didn’t know which branch of physics. So I took the opportunity as an undergraduate to kind of explore and kind of reach my tendrils outwards.
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: And discover what I really wanted to do. So, first I did research with Dr. Rice doing Martian spectroscopy.
AJ: Cool.
Huy: Then I started working with Dr. Covey studying stellar evolution.
AJ: Wow.
Huy: And then kind of led to Dr. Ledger where I study what I do now.
AJ: Nice. That’s really cool.
Huy: So it’s been a long journey, but I think it’s really refined what I want to do and it’s kind of helped me decide on doing experimental physics in graduate school.
AJ: Okay. That’s awesome. That’s really cool that there’s all these opportunities available here at Western for some undergrad students to really feel out the field and figure out what they want to do.
Huy: [Chuckling.] Yeah. Yeah.
AJ: That’s cool.
Huy: My family originally came from Vietnam. We moved to America when I was about 2 years old. So it was definitely a struggle for them, especially learning a new language and uprooting their lives and coming here.
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: But I really am appreciative of what my parents have done, giving me the best opportunity to succeed. For them, I feel like it has been hard but like, for me, I don’t really know Vietnamese. I mean, I can understand it, but it was more English for me. Like English is essentially my first language. But I think my Vietnamese background . . . my parents definitely emphasized the importance of education. When I was younger, they would always be telling me: “Study. Study hard and you’ll be successful in life.” But I never really took that to heart until when I was kind of like independent from them. I came to Bellingham I was on my own, nobody to tell me to study constantly.
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: And I think that’s when I realized for myself that I really gotta try hard to do all I can to gain knowledge.
AJ: Yeah. I’d imagine that you have some other stuff going on in your life outside of that. What kind of stuff do you like to do to unwind?
Huy: Before coming to Western, I was really into martial arts. I have been martial arts called Vovinam. It stands for . . . well it stands for Vietnamese martial arts. I did that for about 7 years. It was really nice. It was a way for me to gain discipline and understand a little bit more about my Vietnamese culture.
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: At the same time, it kept me in shape and gave me an outlet for expression, essentially. And one thing that I also did in connection to martial arts was something called “lion dancing.”
AJ: Lion dancing!
Huy: So it’s a very traditional, like, Vietnamese/Chinese tradition where people willed dress up in lion costumes. And there’s two people that are in a lion costume. There’s one that operates the head. There’s like little flaps and eyes. And then there’s a person that is the butt.
AJ: [Chuckling.]
Huy: And I like being the butt. I get to shake my tail around.
AJ: Shake your booty. [Laughing.]
Huy: But I thought that was really fun because during Chinese New Years or Vietnamese New Years, they would have a lot of celebrations where they light firecrackers and then we’d go dance in the firecrackers.
AJ: Oh, wow.
Huy: I thought it was a great experience. I met a lot of really cool people there. I actually met my girlfriend. I did this thing called “Dance This” where it was kind of a clamation of different dance groups. And that’s where I met her, essentially. She was doing traditional Chinese dance and I was doing line dance.
AJ: So what’s next on the drawing board for you?
Huy: So I’m excited to say that I will be attending the University of Michigan. I’ll be trying to get my physics Ph.D. there. And actually about 7 days after graduation, I’ll be flying on over there I’ll be doing research with one of the professors there.
AJ: Wow!
Huy: It’s gonna be something that I’m really interested in doing and I hopefully will gain a good experience and have a kick-start on my Ph.D. program there.
AJ: That’s cool. Well congratulations on that.
Huy: Thank you very much.
AJ: That sounds really awesome. I bet it was a very competitive program to get into.
Huy: Yeah.
AJ: Is there anything that you’d like to add that I kinda missed?
Huy: I’d kinda like to tell everybody who’s struggling in science or in any area of education that while it might seem like it’s really tough right now, all the hard work is definitely work it. I’ve realized like in my experience here at Western, like there are times where you feel like you’re working so hard but nothing is paying off. And I just want to say like, it will pay off in the end. I guarantee it.
AJ: Yeah. Awesome. That’s really inspiring. You’ve definitely been a bit of . . . you’ve had an effect on me for sure. Because my sophomore year, I didn’t pass the first class. And it was the thermodynamics. And, you know, I talked to you, and you’re like this awesome, successful guy, you know? You really, like, made me realize: you know, it’s okay. Just nose to the grindstone now and keep on truckin’.
