April 9, 2026 Issue #58

SPOTLIGHT is the OPTYCs monthly newsletter. It brings you OPTYCs activity updates, highlights from recent publications related to physics education, and news & resources for Two-Year colleges.

You can find a list of upcoming events and of the recordings of past events on the OPTYCs calendar.

During the 2025-2026 academic year, we are offering a series of presentation-discussion-workshops to share some of the many research-validated assessment instruments used in the physics education community. Join us to learn how you can use these instruments to inform your teaching, to assess your students' learning, and to contribute to a wider body of knowledge about physics students at two-year colleges.

Upcoming events

• iSTAR 2026  April 17, 2026 from 3:00pm - 4:00pm EDT 
  Inquiry in Scientific Thinking, Analytics, and Reasoning (iSTAR). Description forthcoming. Facilitators:  

  Krista Wood (University of Cincinnati - Blue Ash College) and Kathy Koenig (University of Cincinnati)

• RBAIs 2026 May 15, 2026 from 3:00pm - 4:00pm EDT
  Share your experiences with RBAIs. Description forthcoming. Facilitator: Karim Diff (Santa Fe College)

• Launch Student Experiments with NASA May 30, 2026 from 12:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
  Learn about entry level space missions open to community college teams, how to get started, and funding options! Teresa will share a brief history of how the NASA Program came to be at College of the Canyons, the initial steps that led to her first student team payload in 2016 and how her NASA program has grown. You will also learn about 3 NASA missions in which she participates each year. Facilitator: Teresa Ciardi (College of the Canyons).

• Movie and Cartoon Physics 2026 September 12, 2026 from 1:00pm - 3:00pm EDT 
  Description forthcoming. Facilitator: Kenric Davies (Texas A &M)

• The Energy Budget Activity October 10, 2026 from 1:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
  In this two-hour Zoom workshop, I will introduce the Energy Budget to you and then break you up into small groups with colleagues to complete the Energy Budget as student groups would.  After that we will get back together and discuss what you learned from the exercise and how this can be tied into your classes. Facilitator: Greg Mulder (Linn-Benton Community College)

Recent events

Physics and Astronomy Activities with Pivot Interactives (March 27, 2026)

Determining and Interpreting Resistive Electric Circuits Concepts Test (DIRECT)  (March 20, 2026)

Tech Tools with NASA's OpenSource Data for Introductory Astronomy Classes - (March 14, 2026)

In the book How Learning Works: 8 Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching (Jossey-Bass), authors Lovett et al. highlight that, not only is knowledge (skills, concepts, procedures, etc.) important to learning, but that how knowledge is organized influences learning and application. Research points to the vastly different ways knowledge is organized by novices compared with experts. As physics experts, we conceptualize situations in terms of energy and momentum, for example, as guiding principles, which then might lead to forces and motion. We intuit static charges versus charge carriers in motion. Our students, however, are rarely presented with any structure on which to build the new concepts they are learning. Strategies to promote better learning along this principle include providing structures of knowledge in advance (or better yet, multiple structures), and using sorting tasks to gain insight into how students are organizing new knowledge. This last strategy brings to mind Brian Frank’s Card Stacks collections. By understanding how concepts connect, and knowing from the onset of hierarchies, students have opportunities to better learn and apply new ideas.

High School Physics Enrollments and Class Availability

Physical Review Physics Education Research: Focused Collection: Artificial Intelligence Tools in Physics Teaching and Physics Education Research

"Altogether, the articles offer a research-informed picture of today’s opportunities and challenges of AI in physics education. The collection covers research on generative AI and more “classical” machine learning, multimodal systems that interpret images as well as text, and tools aimed at everyday teaching (grading, feedback, tutoring, and lab support). The result is a set of design considerations, sensitive aspects, and evaluation strategies that can guide the next phase of the implementation of AI into physics education."

• The American Association of Physics Teachers 
• Committee on Physics in Two-Year Colleges (AAPT area committee)
• Join the TYC Google group: Send an email to tycphysics@googlegroups.com
• PhysPort Recommendations about teaching methods, assessment, and results from PER
• PER Central A resource collection for physics education researchers 
• Physics Review Physics Education Research Fully open access journal for PER 
• arXiv Physics education The arXiv repository for physics education papers
• AIP Statistical Research Center Data on education, careers, and diversity in physics, astronomy and other physical sciences

optycs.aapt.org