May 14, 2026 Issue #59

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

• 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 
  Find out how you can integrate topics like Kinematics, Force & Motion, Conservation of Momentum, and others into your teaching that will hook your students and motivate them to want to solve physics problems.Workshop participants will break down scenes from movies and cartoons like Dodgeball, The A-Team, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Incredibles, and more! Participants will learn how observation and critical thinking skills can help gather helpful information from a scene in order to evaluate whether or not Hollywood got it "right". 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

Inquiry in Scientific Thinking, Analytics, and Reasoning (iSTAR) - (April 17, 2026)

The fourth learning principle discussed in How Learning Works: 8 Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching (by Marsha C. Lovett, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Susan A. Ambrose, Marie K. Norman;Jossey-Bass) involves students’ motivations to learn. For the highest motivation, students must value the goals of the course, believe that their success is possible, and that the learning environment is supportive. To establish value, the authors recommend that we assign work that is authentic and real-world, create learning tasks that are relevant to our students’ professional or personal lives, and to not only identify but also reward what we value from our students. For example, Lovett et al. write, “If you want students to take intellectual or creative risks, identify these features as important and assess students’ work based on the extent to which they pushed the limits, whether or not they were ultimately successful.” To help students feel positive about their chances of success, ensure that your objectives, assessments, and instruction are well-aligned. Providing students with clear rubrics improves student achievement, since expectations have been made explicit. Often, I have seen exam problems with seemingly random points (Question 1 is worth 12 points, Question 2 is worth 18 points, etc.) and no clear indication of what, if any, partial credit would be awarded, and for what aspects. What if every problem in a course was explicitly graded for conceptual set-up (describing the concepts salient to the situation, perhaps by providing relevant and appropriately labelled diagrams), using this conceptual framework to create a mathematical model, then applying that model to the particular situation? What if we made these aspects of problem-solving explicit, applied them consistently, and rewarded students accordingly? It may help demystify the rubric significantly.

Educational resources from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

APS News: How are physicists feeling about AI?
Global Physics Summit attendees shared their thoughts on how artificial intelligence could impact scientific research.

Physics Colloquium at University of Colorado "Building Tools to Assess Changes in 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