Huy: It’s really important to take failures. You can realize that you failed, but then take the next step and say, “what can I do to really succeed in the future?”
AJ: Yeah.
Huy: You kind of have to look at it in a different as kind of like a learning experience. And that’s the way I view all of my failures, really. I look forward towards the next failure.
AJ: That’s a really wise way of looking at things. That’s awesome. Well, Huy, I want to thank you for your time today. I really appreciated it.
Huy: Yep. Thank you so much for the opportunity to kind of share my story and hopefully inspire others to try to succeed and do their best in whatever they can. Thank you so much.
AJ: You’re welcome. Definitely an inspiring story. Thanks for your time.
Huy: Yep. Absolutely.
[? Music playing ?.]
AJ: This podcast is made in partnership with KMRE, Western Washington University, and Spark Science. I’d also like to thank WWU’s department of physics & astronomy for letting me use their facilities to record this. Special thanks to Laster for letting me use their music in this podcast. You can find them on SoundCloud, YouTube, and BandCamp.
[? Music playing ?]
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
[? Music playing ?]
Jonathan: Hey. This is Jonathan Cornett and today I have a special show for you guys. I am interviewing Dr. Jean Cornett, a graduate from Cornett, who has opened his own business up. It’s resided in Bellingham, Washington, and it’s called Conveyer Dynamic Incorporated. Now you may have caught the similarity. Today I’m actually interviewing my dad.
We talked about his upbringing, the business he started, and advice for students in the STEM field who might be hoping to actually start something of their own after graduating. First we start off by talking about his unique upbringing.
So, first, so you were born and raised in Africa.
Jean: Yes.
Jonathan: So how did that affect your studies and specifically your outlook on science?
Jean: I don’t think it had a lot of effect on that, but a lot of impact on my view of the world and, you know, my opening to different ways of thinking and different culture. But my love of science was always there. I think that would be the same no matter where I was born.
Jonathan: Where do you think that originates from, then?
Jean: I don’t know. I’m a very Cartesian person, very logical. I always try to find the reason why things happen one way and not the other way. When I was very young, I was playing with, Lego Meccano and toys building things and trying to understand. I was taking things apart and putting them back together. I don’t know where it came from. But that’s just the way it is!
Jonathan: So eventually you’re gonna find yourself at Cal Tech, but I’m curious more when that road started forming. You were a fairly advanced student, but at what point did that settle as an actual possible reality of moving to the United States and going to a grad school like that?
Jean: Well, you have to remember that it was the late 70s. I mean, in France, still had the draft, which meant that when you turned 18, you had to go spend 3 months in the army. And then when you were all done with whatever, you could be drafted from 1 year to 2 years, depending on what you did. That was not something I especially wanted to do. So when I finished my [inaudible] school in France, and I was 21 or 22, I think, one option that came to me that would occur to me is to apply for a scholarship to go study abroad.
And one advantage of doing that is I pushed, you know, the army out of the way. So it sounds like I wanted to be at Cal Tech, but it was an opportunity, at the same time, I was interested in a lot of things at the time, most deeply renewable sources of energy. That was a big focus in the later 70s after the oil crisis. So I picked up to go and study photovoltaic effect and studied state physics. And, at the time, Cal Tech was the best place in the United States.
Jonathan: So you really experienced culture shock when moving from Africa to France. What about the change of pace in life when you went from being at the electrical engineering school as opposed to going to Cal Tech in the United States? What was that shift like?
Jean: It was actually a pretty difficult shift in terms of the time and the working world. But it was not difficult personally. I still finished 7th in my class, you know, at Supélec. And then I came to Cal Tech, and suddenly, you’re just an average student. You know, everybody around you, especially at the graduate level, everybody around you is extremely good and extremely focused and motivated, which was something I was not really.
So the biggest cultural shock for me was, you know, okay, I’m going to have to prove myself, you know, I can do it.
Jonathan: Hmm
Jean: And on top of that, I did school in France which was information electronic, you know, like circuit board design, electronic and electrical engineering.
Jonathan: Mhmm.
