Developing the first two years of an undergraduate physics program

In August 2008 I started as the only tenure-track faculty member in physics at Oxford College (OC) of Emory University. One of my priorities was to reinvigorate the physics program.

Located on Emory’s original campus in Oxford, Georgia, 38 miles east of Atlanta, OC focuses on the liberal arts education of approximately 950 first- and second-year undergraduates. First-year undergraduate students can enter the university through OC or the Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS). Students who graduate from OC at the end of their sophomore year move to ECAS for their junior and senior years. The academic preparation of OC students is equivalent to that of their ECAS counterparts, and OC students make up a third of the ECAS graduating class. Therefore, about a third of ECAS graduates in every major should have started their undergraduate career at OC.

However, that was long not the case for physics. Through 2008, OC had contributed only about 10% of all ECAS physics majors. From 2008 to 2010, it contributed only five majors total. Because OC’s physics department included just one tenure-track line, it could offer only introductory algebra- and calculus-based physics sequences, and students had no opportunities for research experience.

The low numbers presented me with an opportunity. As the only tenure-track member, I could develop my own vision for the program and implement my own plan for its growth, even during an economic recession. I felt that I could show students the beauty of physics, make the subject accessible, and help them develop their methodical thinking and mathematical, computational, and experimental skills. My goal was to make physics courses an attractive option for students who came to OC interested in physics and for those who were undecided about their major.

During my preliminary search for strategies, I stumbled upon a Physics Today article that introduced me to the Strategic Programs for Innovations in Undergraduate Physics (SPIN-UP) project, which was developed in 2000 by the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The task force found that physics departments with a high or increasing number of majors had a clear mission for the program, a challenging but supportive curriculum, departmental leadership and responsibility for reform efforts, and continuous experimentation and evaluation of those efforts.

The SPIN-UP report clarified the steps I had to take. I also pursued new strategies that focused on the nature of the interactions between faculty and students and on understanding each student’s background and needs concerning physics.

Building a foundation

To start, I focused on students’ first exposure to college-level physics: the introductory class. After all, students would populate subsequent courses only if they had a good initial experience. I developed mission and vision statements that reflected my colleagues’ and my own pedagogical philosophy for introductory courses. The foundation is that all the students are physicists, regardless of their intended major. Referring to my students as physicists allowed me to hold them to the high, rigorous standards of the discipline and the curriculum. Equally important, it provided students with a sense of belonging to the physics community and, thus, that it was within their reach to succeed in a discipline often considered intimidating. That foundation is the key to ensuring student resilience , which correlates with persistence, retention, and academic success.

To mature as physicists, students also need to discover physical principles via hands-on activities and inquiry-based learning . Accordingly, I set out to create the infrastructure for the development of a meaningful and engaging laboratory program .

Following conversations with science department leaders, the administration decided that there was an opportunity for OC to be a leader in supporting national initiatives for retention in physics. In 2010 the school invested significant funds to purchase state-of-the-art laboratory equipment for introductory physics, such as tracking software for mechanics labs, oscilloscopes, and function generators. I also bought equipment including interferometers, Millikan oil-drop setups, and spectrometers in anticipation of a sophomore-level course in modern physics. Moreover, the administration approved the hiring of a full-time lecturer and laboratory program coordinator who modernized the lab activities for the introductory courses, co-designed the labs for modern physics, and taught one section of astronomy for nonscience majors. The department offered its first modern physics course in 2011.

Further funding, attained through cross-disciplinary grant proposals, enabled the department to offer monthlong, open-ended research projects for introductory physics students on topics such as wave interference, resonance, diffraction, and digital circuit design. Thus the program gave students early exposure to research experiences .

Advising, assessment, and outreach

Increasing laboratory and research opportunities is not enough to create a nurturing physics department. The advising process is also critical. That’s especially true at OC because there are no juniors or seniors on campus to help guide the younger students. At OC, all incoming students take a math placement test and receive a recommendation about the most appropriate first mathematics course before registering for classes. Having that information during one-on-one meetings with new students is central to advising about enrolling in physics courses. The goal is to help students understand that placing them in physics at the wrong time may negatively affect their experience and attitude toward the field and drive them away, even if they were initially interested in the major. Understanding each student’s background is instrumental to maintaining a rigorous curriculum and ensuring the program’s success.

I also wanted students to feel supported and encouraged through assessment. At many institutions, large class sizes force faculty to either assign online homework or delegate the grading to teaching assistants. At OC, faculty can both design and grade all assignments for our courses. To be consistent with the department’s mission, we set up a grading system that focuses on the student’s methodology and physical justification for their way of thinking, not just on the correctness of the final answer.

As the semester progresses, we can give personalized feedback and advice that addresses each student’s needs and gaps in foundational knowledge. When possible, we also engage in out-of-class testing to avoid multiple-choice questions and include multistep problems. Thus the students can display their ability to deconstruct complex problems and integrate concepts, which are skills that successful physicists have. By providing individualized feedback while guiding them through the process of thinking like physicists, we help students grow collectively as scientists while addressing each one’s unique situation.

Outside the classroom and lab, I created supportive social structures for the students. I worked to give female physics students a sense of belonging in the community. I invited alumni to talk to students, and I held student–faculty dinner nights. Faculty gave general-audience talks following major findings, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson and direct detection of gravitational waves, and offered demonstrations to clubs and to the campus and surrounding communities. We also participated in STEM panel discussions and workshops for all students, even those not enrolled in physics. Those events increased the department’s visibility on campus and led to students founding a physics club in 2017.

Measuring success

The application of all those strategies has resulted in meaningful outcomes. Enrollment in the fall semester introductory courses on mechanics, both algebra- and calculus-based, gradually increased from fall 2008 to fall 2018, as shown in the graph below. And the rising popularity of the modern physics lab course shows the program’s progress in student recruitment and retention. Due to the rise in student interest, the department has grown to three faculty members offering five laboratory courses per semester, one of which is a sophomore-level course.

The number of physics majors at OC increased to 19 for the 2017–19 graduating classes. Fourteen students graduated in spring 2020 alone. And those students are prepared once they transfer to ECAS: OC and ECAS students show less than 1% difference in their GPAs when enrolled in the same upper-level courses.

There are also indications that more women are enrolling in physics. In 2011 women made up 17% of the students in the modern physics class. From 2015–18, the numbers ranged from 38–50%. In the 2017–18 academic year, six ECAS seniors developed a physics honors thesis; all six were women , and four of them started their undergraduate careers at OC.

Lessons learned

As the SPIN-UP report suggests, there is no single strategy for physics departments to ensure growth and produce physics students who are excited and successful within the major. The common element of the strategies that work is that they are based on initiatives shown to be effective and on a good understanding of and genuine care for the individual school’s student population and needs regarding physics. Other STEM departments can apply many of these strategies, especially the ones that focus on faculty–student interactions.

On a personal level, I find the positive, wide-ranging, and measurable outcomes of my department’s efforts to be profoundly rewarding, especially when I hear back from students whose experiences at OC led them to pursue graduate degrees in physics. Their achievement stimulates further motivation to build on and extend the program’s success in the years to come.

Effrosyni Seitaridou is an associate professor of physics at Oxford College of Emory University. This work was supported by funds provided by Oxford College and the Luther and Susie Harrison Foundation. The data reported were collected by Emory University’s Institutional Review Board. The author would like to thank colleagues in the Division of Natural Science and Mathematics for their advice and support throughout the project and A. Farris for his helpful comments and feedback on versions of this manuscript.