Jean: We did a lot of math, a huge amount of math, and a lot of physics, you know, in the prep school. So all the basics of physics, I already knew. We did quantum mechanics and the basic . . . but then suddenly, I found a Nobel Prize giving a lecture on physics at a level that I had never thought before. So I really fell for it. And my first year, between the language barrier, I came to California, I hardly spoke any English. I spoke high school English, you know.
Jonathan: Mhmm.
Jean: And the level of the people around me and the fact that I was completely changing subject, you know, I was studying energy in general, I mean nuclear physics, I mean solid state physics, photovoltaic ? a lot of things which I had never really done before.
So what I did was working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for a year.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Jean: But I didn’t mind it because it was my own choice. It was not like I was just going to school because that’s a thing you do. I came to California to learn something and I did, you know?
Jonathan: So that’s cool. It sounds like you found your passion while you were there, too.
Jean: I did. So it was frustrating, NATO. Because my patient at the time, again, Jimmy Carter was president of the US. There was a lot of research done on renewable sources of energy, photovoltaic being one of them, wind energy, geothermal, passive design, you know, even planning [inaudible.] All these key words which are coming up again today, you know, where [inaudible.]
So I did my masters in applied physics. And I then I had to find something connected to energy, you know, and I was offered to stay for a Ph.D. So I did a Ph.D. in fluid dynamics, looking at calculating, trying to find an analytic solution to the problem of calculating lift and drag of an airfoil moving through its own weight, which is a problem you get in helicopters, but also in windmills.
Jonathan: Mhmm.
Jean: So my main focus was really energy, you know, I worked on designing, testing, and making solar cells for the space program. And then Reagan got elected.
Jonathan: Yeah. It changed everything.
Jean: And he killed all of that. You know, overnight he killed the Department of Energy, which was funding most of our research. He killed all the tax advantage for anybody doing anything at the industrial level, especially on wind energy. If you go to California today, you still see a lot of windmill farms. These were all built in the late 70s, you know, and maybe early 80s.
Jonathan: Sure.
Jean: Because of subsidies and tax breaks given to companies doing it by the federal government. All of that stopped overnight when Reagan was elected. And the next 30 years, people were burning fuel.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Jean: So that’s why I never ended up working in that field, you know, later in my, you know, professional life, simply because there was no place you could actually do that. Even [inaudible] research on it was extremely limited.
Jonathan: Mhmm. So you didn’t end up pursuing a job specifically in whole clean energy world because of these outside influences you couldn’t really control. But you did end up starting a business right outside of school, maybe one you didn’t expect yourself to be in. So can you tell me a little bit about Conveyer Dynamics Incorporated, the company you started?
Jean: They were designing a number of large material-ending systems for the time. And when they picked them, you know, pretty much every one of them self-distracted. They [inaudible] of major issues. Where, you know, conveyer systems, historically were [inaudible] used inside plants to move. Then people started thinking, “Well, it costs less to move anything over distance than it would be straight by train.” So people started to make them bigger. And suddenly all kinds of problems that did not happen before happened.
So they came to Cal Tech to actually talk to my advisor at the time, saying “we’re looking for somebody to do some [inaudible] work for us.” And, well, I was a student. I was looking for, you know, some money. And my advisor had better things to do. We worked together with him a little bit at the beginning, and then he pretty much gave me the project. And the project was to do computational physics, to actually take a real-world piece of equipment, which is quite complicated, and find a way to simulate it so we can predict what’s going to happen to it when you’re actually operating it.
Jonathan: Okay.
Jean: So I did that for 3 years. And I wrote the first program, you know, we called it Bell-Flakes [sp?]. And then when I was getting ready to finish my Ph.D., Larry came to me and said “well, do you want to start a business together?”
Jonathan: Wow.
Jean: So I had the analytical knowledge, you know, and understanding, but I also have a good engineering mind, but, you know, understanding the difference between what you can and cannot do.
Jonathan: Mhmm.
Jean: And Larry didn’t have any of that, but he had the world experience.
Jonathan: Sure.
Jean: You know, he knew the problem that they were facing in the field. He didn’t know how to fix them, but he believed I could.
Jonathan: So it sounds like you didn’t really have much business experience before CDI. Larry may have been there to help with that side, but how did you find the business experience and growing your own business? How did you learn to run a business correctly, and how those experiences maybe affected where you ended up?
Jean: Everything at the end of the day ties up, you know, in almost any field.
Jonathan: Makes sense.
Jean: So the same thing applies to starting a business. We started with just 2 of us. So we ran that like a normal corporation. And as we started hiring people, you just learn.
Jonathan: Okay.
Jean: And I have to say, again, that doing that in the United States is a lot easier than doing it in Europe because Europe has so many issues with regulations, with unions, with the way the whole system is structured; it’s much, much more difficult. Where in the US, it’s relatively easy; to start a business costs $70 and it takes 2 hours to fill up an application and you’re in business, you know!
Jonathan: Well that’s cool.
Jean: So running a business is mostly people management. You know, you have to surround yourself with people you can trust, you know, that you can delegate to. You have to learn to delegate, which is not easy. At the beginning, you know, on my side of the business, I was doing everything myself and I had other people do it, but I would check everything they did. It’s not really micromanaged, but when you have a small business, one big mistake, you know . . . we were small but we were doing $400 million projects. It was not our money, you know, we just paid as engineers. But if we messed up, we could mess up big time. And all it takes is one big mess-up and you’re out of the picture.
Jonathan: I hear you.
Jean: So a lot of that has to do with quality control, making sure that anything you do, especially real-time programming, we did a lot of real-time programming running big machines, million dollar machines, and you try to run code and you can break it, or you can kill somebody.
Jonathan: Mhmm.
Jean: So I was very concerned about that side. And you have to learn to delegate to other people and only find out effectively at the end. No checking of code; you don’t read the code, you just look at the result.
Jonathan: So, finally, I was wondering: I know a bunch of people who are about to go to grad school; they’re finishing their undergrad degree, or some graduates who are about to finish ? if you could get a forum where you could talk to all these folks, what would your advice be if they are thinking of maybe trying to go into business right away and not stay in the academia world?
Jean: If you have any idea, anything, you know, try to put a business plan together. I’m not talking of a 20 page PowerPoint and making it look good. In your head: “what do I want to achieve?” Try to be really realistic. Try to show “okay, is this something somebody else has done? Is it going to cost me $20 million which I don’t have?”
Jonathan: Sure.
Jean: You know, you need something that’s realistic in terms of your capabilities, the funding, and the time. But if you have something like this, and you have a grasp on it, go for it!
Jonathan: Well, there you have it, folks: advice I gotta adhere to. But seriously, I hope you guys learned something from this. I know I did, and I wish you guys the best. Thanks for listening.
[? The Beatles playing Rock and Roll Music ?]
? Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music
? Any old way you choose it
? It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it
? Any old time you use it
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
? Don’t resist
[? Music playing ?]
Andrew: Welcome to Spark Science. I’m your guest host: Andrew Hood. And I am an undergraduate student at Western Washington University, studying to become a high school chemistry and physics teacher. I remember back in high school struggling with the basic physics principles and learning it for the first time. I was not alone. The person I’m joined with today has a career in bettering the physics education in the calculus-based physics environment. With that, I would like to introduce Dr. Andy Boudreaux from Western Washington University.
Dr. Boudreaux: Hi Andrew, great to be with you.
Andrew: So the first question: what does your position entail at Western?
Dr. Boudreaux: So I am a professor in the department of physics and in the Science, Math, and Technology Education Program. And the physics department, of course, prepares and educates students studying various different STEM fields, including our physics majors, but also students majoring in chemistry or engineering or geology and so forth. And then I teach a variety of upper-division physics courses for our physics majors.
My other half of my job is with the SMATE program. And the mission of SMATE is to prepare students to become K-12 teachers of science. And so I teach specially-designed physics courses for people who want to become teachers themselves. So that’s my teaching. And then my research area is on the learning and teaching of physics. So I study how students understand and think about specific physics concepts: Where are tricky parts? Where do students tend to get stuck? What common misconceptions there might be? And then try to use that information to design approaches to instruction that can help support learning and help students to deeper understandings of these concepts and ways of thinking.
Andrew: And so what led you to pursue this field of research?
Dr. Boudreaux: Well I started out in graduate school in the department of physics at the University of Washington, intending to focus on a traditional area of physics research. As all graduate students at the University of Washington do, I served as a teaching assistant in small group sections of the introductory source. And there we used the curriculum called “Tutorials in Introductory Physics.” That’s authored by Lilian McDermott and her colleagues at the University of Washington.
I was really engaged and interested in this curriculum and the way it engaged students in deeper-level sense-making about the physics, rather than just sort of memorizing formulas and crunching formulas as I had learned when I took introductory physics. These students were pushed to explain where the formulas come from, why they are the way they are; how do we know what we know?
Andrew: And physics is definitely one of those fields where it’s not memorization. And that was one thing that hit me hard, too. And then when I heard about you doing your research in bettering the education of students, I knew it was the right path for me.
[? Music playing ?]
Andrew: Dr. Boudreaux’s current research is titled “Examining the Development of Student Reasoning Skills through Scaffolded Physics Instruction.” So, Dr. Boudreaux, what is the main goal of this research?
Dr. Boudreaux: So, over the last 30 years or so, physicists have engaged in this kind of research: studying student learning, student conceptions, and misconceptions in an effort to try to improve instruction and better support student learning. And one thing that has been found is that there are a variety of what I might call “alternative conceptions” that are held. And these can linger even after instruction. But, through this kind of research, different approaches to instruction have been devised.
However, despite some of the successes in this area, what remains to be very difficult is for students to be able to apply their conceptual understanding to construct multi-step arguments or chains of reasoning to explain a real-world phenomenon or to make a prediction about a proposed experiment. This multi-step reasoning seems to be something that is really quite difficult. Colleagues and I who had been involved in some of the research on understanding student misconceptions, or student difficulties with single-concept areas of physics became interested in: “well, why aren’t our students able to take their conceptual understanding and apply it to construct these multi-step reasoning chains?” And, you know, it’s no surprise that that’s difficult, but we became interested in: “well, exactly why is it difficult? Where do things break down for students? And what can we do to help them?”
Andrew: So, if I’m correct in this, the goal of this research is to help students create this coherent reasoning chain. They go from step A through step B, C, D, all the way to the end goal.
Dr. Boudreaux: Exactly. You know, in physics, there’s a high value placed on being able to construct an argument or a chain of reasoning starting from first principles and work going all the way through to a specific prediction, or a specific explanation of why a system is behaving in a specific way. What we found is that students, in many cases, are able to demonstrate understanding of individual concepts, but chaining together multiple concepts to form this type of reasoning pathway somehow is difficult; even when they understand the individual steps, chaining together these steps into a coherent reasoning pathway remains very challenging.
So there’s some kind of step in learning between understanding the individual pieces and putting together the entire chain that we’re trying to better understand and support in our physics courses.
[? Music playing ?.]
Andrew: Dual process theory states that there are 2 systems that our brains think with. System 1 is an intuitive, automatic, unconscious process, while system 2 is an analytic step-by-step presentation. So, Dr. Boudreaux, how is dual process theory playing a role in this physics education research?
Dr. Boudreaux: Mhmm. My colleagues and I have been interested in the results and ideas from cognitive science research and psychology research for quite some time. And recently there was a book by Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow, that provided very compelling and clear explanations of a particular set of theories that have come out of cognitive science over the last 2 or 3 decades that are referred to as “dual process theories.” And these theories, as you mentioned, suggest that we have these 2 largely separate thinking processes.
I think physicists and in physics instruction, we expect that students will activate this step-by-step thinking process, this more rational thinking process when they’re posed with a physics problem. But what we were wondering was whether, in fact, students are often answering with system 1 and not system 2. When they’re posed with a physics question in a physics course, system 1 might generate a very quick answer that pops into the student’s mind and feels very compelling to the student.
And then the student then knows that the professor is waiting to hear some kind of physics-y like explanation. So then, after the fact, the student might construct some kind of explanation, but their answer is determined in an instant before the process of granting an explanation. So instead of reasoning from basic principles in a reasoning chain forward to the prediction or explanation, we were wondering if maybe students are generating an answer right away through system 1, and then after the fact, construction an explanation based on what they think the professor wants to hear.
So we were wondering whether this kind of cognitive process could actually explain our empirical observation that students, even when they seem to understand the constituent concepts, still struggle with a lot of these reasoning chain tasks.
Andrew: So one of the projects involved in this research is the adaptation of a new lab for our calculus-based physics classes. What does this project have to do with this dual process theory and helping student make those connections?
Dr. Boudreaux: So in this area of physics, we ask students to make a jump freefall in the absence of air resistance, which is what they initially thought about in introductory physics to incorporating the air resistance force in explaining how objects fall when they’re released. And this introduces quite a bit more complexity in explaining freefall motion, and introduces the concept of terminal speed. We find that objects no longer all accelerate downward at the same rate of 9.8 meters per second per second, which is what students initially learn when they study freefall. So we’re upping the ante, so to speak, for students, introducing additional concepts, lengthening the typical explanations that students would have to go through to answer questions, and increasing the cognitive demand.
And so it’s really an idea context to look at whether dual process theories can explain some of the difficulties students have. Because if we can examine first of all whether students understand the individual building-blocks, for example that the air resistance force depends both on the object’s speed through the air as well as the objects surface area that it presents to the air . . . if they can understand that the weight force exerted on an object is proportional to its mass . . . if they could understand that at constant speed, such as in terminal speed motion, that the forces must be balanced . . . we measure, or look at whether students understand each of these individual pieces.
And then we can also look at whether students can construct a step-by-step reasoning chain to answer questions, for example, like: two balls that are the same mass, but one ball is larger than the other, a baseball and a large rubber ball. And I release those two balls together from the top of a tall building, which will have a greater terminal speed and which ball would have a greater-strength air resistance force exerted on it when it’s reached its terminal speed? That question requires chaining together many steps that draw on different individual concepts, different building blocks.
So we now have the ability to examine how well students are able to do this, and if they are not able to, where does the process break down for them. And in addition, we have found in some of our preliminary work that this context of freefall seems to trigger very quick answers. So it seems like the system 1 is triggered quite readily by these types of situations. Students seem to have intuitive ideas that come to mind right away. So all of these considerations have led us to think of it as a good context to study how well students are able to construct reasoning chains, and whether or not their intuitive thinking process might be intruding on or disrupting their ability to build chains of reasoning with their analytic thinking system.
Andrew: Back in elementary school, we were told: “What would fall faster: a feather or a bowling ball?” And, of course, this is in a demo where it’s 2 feet off the ground; there’s not enough time for this to reach terminal velocity, and of course, they reach the ground at the same time. Is this one of the factors that we have seen students acknowledge when doing this experiment?
Dr. Boudreaux: Exactly. Some psychologists have defined intuition as nothing more and nothing less than what is familiar. So, the intuitive answers that system 1 might generate are really the most familiar the answer that jumps to mind. So, when we ask about air resistance, students have experiences from their life that really sometimes can push them strongly in a certain direction to a certain answer.
So, the experience you relate is an ideal example of that where a salient experience early on in life stuck with you. And that became an intuitive resource. And then, later on, if you’re asked about the, say the baseball/rubber-ball question that I mentioned, that intuitive experience might spring to mind and push you towards a really quick answer which may or may not be consistent with the answer that we would find if we applied the physics principles and reasoned our way step by step.
Andrew: This research is mainly set towards college calculus-based physics classes. Am I correct?
Dr. Boudreaux: That’s right.
Andrew: What can we do to change this, if any changes need to be done at all, to make this more suitable for a high school environment?
Dr. Boudreaux: Well I think that the idea of dual systems theory applies equally well to human thinkers of any age. So the impact that the intuitive thinking system can have on classroom instruction, especially, you know, in science in this case, I think is equally relevant in a college classroom or a high school classroom.
Andrew: So this is something that I can definitely take into my future classroom as a physics teacher.
Dr. Boudreaux: I think the ideas around dual systems thinking could be a valuable resource for a teacher of students at any age.
Andrew: So in that case, I would like to thank Dr. Boudreaux for joining me today.
Dr. Boudreaux: Thank you very much, Andrew. It’s been great to be with you.
Andrew: And I would like to thank you for listening to Spark Science. This was your guest host: Andrew Hood with Dr. Andrew Boudreaux in partnership with WWU and KMRE.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
Dr. DeGraaff: This is Spark Science and we’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3FM in Bellingham or kmre.org streaming on Sunday’s at 5:00pm, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3:00pm. If there’s a science you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page: “Spark Science.” This is an all volunteer-run show, so if you want to help us out, go to Spark Science now and click on “donate.” This show is a collaboration between Spark Radio, KMRE, and Western Washington University. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Andrew Norton and sci-comm students Andrew Hood, Jonathan Cornett, and AJ Calder. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.
[?Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]
1